'Best news of 2024: The collapse of ‘diversity, equity, inclusion’'

<https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4281511/posts>

<https://nypost.com/2024/11/28/opinion/best-news-of-2024-the-collapse-of-dei/>

'DEI is a bad idea whose time came with a vengeance several years ago,
but now its continued ascendancy is in doubt.

Perhaps the most important event this year outside of the presidential
election is the intellectual collapse of so-called diversity, equity and
inclusion, which is poisonous hokum that is finally being exposed as
such.

DEI has been one of the most morally perverse and damaging fads in
recent American history.

The 'diversity, equity, inclusion' agenda has:
We’ve been spending an estimated $8 billion a year telling Americans in
training sessions, workshops and educational material that they are,
depending on their race or gender, victims or oppressors, and that the
country is shot through with white supremacy.

The DEI mindset is dominant in human resources departments and on
college campuses.

Common sense say that this racialist hectoring — often administered by
people who brook no dissent — must be unhealthy, and, sure enough,
evidence is beginning to pile up.

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Research has suggested that DEI can create negative feelings or make
people afraid to speak their minds.

Now comes a compelling new study from an outfit called the Network
Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University Social Perception
Lab.

It found that DEI amplified “perceptions of prejudicial hostility where
none was present, and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice.”

In other words, if its goal is to create illiberal racial paranoiacs,
DEI is succeeding brilliantly.

In one experiment, the study’s architects gave one group of students an
anodyne essay about US corn production to read while another got an
essay drawn from the work of DEI superstars Ibram X. Kendi and Robin
DiAngelo.

Then, the students were asked to evaluate a simple, racially neutral
scenario involving a college applicant getting rejected by an East Coast
university.

The students who had read the DEI material were more likely to believe
that the hypothetical admissions officer in the scenario was more
discriminatory, more unfair and more harmful, as well as guilty of more
micro-aggressions — again, even though nothing in the scenario suggested
as much.

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The Kendi-DiAngelo students were also more likely to want to require DEI
training for the admissions officer, to suspend the officer for a
semester and to demand a public apology. Why let an absence of facts
stand in the way of punitive measures?

Meanwhile, a report in The New York Times Magazine found that the
University of Michigan’s decade-long, roughly $250 million experiment in
making DEI part of the warp and woof of the school’s life has been a
failure.

“In a survey released in late 2022,” the Times notes, “students and
faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the
program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less
likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with
different politics.”

Ordinary campus disputes have become five-alarm DEI crises;
administrators complain about all the new DEI-created paperwork;
students and faculty are afraid to say anything that might offend
anyone.

It’d be one thing if it were only the University of Michigan that had
sunk itself in this mire, but this dynamic has been duplicated
throughout corporate America and our education system.

There are signs, though, that the wave has crested. Walmart just
announced that it will stop using the term “diversity, equity and
inclusion” and end various DEI-related initiatives. Other companies have
been pulling back, as well.

The trend will presumably only accelerate with a new Trump
administration hostile to DEI.

The end of DEI would be a net addition to our collective life. It would
avoid, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, a gratuitous source of
conflict and mutual suspicion'