Editors at National Review Online urge others to follow a recent example from the Sunshine State.
Last week, the University of Florida peremptorily announced that it had ended its ill-fated experiment with DEI. “The University of Florida,” the college’s missive confirmed, has “closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors.” Going forward, the university explained, the more than $5 million per year that was being spent on the initiative will be redirected into “a faculty recruitment fund.” And they say that nothing ever changes!
UF’s move brought it into full compliance with a recently passed Florida statute that prohibits the state’s public colleges and universities from spending any money — including privately donated money — on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Still, while he was obliged to oversee the change, we doubt that following these rules was much of a hardship for the university’s new president, Ben Sasse. Last year, in his inaugural address, Sasse made it clear that universities ought not to be “in the business of advancing either a theology of the right, or a theology of the left.” “We are not,” Sasse proposed pithily, “a seminary.”
Conceptually, this is precisely the correct way of thinking about America’s DEI programs, which like to present themselves as the purveyors of commonplace liberal norms, but which, in reality, serve as little more than Trojan horses within which all manner of fanatical ideologies are smuggled into environments in which they manifestly do not belong. Like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” departments sound entirely innocuous until one looks more closely under the hood. And then? Well, just as roses by any other name would smell as sweet, so rank identitarianism rechristened as “inclusion” remains revolting to the well-adjusted man.
