The DEI virus infects George Mason University
Washington Examiner
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Every week comes another account of a college or university establishing reigning orthodoxies of divisive leftism and then denying the obvious. The latest profile in dishonesty is Virginia’s George Mason University. It is trying to dodge well-founded criticism by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
On Sept. 21, Heritage released a paper called “The Dangerous DEI Bloat at Virginia’s Public Universities.” DEI stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The paper said Virginia taxpayer-funded universities have proportionally larger DEI bureaucracies than those in any other state. Heritage noted that GMU had the highest ratio of DEI workers to tenure-track faculty of any public college in America.
HIJACKING HIGHER EDUCATION: THE IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE OF UNIVERSITIES
As today’s DEI regimes almost universally promote extreme identity politics and stifle expressions to the contrary, Heritage wrote that GMU’s approach “promotes division, and encourages conformity rather than diversity [of belief and expression] on various social and political issues.”
GMU President Gregory Washington replied with an email to all 40,000 of his students disputing Heritage’s numbers and pronouncing the university a free speech mecca. Some of his points may be valid — for example, when he argued that Heritage’s use of only tenure-track faculty might not be the fairest indice.
When Washington also disputed the raw number of DEI spots on his campus, though, Heritage was able in turn to answer by posting all 69 DEI job titles listed on GMU’s own websites, including a bewildering hodgepodge of vice presidents, deans, directors dedicated to DEI, and even several business managers who keep track just of DEI money.
The larger point, however, is not whose numbers are correct. The essential truth is that there is no good reason for any of these DEI positions, except perhaps a handful, rather than dozens, to meet federal mandates intended, often spuriously, to guarantee the protection of civil rights. Heritage noted that by obsessing over identity politics, encouraging the “reporting” of “insensitive” speech, and establishing the insulting fiction that the United States will always be an inherently racist nation, larger DEI regimes create “worse campus climates” than do smaller ones, as measured by regular assessments of how free students feel to express opinions without fear.
Left unaddressed by Washington — quite the name! — was Heritage’s observation that GMU’s bloated DEI bureaucracy comes with an open embrace of radical politics. GMU’s University Life website is a locus for information about, and exhortations to join, progressive causes, petitions, and activism for organizations that, for example, “advocate defunding police departments, diminishing the traditional family, revolutionary distribution of wealth, and radical gender ideology.”
Heritage noted that the University Life page “hosts” a website for Black Lives Matter, a wholly discredited and fraudulent organization founded on a lie. This isn’t just providing one link among other links to a plethora of organizations. Until Friday morning, the “About Us” page so prominently featured BLM and only BLM that it made it appear as if that massive grift was part of the University Life office itself. For all intents, the site is a university endorsement of the virulently anti-white movement. Under “Advocate,” the site directs readers to another website asserting that in the U.S., “racism … is embedded in every aspect of our social system,” while it completely disavows the idea of a “post-racial society” and urges people to “join the movement for reparations.”
The whole University Life website is a portal into a plethora of leftist advocacy and activism. As if competing with the University Life office, GMU’s “Center for Culture, Equity, and Empowerment” lists among its front-page “values” the statement that “we commit ourselves to disrupting imbalances of power wherever and whenever possible.”
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As Heritage wrote, “Students may choose to endorse these views on their own, but to be urged to adopt them as ‘action items’ for which they should ‘advocate’ by a University Life website at their public university … [may] be in violation of both federal and state anti-discrimination laws and regulations.”
Universities should not push this twisted garbage, and taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for it. Yet GMU’s embrace of identity ideology is par for the public universities‘ course today. Most use your money to promote divisive, toxic lies. The original George Mason would be appalled and outraged. You should be, too.