When I was in college, you never heard the sacred troika, “diversity, equity, and inclusion”(DEI). I started graduate school in the mid-1980s, and the prevailing attitude toward any such institutional formula voiced by the powers that be with a numbing regularity was jaded suspicion.
It was the Era of High Theory (the tail end of it), which combined abstruse arguments about signs and their interpretation with a posture of anti-establishment mistrust, a holdover perhaps of ‘60s protest and liberation from The Man.
That spirit is gone, of course. When a college president mouths the DEI slogan and promises better DEI to come at his guiltily lagging campus, it’s hard to take him seriously. Principled intellectuals should wonder what elite interests are being served and what “false consciousness” is being created in the heads of the workers, the proletariat, the people.
In this case, cynicism is warranted. DEI has to be a sham, a fake, a hustle, just another version of the suits making nice while they make life ever harder for their inferiors (for example, by jacking up tuition while telling everyone, “You MUST go to college or end up a loser”).
Any intellectual worthy of the title would listen to the mantra and think, “Gimme a break.” He would look at the offices of deans and associate deans and assistant deans of diversity, their startling salaries and bloated budgets, and realize exactly who are the real beneficiaries of DEI programs. The irony of these elite figureheads pronouncing the word “equity” with solemnity and earnestness is thick and stifling.
They speak of it without shame while watching for any opportunity to exert power and cultivate their imposing place in the institution. They sniff out inequity and nondiversity wherever it might be found, including deep in the heads of employees afflicted with unconscious racism, but the class inequity and exploitation pass right before their eyes and it doesn’t bother them one bit.
I mean the adjunct system. During my academic career, I’ve seen ever more teaching assignments at the freshman level turned over to part-time lecturers, people with doctoral degrees but no regular job with benefits, no health care, and no job security. They’re smart and well-educated, love teaching, and crave the academic life. But they earned their advanced degrees in fields with bad job outlooks, accepted by elite and not-so-elite departments even though those departments have known for a long time that decent and consistent employment for their students is a rarity.
Now, these scrambling quasi-academics pick up a few crumbs per semester at nearby schools at a rate of around $5,000 per course, which works out to around minimum wage once one adds up all the hours of preparing and grading and direct instructing for 15 weeks.
And yet, one hardly ever hears of a tenured professor or equity administrator doing anything about it. They vote Democrat, meaning that they care about the less fortunate and historically disadvantaged, and they profess egalitarian and anti-discrimination credos with vigor and righteousness. They loathe Republicans, who are said to lack compassion and to side with corporate bosses. But they work in one of the most hierarchical spaces on Earth, where gradations of rank are constantly reiterated (lecturer, assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, department vice chairman, chairman, dean, and so forth).
In the office down the hall are 40-year-old humanists with no future and little daily reward correcting commas and sharing desks with three other adjuncts, but the regular professors aren’t bothered by the inequity. In truth, they like it. The more the grunts handle freshman composition classes and French 101 (whose attendees resent being there), the more the professors can teach graduate seminars with only eight students, all of whom want to be just like them, a distinguished faculty member in an elite profession. Life is good for the ones at the podium because it’s hard for others.
One wonders what passes through the minds of our caring liberals, the privileged few who despised Donald Trump voters precisely because of their concern for the other Americans whom those Trump supporters were alleged to hate and harm, the identity groups that couldn’t stand up for themselves against bigotry and discrimination and needed elite sympathy and backing. What did they think when they bemoaned the lack of diversity and equity in those comfy workspaces but didn’t seem to have uncovered ways of fixing that enduring injustice despite their tenancy in those spaces for many years?
Once, while spending two semesters as a visiting professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I entered a faculty member’s office to say hello for the first time and chat about life in Boulder. She proceeded to complain about a serious problem on campus.
“What problem?” I asked.
“Well,” she replied, “look around.”
She paused, and so did I. I still didn’t get it.
“How many black people do you see?” she grumbled.
I paused again. She stared. I didn’t know what to say, but I was clearly supposed to give an opinion.
“Uh,” I mumbled, “what percentage of Colorado is black?” (I was used to Georgia, which at the time had a 33 percent black population—Colorado blacks only made up 4.7 percent, whites 87 percent.)
You can imagine how that query went down. We never spoke again.
DEI-ers don’t respond well to questions. It’s a dogma, not an idea. DEI has no concrete content, or rather, DEI-ers don’t like it when you ask them to specify what it concretely, empirically, and specifically signifies. Any answers they might offer would sink into a sea of contradictions (diversity, yes, but of skin color, not of opinion; equity, yes, except for the working conditions of everyone in the offices up and down the hall; inclusion, yes, except when people grade, admit, and hire and promote others, which happens every week and proceeds by discriminations of quality).
Marx, too, would look at the language of DEI and lay bare the dishonesty, the high-sounding ideals turned into vacuous formulaic utterances. DEI discourse is a delicate veil thrown over another mode of class aggression, a classic case of ideology manufactured by the rulers’ clerks.
DEI, then, is a reactionary tactic, a fresh way to keep the people down, especially those Trump voters of 2016 who struck the establishment as a genuine and shocking revolt. DEI defends the rights of the underrepresented, we’re told. In truth, it maintains the privileges of the elite.
