DEI programs in the news

[apl68]

Oh, I agree that they made a terrible botch of their finances, and that that should have consequences.  I'm just inclined to accept that it was incompetence rather than deliberate malfeasance. 

[financeguy]

I guess I'm also inclined to accept that but only pending verification that it's true. The numbers are just too big and it is too easy for people to exploit racial conflict for nefarious gain. Think of Jesse Jackson and his son's imprisonment, the insane amount funneled by Patrice Colors through BLM to buy personal houses and other goodies and the recent Facebook DEI hustler who scammed FB and Nike out of millions. These are just a few examples. Many of the people that will pay money to avoid being called the R word aren't even inclined to look if it's going to a "legit" cause. The only cause they care about is shielding themselves from accusations of racism, which is accomplished by writing the check, not by the recipient doing anything specific with it. I don't even really have a problem with this protection racket, which is not that different than an endorsement deal with a celebrity to say they buy your product. I just mind when it is done through a tax-exempt entity as if meeting the criteria for a non-profit.

[Langue_doc]

A couple of articles on the DEI program at UMich--paywalled, but I'll try to post the free/shared links tomorrow.

What to Know About the University of Michigan's D.E.I. Experiment
A Times investigation found that the school built one of the most ambitious diversity programs in the country — only to see increased discord and division on campus.

The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?
A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever.

[secundem_artem]

Artem U is about to roll out it's brand spanking new DEI program.  As someone who has been dragged through the mud twice by students crying "Artem is a racist", I look forward to them having greater resources to draw on the next time one of them decides that all problems are due to racism.

The problem is that college kids have been marinating in concepts of racism and various other isms since junior high.  We have taught them enough to learn how to pull the pin from the grenade.  Sadly, we have not yet given them the wisdom to know when to put it back.

[Hibush]

Artem U is about to roll out it's brand spanking new DEI program.  As someone who has been dragged through the mud twice by students crying "Artem is a racist", I look forward to them having greater resources to draw on the next time one of them decides that all problems are due to racism.

The problem is that college kids have been marinating in concepts of racism and various other isms since junior high.  We have taught them enough to learn how to pull the pin from the grenade.  Sadly, we have not yet given them the wisdom to know when to put it back.

The moment when they need to gain that wisdom can be the teaching moment. Schools vary a lot in how much they use that opportunity to produce more responsible and thoughtful graduates, with some mostly producing disgruntled ones.

[Langue_doc]

A couple of articles on the DEI program at UMich--paywalled, but I'll try to post the free/shared links tomorrow.

What to Know About the University of Michigan's D.E.I. Experiment
A Times investigation found that the school built one of the most ambitious diversity programs in the country — only to see increased discord and division on campus.

The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?
A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever.

The first article in its entirety:

A decade ago, the University of Michigan intentionally placed itself in the vanguard of a revolution then beginning to reshape American higher education. Around the country, college administrators were rapidly expanding D.E.I. programs. They believed that vigorous D.E.I. efforts would allow traditionally underrepresented students to thrive on campus — and improve learning for students from all backgrounds.

In recent years, as D.E.I. programs came under withering attack, Michigan has only doubled down on D.E.I., holding itself out as a model for other schools. By one estimate, the university has built the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any big public university.

But an examination by The Times found that Michigan's expansive — and expensive — D.E.I. program has struggled to achieve its central goals even as it set off a cascade of unintended consequences. 

Here are some key takeaways from the full Magazine article on Michigan's D.E.I. experiment.

Michigan has poured a staggering quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I.
Striving to reach "every individual on campus," Michigan has invested nearly 250 million dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. Every university "unit" — from the medical school down to the archives — is required to have a D.E.I. plan.

The number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have "diversity," "equity" or "inclusion" in their job titles reached 241 last year, according to an analysis by Mark J. Perry, an emeritus professor of finance at the university's Flint campus.

Michigan has struggled to improve Black enrollment — and students overall feel less included, not more.
The percentage of Black students, currently around 5 percent, remained largely stagnant as Michigan's overall enrollment rose — and in a state where 14 percent of residents are Black. In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members across the board reported a less positive campus climate than at the program's start and less of a sense of belonging.

Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.

While its peers reconsider aspects of D.E.I., Michigan has doubled down.
This year, both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced they would no longer require job candidates to submit diversity statements, or explanations of the candidate's commitment to D.E.I. Such "compelled statements," M.I.T.'s president said, "impinge on freedom of expression." But at Michigan, a faculty committee this summer privately recommended that the school continue using such statements," which are currently required by most of Michigan's colleges and schools.

D.E.I. at Michigan has helped fuel a culture of grievance.
Instead of improving students' ability to engage with one another across their differences, Michigan's D.E.I. expansion has coincided with an explosion in campus conflict over race and gender. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements are now cast as crises of inclusion and harm.

In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates including Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan's campus. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period.

After Oct. 7, Michigan's D.E.I. bureaucracy was tested like never before — and failed.
At Michigan, as at other schools, campus protests exploded after Hamas's Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and Israel's retaliation in Gaza. So did complaints of harassment or discrimination based on national origin or ancestry. This June, civil rights officials at the federal Department of Education found that Michigan had systematically mishandled such complaints over the 18-month period ending in February. Out of 67 complaints of harassment or discrimination based on national origin or ancestry that the officials reviewed — an overwhelming majority involving allegations of antisemitism, according to a tally I obtained — Michigan had investigated and made findings in just one.

Link to the unlocked second article here:https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/magazine/dei-university-michigan.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TU4.jxD5.Qvf9bKycf3Wb&smid=url-share

[lightning]

I don't know which is worse--authoring a DEI statement or reading a DEI statement. It's probably the former, since no one really forces me to read a DEI statement.

My university does not require a DEI statement anymore, but applicants send them anyway or yammer on about DEI in their cover letter.

I've never liked DEI statements, and I never will.

[apl68]

Brutal as the anti-DEI legislation in some states has been, Michigan's story about what happens when institutions go all-in on it makes one wonder whether maybe DEI's detractors have a point there.

[kaysixteen]

It has certainly been noted here before that schools requiring such statements would need to, ahem, figure out how to tell which applicants' statements are, ahem, just made-up.

[Langue_doc]

Follow-up on the two previous NYT articles:

I Don't Want to Live in a Monoculture, and Neither Do You

The first few paragraphs from the article:

Few things can change your perspective for the better more than being attacked from both sides of America's culture war.

If you think the left is uniquely intolerant, how do you process right-wing censorship? Or if you think the right is uniquely prone to political violence, how do you process far-left riots? When faced with similar behavior from one side or the other, hard-core partisans retreat to specious comparisons. They comfort themselves with the idea that no matter how bad their own tribe might be, the other side is worse.

But there's a different perspective. Remove yourself from a partisan team, and you can more clearly see that human nature is driving American conflict just as much, if not more, than ideological divisions.

I had that exact thought when I read my newsroom colleague Nicholas Confessore's masterful and comprehensive report in The New York Times Magazine on the failure of the University of Michigan's huge investment in diversity, equity and inclusion.

There are two troubling components to his story. The first is found in the bottom-line results of the university's D.E.I. program. In spite of spending staggering sums of money, hiring scores of diversity administrators and promulgating countless new policies, the efforts failed. Michigan still hasn't come close to becoming as diverse as it wants to be. Black students, for example, are stuck at around 4 to 5 percent of the undergraduate population in a state where 14 percent of the residents are Black.

The second is that those ineffective policies were promulgated and enforced in part through a campus culture that was remarkably intolerant. Confessore's report is replete with examples of professors who faced frivolous complaints of race or gender bias, and after Hamas's terrorist attack on Oct. 7 — when the university's commitments to pluralism were put to their toughest test — Michigan couldn't meet even its most basic legal obligations.

In a June news release announcing the resolution of two civil rights complaints against the university for antisemitism, the U.S. Department of Education said that it "found no evidence that the university complied with its Title VI requirements to assess whether incidents individually or cumulatively created a hostile environment for students, faculty or staff." The school also did not "take steps reasonably calculated to end the hostile environment, remedy its effects and prevent its recurrence."

Paywalled article unfortunately, but I've used up my shared articles this month.

[Hegemony]

D.E.I. at Michigan has helped fuel a culture of grievance.
Instead of improving students' ability to engage with one another across their differences, Michigan's D.E.I. expansion has coincided with an explosion in campus conflict over race and gender. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements are now cast as crises of inclusion and harm.

In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates including Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan's campus. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period.

I don't know anything about Michigan's DEI initiatives. I do know that increased reporting does not necessarily mean that everybody is "just too sensitive" now. There have been dozens of sexist experiences I've never reported over the years, my experience being that the powers that be would deride and dismiss my complaint. Most women felt the same. They didn't report because reporting would do no good and just subject them to further dismissiveness and possible harassment. Those lower numbers of complaints were not a good thing.

I've noticed that conservative white guys are often not slow to object when people complain about them (for instance, in DEI initiatives) — but are not as eager to acknowledge that other groups' complaints of bias might be justified.

It's a shame and a concern that Michigan's DEI initiatives didn't work as hoped. Maybe they were going about it all wrong. Maybe people's bigotry is so ingrained that such initiatives are not enough. Maybe both.

[Wahoo Redux]

How would a DEI program properly go about establishing equity?

What do DEI programs do now to establish equity?

What does a DEI officer actually do?

[mythbuster]

The part of the Michigan story that stuck out to me was this part- regarding the DEI officer in the nursing school:

On one occasion, she advised faculty members deciding how to handle a student on the verge of flunking out. The student worked more than one job and sometimes slept in her car. Patel told me she urged her colleagues to consider whether expulsion would align with the principle of equity — an ideal with different meanings for different people. "Some people say, 'If the policy's the policy, we have to implement the policy evenly — that's equity,'" she said. "I'm not trying to shame anyone. I'm trying to get them to really do the hard moral, ethical work."

I'm not clear based on the quote what the "equitable" outcome is in the mind of the DEI officer. Are we supposed to solve the students housing issue in order to achieve perfect equity? If so at what point does DEI morph in to old school social work?

I realize this hinges on whether you think the equity is just in having the opportunity to pursue the degree, or if it required the university to actively intervene in any and all possible hurdles on the way to graduation.

[Hegemony]

Yes, they ought to be clearer in reporting what the officer thought would be equitable. If I were in charge in that situation, I'd try to work with the student to figure out if they could take a lighter courseload, or if extra scholarships or financial support were available. Sometimes these students are first-generation in college or so overwhelmed that they haven't found all the potential sources of support. To be honest, the sources are so confusing and scattered at my university that when I was trying to support one of my needy students, finding the right office to handle each particular piece of the puzzle was baffling.

But I think that kind of support would be "equitable" in my view, rather than kicking the student out without further ado. I would also judge it "equitable" to kick out a kid who had a poor record but was just slacking and had nothing else going on — subject to the usual rules about expulsion, of course.

Whether that's the kind of thing that DEI officer meant, I don't know. The reportage was not very thorough.

[lightning]

The part of the Michigan story that stuck out to me was this part- regarding the DEI officer in the nursing school:

On one occasion, she advised faculty members deciding how to handle a student on the verge of flunking out. The student worked more than one job and sometimes slept in her car. Patel told me she urged her colleagues to consider whether expulsion would align with the principle of equity — an ideal with different meanings for different people. "Some people say, 'If the policy's the policy, we have to implement the policy evenly — that's equity,'" she said. "I'm not trying to shame anyone. I'm trying to get them to really do the hard moral, ethical work."

I'm not clear based on the quote what the "equitable" outcome is in the mind of the DEI officer. Are we supposed to solve the students housing issue in order to achieve perfect equity? If so at what point does DEI morph in to old school social work?

I realize this hinges on whether you think the equity is just in having the opportunity to pursue the degree, or if it required the university to actively intervene in any and all possible hurdles on the way to graduation.

That DEI officer failed. That DEI officer should have put that struggling student in contact with all of the appropriate support services (university financial aid, university crisis intervention, university counseling, and city social services). AND, the DEI officer should follow up with all offices and agencies. If that officer didn't think that was their job, then that officer should be out of a job.