When most Americans think of higher education, what likely comes to mind is the quintessential image of a distinguished professor in an even more distinguished office, complete with a leather couch, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and hundreds of seemingly ancient books. The professor, whether in the form of the excitable, crazy-haired genius or the absentminded intellectual with his fingers perpetually stroking his chin, is seen as the king of his domain, ruling over (and hopefully teaching) the students who come through his courses.
The reality, of course, is quite different. The American academy is not ruled by its faculty (distinguished or not) but by its administrators, whose decisions determine the tiniest minutia of students and professors lives on campus. A mere glimpse at the payroll of most American universities will confirm who really calls the shots on campus, with administrative bloat being one of the leading causes of the skyrocketing tuition costs that led to the student debt crisis. If you need more proof, just take a look at the average college student’s inbox—the flood of emails from the Office of This, That, and the Other will far outweigh the number of emails that are actually related to course content.
In recent years, the diversity regime has emerged as the most powerful component of the university bureaucracy, with a “mission” that encroaches on every aspect of university life. Rather than improving diversity of thought and experience on campus, these Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices tend to stoke division and encourage students to self-segregate along racial lines. Their toxic and divisive ideology has received much attention—but the way in which they amass power and embed themselves within university systems has been largely overlooked.
In this week’s featured article, National Association of Scholars Junior Researcher Mason Goad describes how DEI (or, more accurately, DIE) bureaucracies are structured in a way that entrenches their power and influence within the university system. Goad suggests that we should consider the DIE bureaucracy “as an extended organism, or better yet, as an extended parasite” that is “intentionally designed to foster blind obedience to authority.”
Goad identifies four characteristics of a system designed to trap well-meaning individuals into advancing a malevolent agenda. These include the use of contractual obligations to control behavior, the assignment of supposedly meaningful roles, the enforcement of vague and arbitrary rules, and the replacement of reality-based language with enticing rhetoric. All four of these characteristics are apparent in the DIE bureaucracy, from the use of diversity statements to filter candidates for faculty positions, to the creation of seemingly endless administrative positions, to the policing of every-day language for microaggressions and “implicit bias.”
Taken together, these carefully crafted traps ensure that the parasite can spread undisturbed throughout the entire university system. As Goad writes,
The DIE bureaucracy then increases its actions incrementally, trapping its victims ever further. It offers an ideology for victims’ minds to rest upon and makes the exit costs as high as possible, such as the loss of one’s job and professional exile. In doing so, the extended parasite secures its environment and its future.
called Democrats
Salisbury University has an “Office of Institutional Equity”- how it THAT for a soviet sounding name. Anyway, they are nothing more than Soviet Commissars and Marxists. If you send your child to Salisbury University, just as if you send them to public school- YOU DO NOT LOVE THEM. PERIOD. Some days, I hope there is an EMP or nuclear attack just so I can imagine the marixist college professors are slowly and painfully dying of starvation.