A decade ago, when I returned to University in my home state of Queensland to train as a teacher, a curious and somewhat mysterious character began to manifest itself in all my coursework.

Beloved of lecturers, ‘Diversity’ was his name, and his patronage seemed pre-built into every aspect of my study.

Diversity was a funny fellow and a hard one to define, other than to say that he probably wasn’t a fellow at all. The mysterious character in fact seemed to be a totem for any student, teacher, or community member that wasn’t straight, white, and male.

You had to love diversity. And I mean, you had to love diversity! If you didn’t, or if you merely forgot to accommodate her/ze/zem/xir/xerox in a lesson plan, then you weren’t bloody well passing…

Later, I learnt that you weren’t passing either, unless you understood that – as one of my esteemed lecturers put it – ‘teaching isn’t teaching unless it’s social justice teaching’.

What?

Enter diversity’s fellow traveller, ‘equity’, also known as the nefarious successor to its more benign predecessor, equality.

Education, it seemed, had moved beyond giving the best, most rigorous, and enriching possible start to each student, and had instead tasked itself with saving the world from all its manifest injustices.

But the most bizarre addition to this emergent duo of schoolyard pals came with the arrival of their new friend ‘inclusion’ at the academy sandpit.

Inclusion was an out-and-out weirdo of an ideological movement. It wanted special language (and sometimes special lessons) for all the different kids in the class, claiming this kind of individual exclusivity was the best way to bring everyone together in the manner his name suggested.

By the time I marched away with diploma in hand, this terrible trio, now known as ‘DEI’, had stormed the Bastille of modern education, tossing a legion of hapless old-timers onto the guillotine to meet a bloody, unsophisticated end. Just desserts you see, for their bloody unsophisticated ‘old fashioned’ teaching practices.

DEI’s reign of terror within the academy has now lasted at least a decade longer than that of Robespierre’s in 18th Century France. It has seen more victims too, albeit less physically (and more psychologically) bloodied ones.

Stanford University Law School, surely one of the most DEI’ified institutions on the planet, traces its Woke-inclusive genealogy to 2009. The school’s website boasts that 2009 commenced a long run of DEI achievements, with the first ‘woman of colour’ appointed as an associate Dean.

Stanford is in the news again today as the poster child of the DEI Agenda gone mad. Conservative judge Kyle Duncan was subjected to an inmates-run-the-asylum style intifada whilst trying to speak at a campus last week. Students disgracefully interrupted his speech, forcing Duncan to call for a University representative to address and defuse the fracas.

Expecting de-escalation and perhaps even discipline of students, Duncan was instead met at the lecture hall by a histrionic bureaucrat who launched into an outrageous soliloquy on the evils of ‘hurtful’ speech, as an astonished Duncan looked on in humiliation. Bewilderingly, it was said of the Judge’s sheer effrontery in daring to turn up on campus, Duncan ‘literally denies the humanity of people’.

Stanford has since apologised to Duncan, but the incident has laid bare the corrosive, long-run influence of DEI Wokeism as the dominant spiritual force within the modern day University.

The DEI agenda has destroyed the institutions which it purports to help enrich. Supercharging the politics of grievance with the fuel of disaffected youth, DEI has become a self-sustaining nefarious force, enabling and indeed encouraging the very worst destructive instincts of society’s malleable young minds.

Like a swirling Hydra, for every blow against it, it regenerates two-fold, sucking student fees into an ever-expanding vortex of nonsensical new self-justifications. Look at the ludicrously bloated DEI department of the University of Michigan – once a jewel in the crown of the US Midwest’s stellar array of higher education institutions – to see the sheer scale of resources diverted away from learning into nefarious institution-destroying ideology: Michigan now boasts 163 DEI staff, at a cost of over US $18 million, most of which is picked up by taxpayers.

Last week, a highly regarded colleague told me that Harvard, perhaps once the world’s most prestigious university, had become a byword for American decline within academic circles. Sitting atop a mammoth endowment and outrageously high fees, Harvard employs over 7,000 full-time administrators, at a ratio of more than 3 administration staff for every faculty member. With approximately 7,100 undergraduate students, Harvard has almost as many administrators as it does undergrads.

Harvard’s office for equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging (OEDIB) has this masterful exposition of Type-A bureaucratic drivel posted prominently on its webpage:

‘Informed by the recommendations of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, our office will guide Harvard’s culture toward inclusive excellence by convening stakeholders, serving as a catalyst for strategic efforts, analyzing University-level progress, optimising investments, and facilitating University-wide coordination.’

Right then. Glad we got that cleared up.

Notwithstanding the shocking fall of these once-great institutions, there are some shoots of hope in higher education.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has used state power against the monster itself. DeSantis has handpicked a board of trustees for New College, a state-run liberal arts school in Sarasota on Florida’s Gulf Coast. In February, the board voted to abolish the school’s DEI office and redirect funds to core learning objectives.

At the University of North Carolina, 25 year old convinced the University’s medical school to ban DEI statements on entry. Their victory will ensure that patients, as he says, will be ‘treated by qualified doctors — not those accepted to med schools because of their victim status or the color of their skin’.

In Texas, the embryonic University of Austin continues to make waves with its ‘forbidden courses’ program. The fledgling school and its superstar international faculty (a genuinely ideologically diverse group of scholars) permit no safe spaces. UATX doesn’t censor viewpoints or ‘protect’ students from uncomfortable conversations and challenging class content.

In Iowa, the state legislature has just halted all new DEI programs at its three public universities, pending a review of the existing programs.

These are great victories for common sense, rigor, and transparency in education. However, more must be done if higher education is to be salvaged from its precipitous demise at the hands of the DEI bureaucracy.

It is troubling in the first place that victories over the DEI monster seem only to be occurring in conservative American states, where government itself is somewhat innately hostile to the DEI agenda. In the rest of the Western world, the slide of higher education into rule by Woke bureaucracy continues unabated.

Students are losing out badly under this arrangement.

It remains to be seen whether Universities writ-large can rid themselves of this pernicious blight, ending Woke hegemony by sending DEI to its grave.

Let’s hope they can, lest they end up like Stanford and its unruly hordes of entitled brattish students and administrators – a sad self-parody, where irrelevance and eventual collapse may be the only way out of the malaise.

Ben Crocker is a research fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington DC. His Substack is Crocker’s Columns.

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