The defenestration of Harvard’s Claudine Gay, a champion of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” has kicked off a debate over what DEI really means. One side says it means simple fairness and decency. The other side says it is a stalking horse for another form of invidious discrimination, segregation, and political propaganda.
For those who have real experience, the second description is completely accurate. Everyone knows it.
Just to get things going, there is a helpful graphic so we can understand.
All of this seems rather important so let’s dig a bit deeper to understand what it all means. To be sure, I can admit that I’ve long enjoyed the sport of poking fun at corporate, managerial, and academic gibberish. All these fields make up new vocabulary in an attempt to make the simple seem incredibly complicated.
Over time, climbers in these spaces master the art of weaving the gibberish into casual talk. It seems like it means something but you cannot figure out what it is. It’s designed to mystify outsiders and signal to insiders that you know what’s what. You can talk the talk, and hopefully then there is no need to walk the walk.
This obfuscation and obscurantism serves industrial and career interests. So it stands to reason that DEI has its own lingo thing going. It’s opaque and strange, only hinting and nudging about its real meaning. But the words are designed to evaporate once they leave the tongue.
Let’s examine this more closely.
First we learn that “our office works across the University to serve as a: “Convener.” To convene means to gather people together, which is of course a nice thing to do. But it’s very likely that people are going to “convene” without or without the OEDIB, so what precisely is the added value?
The department lists three specializations in its ability to convene. First, it can “facilitate collaboration and strategic partnerships across Schools/Units.” Well, again, that seems fine but probably that can happen regardless.
I’m also always amused by the use of the term “strategic” in front of “partnerships,” as if lots of partnerships are not “strategic” whereas everyone knows that it is futile to partner without strategy. If you are going to have a partnership, by all means make it strategic.
Second, the office can “coordinate common language and vision.” Yikes, so everyone has to speak the way the office does?
Third, the office can “create and manage the institutional infrastructure necessary to achieve sustainable inclusive excellence.” All right, at this point, it seems like they are just throwing together words from a random gibberish generator. “Infrastructure” has long been a go-to term for nothing in particular, but now we are adding the word “sustainable,” because, of course, to be unsustainable these days is bad because we have to sustain anything and everything.
Years ago, I was at the fish counter advertising “sustainable fish” but looked down at the dead fish and they didn’t seem sustained to me. I asked the nice people behind the counter what it meant but no one knew.
As for “inclusive excellence,” the point is that inclusive is nothing without excellence and excellence is fruitless without inclusivity.
I guess. We are already wandering into the great unknown of nothingness here.
So much for being a “convener.”
Now we learn that the OEDIB is also a “Catalyst.” The term is a metaphor, one supposes, because a real catalyst is, by definition, “a substance or agent that increases the rate of a chemical reaction by lowering the activation energy required for the reaction to occur.” So it appears that the office is increasing reactions with lower energy. The lower energy part I get but let’s see how they describe it.
To be a catalyst, the OEDIB works to “collectively identify metrics to advance and measure inclusion and belonging.”
Oh great, they are going to measure tons of stuff and make sure it meets up with certain standards. Gotta have metrics else how can you know if you are meeting targets?
Do you feel included and that you belong? No? That’s bad. Let’s mark one no and add it against the other yeses and nos. We need to do better. Is there some mathematical program they are working on to guarantee higher metrics and measures? Maybe. At some point, they might even have enough metrics to give us a chart!
As a catalyst, the OEDIB also intends to “serve as a consultant to support Schools and Units in inclusion and belonging strategic planning.” Gosh, I need not just a plan but a strategic plan to increase inclusion and belonging but don’t know where to turn. Oh good, the OEDIB has consultancy services, which means someone to whom I can speak. I can ask them what to do because I have a strategic plan for inclusion and belonging but don’t know where to begin!
In this way, the OEDIB’s work as a catalyst helps “foster a culture of innovation in diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” So, you see, it is not enough just to have diversity and inclusion as a purely formal structure; instead it must be part of the very culture! But who or what is going to foster this? Oh, the OEDIB of course!
So much for being a catalyst. We aren’t finished yet with the OEDIB’s amazing work. It also serves as a “capacity builder.” Capacity means the maximum amount that something can hold. It stands to reason that capacity always needs to be built but how?
The OEDIB does this by offering support of “inclusion and belonging training and technical assistance.” Yes, of course we must be trained to belong and feel inclusion, otherwise we won’t have either. And, yes, this often requires not just assistance but “technical” assistance, because we can be sure that the office is staffed with great technicians.
These technicians “ensure access to tools and resources across the University and serve as a central access point for inclusion and belonging resources.” Everyone needs tools and resources, for sure, and no one wants a decentralized access point. We need a one-stop-shop, as they say, to get tools and resources.
I’m sure lots of them are just sitting right there on shelves ready for the taking. Good thing we have a central access point. Otherwise there might be exclusion and a lack of belonging.
But it’s not just tools they offer. They also seek to “surface and maximize adoption of promising practices.” To be sure, these practices are not guaranteed but you can be darn certain that they are “promising,” at least once they have surfaced.
Finally, and as if that wasn’t enough, the OEDIB also engages in “community building.” That seems like a good thing but this is where it gets weird. Here we are introduced to a new phrase that must be popular in the Ivy: affinity group. To build community means to “develop spaces for affinity-group gathering,” to “create opportunities to engage across affinity group[s],” and to “foster inclusive dialogue, conversations, and community spaces.”
An affinity group means a collection of people who have the same interests, like water skiing or Victorian literature, but there are clubs for those so what does OEDIB offer that the chess club does not?
One suspects based on the context that we are talking here about demographic traits: race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual, yada yada yada. So this office develops spaces for people who have all this in common, separating them by affinity, fostering it, and letting them be as affinity-minded as possible, and then pushing them together with other affinity groups to speak about their differences and affinities—struggle sessions, no doubt—because otherwise this wouldn’t happen.
I suspect but cannot prove that this last feature turns out to be the most divisive. All Asians meet here, all blacks meet here, all Muslims meet here. But what if a person doesn’t want to define himself exclusively or primarily by his demographic affinity and instead just wants to be, let’s say, a normal person? Or what if a person just wants, for example, to study math? Are we supposed to believe that such a person is failing to be diverse, inclusive, and equal?
We aren’t really given the answers but I would hesitate to ask any questions, knowing for sure that questions would elicit more buckets of gibberish like the above and get no further to the core of what this office actually does.
All this language is a construct of maniacally exclusionary, doctrinaire, elitist ideologues who are forever yelling to the rest of the public: you don’t belong here. In other words, the reality is the opposite of the puerile incantations of the bureaucrats inhabiting this institution.
