The fluctuating status of DEI

Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University, recently wrote about his school’s plan to adopt a “Just Societies” course requirement, which he aptly described as “a thinly veiled woke-indoctrination requirement … [regarding] ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ in all its Orwellian wonder.”

In contrast, the University of Florida announced last week that it’s firing all employees in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) positions and administrative appointments, stating: “To comply with the Florida Board of Governors’ regulation … the University of Florida has closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors.” Good!

So, where’s “conservative” Arkansas on DEI in higher education? Answer: largely nowhere.

The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville announced last year the elimination of its DEI division and re-allocation of its staff and resources to other offices. That sounds good, but the facts on the ground cause concern.

UA Fayetteville’s webpage still lists a “vice-chancellor [of the] Division for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” even though I presume that position no longer exists.

That same site lauds that person’s “mentor[ing] Honors College students in their efforts to incorporate a diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective in their thesis and research efforts [and her] … support [of] Honors College staff in their efforts to weave diversity, equity and inclusion into every aspect of their work.” How utterly Maoist.

An old saw describes that the wheels of justice grind slow but fine. We’re seeing the slow part. And it ain’t fine.

UA Fayetteville’s art school’s webpage still lists the following goals:

■ Provide faculty and staff funding for training and books related to equity, diversity and inclusion.

■ Set diversity goals for recruiting faculty and students.

■ Update the mission and values statement to reflect the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion plan.

■ Add a senior diversity leadership position to the School of Art.

■ Continue highlighting faculty and students current work and efforts addressing DEI issues.

Maybe they too didn’t get the memo. After all, the alternative is that Fayetteville’s de-DEI-fication is all show.

Arkansas State University’s website contains a memo from its vice chancellor for Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement saying the quiet part out loud: “We understand that while all faculty and staff are expected to serve as positive role models for our students, the fact remains that many students from under-represented populations and students in general are drawn to those with whom they feel familiar and comfortable. We are committed to designing and implementing programs and processes that bring and retain such role models to our campus.” Wait, what?

Higher education isn’t about making students “feel familiar and comfortable.” The goal is precisely the opposite. Don’t indulge parochialism. Challenge it.

Moreover, hiring faculty based upon their appearance, irrespective of whether “students … are drawn to those with whom they feel familiar and comfortable” is not only illegal, it will result in perverse outcomes. By ASU’s logic, if most students grew up with white-supremacist kin, the school would hire a bunch of crazy-uncle Billy-Roys to make those freshman—whoops, fresh persons—“feel familiar and comfortable.” That can’t be right.

These examples of DEI embedment are solely from the flagships of the state’s two competing higher-education systems. It doesn’t get better when expanding the examination’s scope.

Tragically, the history of discrimination reflects a tortuous path of vacillation between embracing and eschewing pigment-and-plumbing-prioritizing policies. For years, the New York City Police Department overwhelmingly hired white men of Irish descent. To break the stranglehold of this racism and sexism, the NYPD adopted a merit-based civil-service entrance exam. Specialty schools throughout the country’s public-school systems adopted similar merit-based entrance criteria.

Then the leftists got involved. They complained that these objective measures failed to produce the “right” (or is it “left”?) distribution of hirees and admittees, because they didn’t mirror the racial composition of the population. “Too many” Asians in, say, engineering, meant “not enough” African Americans. So went the argument.

This demanded social-justice intervention, the racialists wailed. And so was born affirmative action 2.0—quotas, but certainly without the name. Fight Club rules applied. We’ll euphemistically refer to this institutionalized racism as “full-file review,” leftists whispered as they jerked the reins of higher education towards identity politics. And this suppression of merit was successful for some time in large measure thanks to the Supreme Court.

Twenty years ago, in Grutter v. Bollinger, the court held that the University of Michigan law-school admissions process that privileged “under-represented” minority groups wasn’t unconstitutional, because it “considered” factors beyond race for each applicant. But, in Gratz v. Bollinger, the same court, at the same time, struck down Michigan’s undergraduate point-based-admissions system that increased the scores of minorities in preferred racial categories. Thanks for clearing that up.

Last year, the court finally rationalized its strange cases of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, holding that parsing people based on pigment is prohibited. In so declaring, Justice Thomas cited my co-authored forthcoming Journal of Legal Education article “Mismatch and Bar Passage: A School-Specific Analysis,” which demonstrates that race-based admissions harm affirmative-action “beneficiaries.”

Arkansas could have been at the vanguard on this issue, ahead of Florida, had we only enacted Dan Sullivan’s and Justin Gonzalez’s bill from the last general session to end state-sponsored discrimination (SB71). The bill passed the Senate committee, the full Senate, and the House committee. But SB71 failed on the House floor due to insufficient Republican support reflecting shameful cowardice.

Will the governor ask the Legislature to reconsider this bill during the upcoming fiscal session? If she doesn’t, the people of Arkansas will have to wait until 2025. I hope we’ll be able to prohibit state-sponsored discrimination before then. We deserve better.

This is your right to know.