National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood has written a superb essay on the terrible effects of the DEI mania (diversity, equity, inclusion) on not just our education system, but on the nation’s future.
Wood lists the following consequences of the DEI agenda:
- Ethnic division and strife. DEI is an incitement to racial resentment, primarily of blacks against whites, and at another level of whites against blacks.
- Political opportunism. DEI in schools and colleges is aimed at recruiting students through emotional manipulation into durable allegiance to progressive political loyalties.
- Cultural impoverishment. DEI displaces from the curriculum and disparages study of the great achievements of Western civilization and the American past. DEI imposes ruthless hostility toward Western values and falsely romantic views of other traditions.
- Historical amnesia. DEI amplifies accounts of injustices in American history and minimizes American accomplishments. Sometimes, as in the 1619 Project, it sets forth grossly inaccurate accounts of the American past as if they were true, and it provides students with no basis to recognize that there are other accounts better grounded in the facts.
- Professional incompetence. Because it lowers academic standards and diverts attention from well-established facts, DEI leaves graduates with an inferior education. The problem is compounded at the level of graduate and professional education where individuals begin their careers with significant DEI-caused deficits in their professional knowledge.
- Impeded international competitiveness. Other nations are not handicapping generations of students by providing them inferior DEI-inflected educations and false maps of the world we live in. America’s international competitiveness is at risk from graduates who think they understand things of which they in fact have only superficial or mistaken knowledge.
- Destructive orientation. DEI is an essential piece of indoctrination in the social-justice ideology that is now taking hold in the American economy as the “ESG” movement (Environmental, Social, and Governance investing). DEI prioritizes race in all contexts and subordinates all other principled considerations. Graduates carry this into the corporate world, where it has now been elaborated as ESG.
To those, I would add that it undermines the idea among minority youth that they have any agency, teaching that they can look only to politics for any improvement in their lives.
Read the whole thing — and share it with others.