OPINION:
Slowly but surely, the diversity, equity and inclusion movement is dying. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week became the highest-profile educational institution to stop forcing aspiring faculty members to make a “diversity statement” if they want to be hired.
Diversity statements are an ideological purity test in which job applicants pledge fealty to a self-perpetuating movement that exploits racial division for personal gain. Those making MIT’s pledge had to outline “your track record of working with diverse groups of people and advancing DEI” and concretely discuss “what you will do as a faculty member to actively encourage DEI and belonging within your group, department, and community.”
MIT hasn’t expelled DEI entirely, but getting rid of the pledges is a good start. The DEI movement has spawned sprawling bureaucracies across academia at a staggering cost to tuition-paying students and taxpayers. Administrators who play the game collect big salaries, while savvy teaching faculty know they can append “DEI” to their job title for a boost.
Open the Books used a recent Freedom of Information Act request to document how the University of Virginia pays 235 employees a total of $20 million a year under the DEI banner. The school’s “global chief diversity officer” took home an estimated $587,000 last year, while the “VP for DEI and community partnerships” pocketed $520,000 in salary and benefits.
Until recently, it has been impossible to question these absurd budgets, since doing so invokes the wrath of the special-interest groups standing by to brand such action as racist. The Sunshine State ignored the hateful tweets and saved $5 million a year by banning DEI at the University of Florida. As Gov. Ron DeSantis explained last week, DEI serves no educational purpose.
“It’s an ideological agenda,” the Republican governor said. “In practice, it’s discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination. That does not have a place in our public universities.”
In Texas, a law took effect in January prohibiting the state’s 36 public colleges from operating DEI offices or requiring diversity statements as a condition of employment. Leftist administrators who early on thought they might get away with concealing their DEI schemes under alternative labels quickly changed their tune after learning they’d lose state funding if the state auditor caught wind of their intention.
When Iowa lawmakers threatened to advance similar legislation, the University of Iowa Board of Regents curtailed DEI on its own, insisting instead on “diversity of intellectual and philosophical perspective in faculty and staff” — which is the opposite of the monolithic, Marxist mindset DEI programs are designed to perpetuate.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth doesn’t need to worry about the Massachusetts Legislature or Congress banning DEI programs anytime soon, but ending diversity statements is consistent with the controversial defense of free speech she articulated before Congress in December.
“In practice, speech codes do not work,” she said. “Problematic speech needs to be countered with other speech and with education.”
The MIT bureaucracy that came up with the idea of diversity statements is just as much a threat to free expression as the statements themselves. Ms. Kornbluth should take the next logical step and close the DEI offices.
Perhaps then she could apply the savings toward a reduction in MIT’s outlandish $85,960 annual cost of attendance.
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