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An insightful case study of how it works at the University of Michigan demonstrates the danger of allowing woke ideological rule. The next administration can do something about it.
By: Jonathan S. Tobin
Give credit where it’s due. In recent years, The New York Times has become an almost unreadable publication. Left-wing bias is present in nearly every article as a partisan agenda has been weaponized by a business plan in which the so-called “newspaper of record” has marketed itself almost exclusively to affluent liberal readers. This has resulted in a cascade of biased reporting and editing aimed at affirming those readers’ prejudices and pre-existing opinions about issues, candidates and lifestyle choices. Though other major papers, as well as broadcast and cable channels, have taken similar paths, no other news outlet better exemplifies the way legacy corporate mainstream media has discarded journalism for political activism.
Still, the organization is large enough that every once in a while, articles that are more in line with the traditional purpose of journalism—seeking the truth and exposing corrupt practices no matter who is the guilty party—seem to sneak into the Times. An example of such a piece was published in its Sunday magazine and written by veteran investigative reporter Nicholas Confessore.
The article ran under the headline, “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?” It took a deep dive into the way one of America’s elite public universities had embraced the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and how this ideological commitment had not merely consumed a considerable portion of its budget but also transformed the institution into one in which students, faculty and staff have been pitted against each other in an endless racial war that serves only to exacerbate divisions and undermine academic freedom.
The story is far from perfect. It fails to adequately trace the origins of the woke catechism of DEI, and its progression from the radical left’s toxic neo-Marxist ideas of critical race theory and intersectionality. Instead, Confessore seeks to tie it to failed liberal attempts to deal with racial disparities in education like affirmative action. Anyone who wants to understand how and why DEI came to dominate education in the United States, in addition to the arts, corporate business culture and even the government, would do well to read Christopher Rufo’s brilliant 2023 book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
Behind what happened in Michigan
But Confessore’s article is nevertheless essential reading in that it provides an intensive case study about how DEI worked at the University of Michigan. In doing so, it shows how it is destroying American education, worsening race relations and fomenting anti-Semitism.
The dead hand of efforts to racialize everything extends far beyond top-rated schools like Michigan. It has been rejected by a few institutions like the University of Florida, Florida State University and the University of Alabama, and many state legislatures in red states—mainly in the South—are working on passing laws to ban it. However, it has become ubiquitous throughout higher education as schools have employed more and more administrators solely devoted to enforcing DEI rules.
These woke commissars who dominate hiring and admissions replaced merit with racial quotas and the pursuit of excellence with an emphasis on tearing down the Western canon to elevate ideas about a perpetual conflict between the races.
It replaced the principle of equal opportunity—the goal of the civil-rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—with equity, its polar opposite, which gave designated minorities rights and privileges that were now denied to others, including other minority groups.
And though this was not touched on in Confessore’s monograph about Michigan, it has also spread into primary and secondary schools throughout the nation, as teachers unions and administrators—whose ranks have become dominated by those indoctrinated in DEI ideology in college—thus deepening its poisonous hold on the nation.
The story of DEI at Michigan is a dismal one. As the writer reports, over several years, the school spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars on such programs, as every university department was forced to adopt a plan to implement its ideas. Most of this was spent on hiring a new class of administrators dedicated to enforcing its doctrines that were (as soon became apparent) antithetical to free and open inquiry while failing to do anything to make minority students feel more welcome on campus or increase their numbers, as was the stated goal of the institution.
A culture of grievance
Instead, it promoted a culture of grievance rooted in the idea that “anti-racism”—a catch-all phrase that is primarily focused on waging war on the precepts of Western civilization that are the foundational principles on which higher education was founded—was the only acceptable point of view. Students turned on each other and their teachers as they decided to be offended by any idea, thought, word or subject that supposedly triggered their feelings of being oppressed or endangered. Those who didn’t fit into the victim class—whether white, Catholic, politically conservative, or as became apparent after Oct. 7, Jewish—found out that the principle of “inclusion” did not include them.
And rather than make African-American and Hispanic students feel better about their place in the university, DEI culture had the opposite effect, as the emphasis on ferreting out racism where it actually barely existed left them feeling worse.
It reached a peak during the moral panic that swept the nation after the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May 2020. As Confessore describes, “Every part of the university seemed to stage its own auto-da-fé,” in which heretics were tried or subjected to Cultural Revolution-style “struggle sessions,” with the drama being amplified on Twitter and the school newspaper.
Nor is dissent against the new secular faith permitted. Michigan, like many other schools and institutions, requires new academic hires to swear fealty to DEI in documents that bear a striking resemblance to the “loyalty pledges” in which Americans were forced to disavow communism during the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
It was all rooted in pseudo-scientific notions about the impact of so-called “microaggressions” in which subtle alleged racial slights are treated as the moral equivalent of Jim Crow prejudice. The truth is that, as the article states, “teaching students to view the world chiefly through the lens of identity and oppression can leave them vulnerable instead of empowered. Psychologists have questioned whether implicit bias can be accurately measured or reduced through training.” Confessore continues by noting that “the notion that microaggressions are not only real but ubiquitous in interracial encounters is widespread in D.E.I. programs; a 2021 review of the microaggressions literature, however, judged it ‘without adequate scientific basis.’”
This is a tragic story of how ideologues were undermining the purpose of higher education at an elite American institution. While the argument to eliminate DEI was already strong, it became obvious a year ago.
Oct. 7 is DEI’s denouement
What Confessore rightly depicts as the denouement of DEI at Michigan—the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism as college campuses became battlegrounds dominated by pro-Hamas mobs targeting Jewish students—was repeated in many other places. At Michigan and elsewhere, universities that were supposedly dedicated to preventing prejudice because they adopted DEI standards became hotbeds of Jew-hatred.
As the article succinctly puts it, the essence of DEI culture—the “elaborate codes of speech and behavior” and “its ceaseless instruction around microaggressions and harm” didn’t apply to even the most open prejudice and public threats against Jews. Indeed, such concerns were “vaporized” when the targets of bias were people that the toxic ideology behind DEI had falsely labeled “white” oppressors—Israelis and Jews.”
And rather than seek to correct this, as the article reports, “civil rights officials at the federal Department of Education found that Michigan had systematically mishandled such complaints over 18 months. … 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—Michigan had investigated and made findings in just one.
What makes the tale of DEI at Michigan so depressing is that rather than admit that they failed, the new class of DEI administrators who had cowed the university into submission for fear of being falsely accused of racism refused to admit that their programs haven’t achieved their goals. Instead, they continue to double down on their ideological agenda. At Michigan, the answer to DEI’s failure is more DEI.
But this is more than an issue for that one school. The question facing the country now is what concerned citizens can do about this toxic ideology, which has spread its tentacles throughout society.
Individual states are in some cases rolling back DEI, with Florida providing an outstanding example, thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis. But that’s not enough.
What must be done
The pervasive hold of DEI is—as much as any other issue that worries voters—a real threat to the nation’s future as well as to its hopes of maintaining itself as a free country. Yet, as I noted last month, it is being largely ignored in the presidential campaign.
That’s unfortunate since the best way to roll back DEI is for the next president to rescind the executive orders issued by presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden that allowed its spread in the federal government. More than that, the next president needs to appoint an Attorney General who will direct the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to focus on enforcing laws against racial discrimination, which are comprehensively violated every day by DEI programs that make race the focus of hiring, admissions and curricula.
Such moves would also enable the government to take real action against the way anti-Semitism has been allowed to become a respectable form of prejudice in American society and education. Slaps on the wrist or reports from the U.S. Department of Education’s civil-rights division have not done a thing to deal with the problem.
If the DOJ were to act in this manner, then there is little doubt that the woke tide in education, culture and business would be rolled back. That the reason for doing so has been strengthened by Confessore’s report on the University of Michigan is highly ironic since the Times has done as much to defend and spread DEI as any news outlet.
Nevertheless, this case study should be read and understood by policymakers in the next administration as they plan their priorities for the next president. As much as there are other important problems to be solved, ridding the country of the DEI scam should not be relegated to the status of a “culture war” issue. As long as it is allowed to continue at Michigan and so many other places, racial division will be worsened and anti-Semitism will become further entrenched in American society.
(JNS.org)
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
