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January 20, 2024

The battle against DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) in America’s educational institutions isn’t about the obvious abuses of academic integrity, disregard for achievement, or embrace of institutional racism.  It’s about power and money.  The same goes for DIE’s offspring, ESG (environmental, social and governance), whose proponents have forced public and private companies to adopt policies that are antithetical to their basic missions.

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Much of our academic, political, and corporate elite are heavily invested in DIE because its doctrines have enabled them to acquire their positions of power absent competitive merit or achievement.  They will cling to their privileges in the face of embarrassment and exposure.

Accordingly, eradicating DIE’s adverse effects on education and corporations will require an offensive, not a defensive, strategy focused on eliminating the policies and funding that sustain it, in addition to the continuing aggressive efforts to expose DIE’s corruption and adverse consequences.  DIE is based on many false premises.  Accepting them as the terms of battle will result in defeat.

Many years ago, public school administrators, teachers’ unions, and their political collaborators realized that the accusation of racism was a useful tool to obfuscate their roles in failing school systems and wretched student achievement by removing all accountability for the incompetence of the teachers and administrators.  They created subjective goals that were completely unquantifiable and undefinable, like antiracism.

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DIE has been used to limit admittance to only likeminded faculty and students by degrading standards and expanding course offerings into squishy subjects for which grades are irrelevant.  The DIE gatekeepers have been most successful at America’s top colleges and universities, where demand far outstrips available places.  These policies have not gone unnoticed by students.

Support for DIE comes from affluent school districts, where students and their parents have correctly concluded that embracing DIE rather than academics is the key to getting into top-tier colleges and from there into the elite.  A 2020 student petition from an affluent and high-performing school district in Westchester County, N.Y., pleaded for DIE certification: “an applicant’s racial literacy is a prerequisite in today’s hyper-competitive college process and college admissions require critical and empathetic thinking towards the racial justice challenges of our time.”

Government adopted the absurdity of “racial literacy” enthusiastically because it gave government a twofer.  DIE allowed government administrators to be relieved of their responsibility for poor governance of schools by first claiming the high moral ground of racism and then using it as the bludgeon to demand more money from taxpayers.  These state and federal government entities deserve failing ESG scores.

Corporations were shamed into accepting the corrupt tenets of DIE by the graduates of the corrupted universities whom the corporations hired and then promoted.  Some corporations, principally the investment managers of America’s pension funds and the proxy oligopoly, saw DIE and ESG as a vast untapped white space for lucrative business models based on forcing clients to kowtow to DIE and ESG dogma.

If DIE and ESG advocates were genuinely concerned about improving the outcomes of minority students and employees, K–12 test scores would be soaring, disadvantaged minority students would be admitted to colleges and professional schools on the basis of achievement, and corporations would not have to issue quotas on minority hiring.

Instead, U.S. test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress hit new lows in the 2022/2023 academic year, minority students’ SAT scores are well below those of white and Asian college students, and corporations are suffering from the forced hiring of unqualified minority candidates.  The organization reported the “first-ever significant score drop in math” for nine-year-olds and the largest decline “ever” in math for 13-year-olds.  Reading scores for 13-year-olds continued a 12-year-long decline.