Jason L. Riley: The Campus DEI Retreat is a Tactical Withdrawal

Well, you know where I stand on this.

   DEI isn't the main problem--not by any stretch of the imagination.

   The problem is the ideological capture of the university.

   The left seems to have inherent totalitarian tendencies that lead it to take over institutions and bend them to its ideological ends. There is no reason to think that this tendency will go away. In fact, it's a very safe bet that it won't. And schools and universities--and young people in general--seem to be among its favorite targets. This, per Lenin, is correct strategy: occupy the bottlenecks and brainwash the youth.

   The left will remain in control of universities for the foreseeable future. And it will never stop searching for new and better ways to inject its pernicious ideology into the institution and, thus, into the minds of the young.

   The problem of the "deep state" is nothing compared to that of the deep academy.

   "Diversity," which morphed into "DEI," (note that no one ever voted on adding to / expanding this concept--it was just decreed by the left) has been a mere catspaw--an incredibly effective one, but nothing more. It won't go away completely (many programs and administrators will simply be "rebranded") but even if it did, the academic left would replace it. The left already has other Trojan Horse terms that are used to sneak totalitarian leftism into our institutions of learning. "Social justice"--already often even more misleadingly shortened to "justice"--for one. The term sounds plausibly neutral on its face, and seems to have an undeniable positive moral valence--who could possibly be against justice? Nobody, of course. But 'social justice'--and 'justice'--in the mouth of the academic left doesn't mean justice. It means far left conceptions of justice. 'Social justice,' like 'political correctness' is specifically designed to have both exoteric and esoteric meanings. To the uninitiated, it sounds uncontroversial, politically neutral and undeniably good. But its real, esoteric meaning is quite different: "social justice" is the implementation of far-left ideology. The term is almost never used approvingly on the right. If you hear someone advocating for "social justice" with respect to taxation, you know what they'll be arguing for--and it won't be letting everyone keep more of the money they earn...

   'Sustainability' is another term almost always used as a Trojan Horse for leftist ideas and policy--it almost always conceals leftist views about the environment, fossil fuels, global warming, (lower) consumption and (less) prosperity. 'Wellness' seems to be an emergent new terminological weapon--almost anything can be snuck in under that rubric--and at least one popular declaration in academia includes things like "community wellness" and "environmental (see: 'sustainable') wellness." "Civic engagement" seems to commonly mean doing work for left-leaning NGOs and the like--but I tend to think this has little to do with the terminology; it's just where HS and college students will be funneled...

   Anyway.

   None of this means that we shouldn't make them beat their DEI swords into scholarly plowshares--just that this is a necessary condition for saving academia, not a sufficient one.

   This battle, in my estimation, will never be over. Liberal, conservative and libertarian normies who want ideologically neutral, truth-seeking institutions will always be at war with a left that rejects the very ideas of objectivity and neutrality, and that thinks that ideological capture is inevitable--and/so it wants to be the captor.