DIE-- Diversity, Inclusion, Equity

I am not sure why everyone talks about diversity, equity and inclusion when they can be talking about diversity, inclusion and equity. The former gives us the acronym, DEI, while the latter gives us DIE. At the least it seems more appropriate.

As it happens, and as you doubtless know, universities have been hiring more and more DIE officers. In the first place, after churning out social justice warriors who are largely useless for anything else, they must feel obligated to find them work. In the second place their affirmative action admissions programs have produced a considerable amount of tension on campus, which gives them a rationale for hiring more culture warriors.

Now, as it happens, and as the Heritage Foundation explains, the DIE administrators are happily purveying anti-Semitism on campus. For those who want to know why anti-Semitism seems to be getting worse on campus, we need only to look at those who are supposed to be promoting diversity and equity.

Dare we mention that Jewish students and their parents have nothing to say about this. Their silent complicity, borne out of their feeling that they must support anything that even vaguely resembles civil rights, is certainly contributing to the current wave of anti-Semitism.

In many ways none of this should be surprising. The reigning leftist narrative today holds that underachievement by minority students is caused by overachievement of non-minority students. Now, if we can dumb down the best, we can make the rest feel better about themselves.

And the narrative also suggests that those who have more have stolen from those who have less. Since Jews are often successful in business and professions, the narrative claims that they have cheated their way to success. Obviously, if Israelis built a prosperous democratic state in an area of the world where Arabs have failed to do so, that can only mean that they stole from those who have done less well.

For those whose rational faculties are in serious decline, the impoverishment of the Palestinian people has been caused by Jews. Thus, the Palestinians have a right to destroy whatever the Jews built and to take from the Jews what is rightfully theirs.

Surely, people think this way. It is endemic to the American left. If you want to understand why certain people underachieve, consider the possibility that they do not know how to think. Dare we add that such thinking is profoundly demoralizing. Blaming other people deprives you of responsibility and allows you to think that you can do nothing on your own.

Jay Greene reports for Heritage:

Universities ostensibly employ diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) staff to create more tolerant and welcoming environments for students from all backgrounds. A previous Heritage Backgrounder documented that the number of people devoted to DEI efforts has grown to about 45 people at the average university.

This Backgrounder examines whether these large DEI staff are, in fact, creating a tolerant and welcoming environment on college campuses. In particular, this Backgrounder examines the extent to which DEI staff at universities express anti-Israel attitudes that are so out of proportion and imbalanced as to constitute antisemitism.

How did the researchers identify anti-Semitic bias among university administrators?

To measure antisemitism among university DEI staff, we searched the Twitter feeds of 741 DEI personnel at 65 universities to find their public communications regarding Israel and, for comparison purposes, China. Those DEI staff tweeted, retweeted, or liked almost three times as many tweets about Israel as tweets about China. Of the tweets about Israel, 96 percent were critical of the Jewish state, while 62 percent of the tweets about China were favorable. There were more tweets narrowly referencing “apartheid” in Israel than tweets indicating anything favorable about Israel whatsoever. The overwhelming pattern is that DEI staff at universities pay a disproportionately high amount of attention to Israel and nearly always attack Israel.

Does this necessarily bespeak bias? Duh?

While criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic, the inordinate amount of attention given to Israel and the excessive criticism directed at that one country is evidence of a double-standard with respect to the Jewish state, which is a central feature of a widely accepted definition of antisemitism.

Frequently accusing Israel of engaging in genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and other extreme crimes while rarely leveling similar criticisms toward China indicates an irrational hatred that is particularly directed toward Jews and not merely a concern for human rights.

So, rather than consider these administrators to be administrators, Greene recommends that we see them as political activists advancing a radical agenda. They are seeking to recruit people who can form a vanguard to overthrow capitalism, and especially to replace Jews who have earned their way with minority group members who have not.

The evidence presented in this Backgrounder demonstrates that university DEI staff are better understood as political activists with a narrow and often radical political agenda rather than promoters of welcoming and inclusive environments. Many DEI staff are particularly unwelcoming toward Jewish students who, like the vast majority of Jews worldwide, feel a strong connection to the state of Israel. The political activism of DEI staff may help explain the rising frequency of antisemitic incidents on college campuses as well as the association between college and graduate education and higher levels of antisemitic attitudes. Rather than promoting diversity and inclusion, universities may be contributing to an increase in anti-Jewish hatred by expanding DEI staff and power.

It is certainly not limited to universities. The corporate world has its own diversity officers, and they seem drawn to the same ideologies and to the same hatreds. Consider one Kamau Bobb, who works at Google:

The most prominent example of this from the corporate world was when Kamau Bobb, the head of diversity at Google, wrote that Jews have an “insatiable appetite for war” and an “insensitivity to the suffering [of] others.” Amazingly, Bobb was only reassigned to work on STEM education efforts for Google. Bobb let the mask slip by accusing “Jews” of these crimes rather than simply saying “Israelis” or “Zionists.” If DEI staff maintain that cover, they might be able to get away with expressing virulent antisemitic statements without even being reassigned to new positions. 

Apparently, Bobb was reassigned. When we look at Silicon Valley, however, we do not find a diverse, inclusive workplace. We find that the great tech companies have nearly no minority employees. In fact, as we have pointed out, they do not even have very many American citizens. Recall that nearly 70% of the top staffing at these companies was educated abroad, in schools that placed academic excellence ahead of DIE.