We should re-direct all the $ we spend on DEI and "misinformation" to a new national program that exposes and belittles all the people who try to divide us against each other, including hatemongers like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, who ruin lives while enriching themselves.
Coleman Hughes discusses his mistreatment by TED with Glenn Greenwald on System Update. Also discussed, TED's betrayal of its stated principles. It's clear that modern day TED would have done the same with Martin Luther King, given that Coleman's talk was in favor of color-blindness.
Peter Boghossian sat down to take about the immorality of DEI programs with Dorian Abbot. Intro:
In 2021, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) canceled a high-profile lecture by Dr. Dorian Abbot, a renowned geophysicist from the University of Chicago. The topic of the lecture was not the issue. Rather, Dorian was targeted by Social Justice activists because of his critique of DEI ideology. MIT buckled to the demands of a handful of ideologues, inadvertently contributing to discussions about academic censorship.
MIT did not expect the blowback it received for hobbling scientific inquiry in favor of ideological conformity. MIT alumni formed the Free Speech Alliance and its faculty overwhelmingly voted to adopt a university statement regarding freedom of expression. Since then, Dorian has become a leading figure in the fight for academic freedom of thought, speech, and inquiry.
In this conversation, Peter Boghossian and Dorian discuss the MIT fiasco, the proper aim of academia, the immorality of DEI, speech as “violence,” University of Chicago’s commitment to academic freedom, finding meaning through religion and naturalism, Dorian’s rejection of tyrannical “equality” mandates, and much more."
Abbott takes the position that DEI programs are immoral because they are based on racism. Instead, he proposes that hirings should be based on merit, fairness and equality, as he argues in a Newsweek article published August 12, 2021. Excerpt from that article:
DEI violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment. It entails treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century. It requires being willing to tell an applicant "I will ignore your merits and qualifications and deny you admission because you belong to the wrong group, and I have defined a more important social objective that justifies doing so." It treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.
DEI compromises the university's mission. The core business of the university is the search for truth. A university's intellectual environment depends fundamentally on its commitment to hiring the most talented and best trained minds: any departure from this commitment must come at the expense of academic excellence, and ultimately will compromise the university's contribution to society. This point is particularly urgent given that DEI considerations often reduce the pool of truly eligible candidates by a factor of two or more.
I received my copy of Yascha Mounk's new book yesterday and it is excellent. Here's the blurb from the publisher:
Blurb from the publisher regarding Yascha Mounk's new book, "The Identity Trap."
For much of history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. It is no surprise that many who passionately believe in social justice came to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity to resist injustice.But over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minority groups has transformed into a counterproductive obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new ideology aiming to place each person’s matrix of identities at the center of social, cultural, and political life has quickly become highly influential. It stifles discourse, vilifies mutual influence as cultural appropriation, denies that members of different groups can truly understand one another, and insists that the way governments treat their citizens should depend on the color of their skin.
This, Yascha Mounk argues, is the identity trap. Though those who battle for these ideas are full of good intentions, they will ultimately make it harder to achieve progress toward the genuine equality we desperately need. Mounk has built his acclaimed scholarly career on being one of the first to warn of the risks right-wing populists pose to American democracy. But, he shows, those on the left and center who are stuck in the identity trap are now inadvertent allies to the MAGA movement.
In The Identity Trap, Mounk provides the most ambitious and comprehensive account to date of the origins, consequences, and limitations of so-called “wokeness.” He is the first to show how postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory forged the “identity synthesis” that conquered many college campuses by 2010. He lays out how a relatively marginal set of ideas came to gain tremendous influence in business, media, and government by 2020. He makes a nuanced philosophical case for why the application of these ideas to areas from education to public policy is proving to be so deeply counterproductive—and why universal, humanist values can best serve the vital goal of true equality. In explaining the huge political and cultural transformations of the past decade, The Identity Trap provides truth and clarity where they are needed most.
David Decosimo, an associate professor of theology and ethics at Boston University, writing at Wall Street Journal, "How Ibram X. Kendi Broke Boston University: The university totally committed itself to his ideology. It hasn’t backed off despite the scandal."
I wrote a letter to BU’s president that afternoon, stressing that beyond the problems with Mr. Kendi’s vision, the more fundamental issue concerned betraying the university’s research and teaching mission by making any ideology institutional orthodoxy. Nothing changed. Even now, BU is insisting it will “absolutely not” step back from its commitment to Mr. Kendi’s antiracism.
Mr. Kendi deserves some blame for the scandal, but the real culprit is institutional and cultural. It’s still unfolding and is far bigger than BU. In 2020, countless universities behaved as BU did. And to this day at universities everywhere, activist faculty and administrators are still quietly working to institutionalize Mr. Kendi’s vision. They have made embracing “diversity, equity and inclusion” a criterion for hiring and tenure, have rewritten disciplinary standards to privilege antiracist ideology, and are discerning ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ruling.
Most of those now attacking Mr. Kendi at BU don’t object to his vision. They embrace it. They don’t oppose its establishment in universities. That’s their goal. Their anger isn’t with his ideology’s intellectual and ethical poverty but with his personal failure to use the money and power given to him to institutionalize their vision across American universities, politics and culture.
Whether driven by moral hysteria, cynical careerism or fear of being labeled racist, this violation of scholarly ideals and liberal principles betrays the norms necessary for intellectual life and human flourishing. It courts disaster, at this moment especially, that universities can’t afford.
Consider also, Jonathan Haidt's argues "Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice." An Excerpt:
What is the telos of university? The most obvious answer is “truth” — the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict? ...I am not saying that an individual student cannot pursue both goals. In the talk below I urge students to embrace truth as the only way that they can pursue activism that will effectively enhance social justice. But an institution such as a university must have one and only one highest and inviolable good. I am also not denying that many students encounter indignities, insults, and systemic obstacles because of their race, gender, or sexual identity. They do, and I favor some sort of norm setting or preparation for diversity for incoming students and faculty. But as I have argued elsewhere, many of the most common demands the protesters have made are likely to backfire and make experiences of marginalization more frequent and painful, not less. Why? Because they are not based on evidence of effectiveness; the demands are not constrained by an absolute commitment to truth.