Diversity Thursday

Where the girls are the fairest, the boys are the squarest

Time to visit the front lines of the pushback against the diversity commissariat in higher education - this time in my home state.

Don’t forget that we’ve documented their march through the US Naval Academy - but it is all over the place, and your tax dollars are paying for it.

The invaluable Chris Rufo has been digging around the University of Florida;

The University of Florida has created a radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy that promotes racial and political preferences in faculty hiring, encourages white employees to engage with a twelve-step program called Racists Anonymous, and maintains racially segregated scholarship programs that violate federal civil rights law.

I have obtained a cache of internal documents via Sunshine Law records requests revealing the stunning scope, scale, and radicalism of UF’s “diversity and inclusion” programs. Officially, the university has reported to Governor Ron DeSantis that it hosts 31 DEI initiatives at a cost of $5 million per year. But these figures don’t capture the extent of the university’s rapidly growing DEI complex. In reality, DEI is not a series of standalone programs but an ideology that has been embedded in virtually every department on campus.

…

Under chief diversity officer Marsha McGriff, who replaced Farias in December 2021, DEI blitzed through the university administration. According to internal documents, McGriff’s three-year plan included the creation of an “institutional equity and inclusion blueprint,” the expansion of a university-wide “DEI infrastructure,” and the deployment of DEI cadres to each division, school, and college, to monitor and enforce DEI ideology at every level of the bureaucracy. As part of this program, the embedded cadres were tasked with conducting loyalty surveys, with questionnaires asking faculty and staff to rate their agreement with statements evaluating their unit’s “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” financial support for DEI, and trainings on “unconscious bias” and “micro-aggressions.”

The “institutional equity and inclusion blueprint” has already had a major impact. Slides from a presentation on UF’s six-month “DEI inventory” study, conducted by Damon Williams, a strategist for diversity leadership retained by the university, would appear to show that UF has created 1,018 separate DEI initiatives (slide 55). Williams’s preliminary survey suggests that the process of ideological capture has spread throughout the university’s departments and divisions: 73 percent “have a DEI committee” and “DEI officer”; 70 percent “espoused commitment to DEI”; 53 percent “have a DEI strategic plan”; and 30 percent have “DEI in annual reports” and use “DEI in performance review.”

One area of focus for the DEI bureaucrats is to forcibly recompose the racial demographics of the professoriate. In 2021, DEI officials administered a survey to measure affirmative action efforts in faculty hiring and to question departments about their commitment to DEI-style hiring. The list of favored practices included “specific formal training in diversity, equity, and inclusion,” advertising through organizations “formed around DEI identity,” retaining an “equity specialist” to advise search committees, explicit race-based recruiting of individuals “from historically underrepresented groups,” and measuring “current workforce demographics” against targets and benchmarks.

You need to read it all - but there are a few points to consider that - at least for Florida in general and Gators in particular - may lead one to have a bit of optimism that pushback may arrive;

Fortunately, legislators in Tallahassee have taken notice. House Republicans have proposed legislation that would eliminate DEI programming at all Florida public universities. They need to recognize, though, that DEI has embedded itself in every department, program, and initiative. It will take continued vigilance and aggressive enforcement to root out DEI and restore academic excellence as the guiding light of Florida’s public university system.

Governor DeSantis is already leading from the front in pushing back, but there is someone else to keep an eye on.

Last month one of your humble blogg’r’s favorite Senators (now former) started his new job after his years of service in the US Senate;

The University of Florida welcomes Dr. Ben Sasse. A former U.S. Senator, Dr. Sasse is the 13th president of Florida’s flagship university.

In his opening letter to students, faculty and staff, Ben Sasse only used the word “diversity” only once;

How will we champion pluralism, curiosity, viewpoint diversity, open debate, and intellectual rigor for our students and faculty, such that our graduates will be prepared to live and work with people of many points of view?

Proper.

With Chris Rufo doing a lot of the work for him, it will be interesting if Sasse will rise to the challenge of our time and set UF on the path to be a template for other large land grant universities suffering under the rent seeking diversity commissariat.

Then ponder what glory would behold our military should DeSantis get elected President and then, as CINC, could issue a similar directive as he did at New College for the service academies … and the military at large - eliminating DEI initiatives so those billets could be either taken as savings or the BSC recoded in to something productive. All those wasted positions, travel funds, work hours and negative atmospherics gone.

It isn’t a bad thing to hope, and plan.

I have a list. Call me.