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By Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD | Minding the Campus
That brutish gangster threat is the “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hustle in its most succinct form.
It captures the protection racket that has plagued American higher education for the past five years, certainly since the hot, violent summer of 2020 coerced universities to open their gates to admit a flood of DEI grifters onto the campuses to solve a problem that simply didn’t exist.
That problem was supposedly “rampant racism,” as a breathless Princeton University protest letter claimed.
The actual problem was that the problem didn’t exist in any meaningful way. It wasn’t a problem, it was an excuse, and a flimsy excuse at that.
As Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy stated at the time, America’s campuses are some of the least racist places in the country. Atlantic author Conor Friedersdorf gave the lie to the Princeton letter’s claim.
No one who signed the Princeton “rampant racism” letter could produce a single incident of “racism” that had occurred on campus in the preceding 15 years. Not one!
And yet, Princeton was supposedly gripped by “rampant racism.”
If you don’t act in good faith to fix this imaginary problem—examples of which we cannot produce—well, something might happen to this nice university you’ve got here. Tensions are high, you see. The place is a powder keg, don’t you know.
It’s this primitive coercive dynamic that crowbarred DEI onto the campuses. DEI peanut grifters streamed to fill the new, luxuriously compensated bureaucracies created just for them.
From these ever-growing bureaucracies, DEI apparatchiks with no discernible skills would presume to instruct faculty, students, and staff into a primitive Manichean doctrine of “oppressors” and “oppressed” and instruct everyone on the worldview that America is an irredeemably racist country larded with “white supremacy culture.”
Moreover, it is this bureaucracy that would determine the “racial climate” on campus and whether their DEI services would continue to be needed.
At the core of the DEI protection racket on the campuses is the irresistible con story that DEI hustlers have played.
Every con has a grifter and every grifter has a “mark”—or sucker. The con story is the bait, and DEI weaves a masterful yarn.
The suckers are the very smart people on college campuses who desperately want to expiate their imagined sins. These are presidents, administrators, sycophant staffers, and simpering faculty. Together, they agreed to turn over millions of dollars annually to DEI bureaucrats in return for absolution of their manufactured guilt for imaginary “racism.”
The DEI grifters, for their part, spun a con story of “rampant racism,” “white supremacy,” “institutional racism,” and constant “oppression,” all of it wrapped in the social justice package that attacked universities as somehow guilty of all this.
The summer of 2020 provided a window of opportunity for the grifters to enter academia en masse.
Diversity hustlers of every stripe streamed onto the campuses with their “20 years of diversity experience” and paper-thin education degrees to occupy a lavishly compensated bureaucracy so that they could “do the work.”
“Do the work” has become a risible cliché to mock the vapid DEI project. Woe be unto any apparatchik who utters it.
From one-person operations to larger full-service consulting firms, they have taken advantage of a small but steady demand from both companies and colleges to provide absolution. I call these small-time consultants “peanut grifters”—part of the lingo of con-artists—who have run small-time diversity consulting for many years.
The deal was simple. Universities could purchase absolution for this imaginary “guilt” at a price of installing expensive new bureaucracies and hiring lavishly compensated DEI mandarins.
Examples? The top two DEI moguls at the University of Virginia each receive more than $500,000 in annual salary and benefits. At the University of Michigan, the top DEI mogul receives $417,000 and presides over a bureaucracy of more than 200 worker bees, although I hesitate to call them workers.
This is how an assortment of peanut grifting consultants streamed onto the campuses to run expensive workshops during which they would declare all white folk “racist,” teach them that this “racism” is permanent, teach them about the faked “white supremacy culture” list, and teach them to perform their assigned roles of villains and victims.
They would learn to “do the work” of “antiracism” because, of course, “diversity is our strength.” Universities spent hundreds of thousands of dollars—some of them millions of dollars—on valueless DEI programs, expanding bureaucracies of apparatchiks with luxurious salaries, and creating make-work projects such as “DEI dashboards” to display statistics on college websites.
Air Force System Exists Just To Track ‘Progress’ In Diversity
At bottom, the story of DEI is one of hustle—the people, the gurus, the schools, and the fellow travelers.
It’s a sad tale, one of narcissism and paranoia, deceit and dishonor, fakery and hate on a massive scale. (I lay bare this hard truth in more depth in my book DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education.)
The diversity grifters had been scratching at the gates of higher education for more than two decades, seeking admittance for their primitive binary ideology.
They hoodwinked their way onto campus. They certainly gained a foothold with their protection racket.
The game, however, is up.
Their time, which never should have come, is now gone.
First published on Minding the Campus
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