The Big DEI Gulf on Campus: It’s Much More Than He Said/Ze Said

The Big DEI Gulf on Campus: It’s Much More Than He Said/Ze Said
Holiday4free.com [Manuel]/Unsplash.com
John Murawski
RealClearInvestigations
Updated:

The fight over academic freedom on campus increasingly comes down to a fight over three letters—DEI—which goes a long way to explaining the fissures now tearing higher education apart.

For progressives committed to social justice advocacy, academic freedom must shield the prevailing academic consensus on race and gender from outside political pressure. Nowhere is that academic consensus better represented in the modern university than in the campus Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, which exists to advocate for students and faculty who identify as brown or queer, often by monitoring the campus culture for “whiteness” and “cisheteropatriarchy”—the social dominance of white, heterosexual men.

Main Article: Is the Counter-University Movement Any Match for DEI’s Juggernaut?

Conservative reformers also see themselves as defending academic freedom by challenging the progressive campus orthodoxy that’s enforced by DEI functionaries in the name of social justice. Critics of DEI say that these are overzealous bureaucrats who stifle the academic freedom of anyone who dares to dissent from their monocausal, moralistic metanarratives about race and gender.
John Murawski is an award-winning journalist who writes for RealClearInvestigations. He previously covered artificial intelligence for the Wall Street Journal and spent 15 years as a reporter for the News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) writing about health care, energy, and business. At RealClear, Murawski reports on how esoteric academic theories on race and gender have been shaping many areas of public life, from K-12 school curricula to workplace policies to the practice of medicine.
twitter
Related Topics