ARNOLD: The ‘Secret Trade’ of Diversity, Equity And Inclusion

Did you know that mandatory diversity course materials are university “trade secrets”? Well, they are according to Arizona State University (ASU).

The Cronkite School of Journalism now requires its freshmen to take “Diversity and Civility at Cronkite” as of Fall 2022. ASU is subject to open records laws, so course syllabi should, theoretically, be available to the public upon request. But when I requested to view the syllabus as a part of a research project for the National Association of Scholars, ASU’s open records administrators responded with stalling and obfuscation.

First, they denied my request to view the syllabus, along with several other course syllabi, over email. ASU claimed that the course materials were “trade secrets in that they are copyright-protected materials.” This is not a standard restriction: Universities in Florida, Texas, and Georgia offer course syllabi online. The University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill provide these materials upon request.

I continued to push to view the materials. Since ASU could not send them electronically, I asked to view the materials in person. They obliged, and we set an appointment. But ASU administrators then tried to reschedule due to an unfortunately timed “fire drill” occurring that morning during the week between Christmas and New Years. When I later asked an employee who had been stationed at the building that morning about this, he had no knowledge of such a drill. When I arrived for the rescheduled appointment, I was given only an hour to view and take notes on the materials — a stipulation they hadn’t mentioned previously, and one which has never been imposed during viewings I’ve attended in other states.

So what’s in this course that ASU seems to so desperately want to hide? The school already imposes diversity as part of general education requirements, but not every department has its own diversity course to teach practices specific to that field. Unlike non-political fields, like the sciences, journalism is a subject already charged with political bias. The school can have only one goal in requiring such a course for future journalists: to dictate the kind of information journalists include, and choose to exclude, when covering stories. Based on what I learned from one hour’s perusal, the class serves as a tool to brainwash future journalists into a radical ideology euphemistically called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — an initiative aimed at forcing ideological conformity to progressive causes.

The course begins with “implicit bias exploration,” a popular topic in progressive circles due to the much-acclaimed Implicit Association Test (IAT). Implicit bias refers to prejudices, particularly racial ones, that are not expressed in an explicit or conscious manner. IAT inventors Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji created the test to measure implicit bias through a reaction-time based psychological test which tracked internal associations of racial groups with positive or negative thoughts. But both the IAT and the concept of implicit bias are shrouded in controversy due to validity issues and weak correlations to behavioral outcomes. At best, the scientific literature is mixed on the usefulness of implicit bias as a concept. Yet the Cronkite School dedicates an entire session on this niche and controversial subject. Perhaps that’s because implicit bias allows DEI believers to continue insisting that America is a fundamentally racist country.

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