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Education
DeSantis calls the bureaucrats' bluff
By
Jay P Greene
February 10, 2023 01:00 PM
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Education
DeSantis calls the bureaucrats' bluff
By
Jay P Greene
February 10, 2023 01:00 PM
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Thomas Fluharty for the Washington Examiner

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has a plan for freeing public universities from the
stranglehold of their diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies. Before
DeSantis launched this effort, it was widely believed, even among those who
recognized the dangers of DEI , that there was really nothing public officials
could do about the problem. Just like the weather, it was simply something we
would all have to learn to live with. Public universities were thought to be
outside of political control, and academic culture was thought to be too
committed to DEI goals. But DeSantis is proving that something can be done. His
plan is likely to make significant progress in dismantling DEI in higher
education.

DeSantis is showing that DEI is not beyond the reach of elected officials, at
least not at public universities. In most states, public universities are state
agencies, just like the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Game and Fish
Commission. They may have their own boards of trustees, but those boards were
created, and can be modified, by legislation, and their activities are governed
by state laws and regulations. States can reorganize how public universities are
structured to achieve public purposes better, just as they can reorganize the
DMV. Lawmakers may alter the size and composition of the Game and Fish
Commission, as well as the process for appointing those officials, and they can
do the same with the boards of public universities.



SCHOOL CHOICE ROLLS ON

In the past, state officials refrained from addressing the rise of DEI
bureaucracies in public universities, not out of an inability to do so legally
but from a conviction that it was somehow inappropriate for them to interfere.
DeSantis’s innovation was to recognize that this self-restraint was unnecessary,
counterproductive, and based largely on a misunderstanding of what DEI
bureaucracies actually are.

DEI units at universities are not faculty, nor are they engaged in the core
functions of teaching and conducting research. They are staff with the
ostensible purpose of helping welcome students, faculty, and staff from
different backgrounds to campus and creating conditions that facilitate their
success. DEI staff members develop a set of practices and inculcate related
dispositions that university leaders believe are necessary for welcoming diverse
groups and ensuring that they thrive. One might say that DEI staff members
articulate and enforce a university-approved orthodoxy regarding a set of
divisive political concerns.



Let’s leave aside the appropriateness of university staff serving as a political
commissariat to police an approved political ideology. DEI staff members clearly
are not covered by traditional norms protecting academic freedom because their
activities do not consist of teaching classes or conducting research. They are
staff, just like the bureaucrats who run student housing or work in the bursar’s
office. No one thinks that how students are assigned to housing or pay their
bills are matters covered by academic freedom. By recognizing that public
university DEI bureaucracies are protected by neither law nor norms of academic
freedom, DeSantis has shed the self-imposed shackles that deterred earlier
efforts to rein them in.

In the process, he has also demonstrated just how weak the support for DEI
bureaucracies is in the academy outside of those bureaucracies themselves.

To dismantle DEI, DeSantis is pursuing a series of initiatives. Most directly,
he has proposed “forbidding institutions from using any funding to support
initiatives relating to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, critical race
theory, and other programs he considers discriminatory.” Defunding the DEI
bureaucracy is the most obvious way to dismantle DEI. But DeSantis understands
that DEI activities may simply get renamed and reappear elsewhere within the
university, so he does not rely solely on defunding DEI.

He is taking other steps to block any attempt to end-run his defunding effort.
For instance, he is seeking to ban diversity statements from being required as
part of hiring or promoting faculty. And he has appointed a slate of anti-DEI
trustees to the New College of Florida, one of the state's smaller but most
prestigious public institutions. Placing vocal critics of DEI, such as Chris
Rufo and Mark Bauerlein, in charge of a state college has sent a clear signal to
all of Florida’s state universities that DeSantis is serious about dismantling
DEI.



To drive home the message, the newly appointed board removed the president of
the New College in short order. That left no doubt. Senior university
administrators who attempted to shield DEI would suffer consequences.

The 28 presidents of the Florida College System got the message. In a joint
statement , they acknowledged, “The presidents of the Florida College System
(FCS) also understand that some initiatives and instruction in higher education
under the same title [DEI] have come to mean and accomplish the very opposite
and seek to push ideologies such as critical race theory and its related
tenets.” They then pledged that “our institutions will not fund or support any
institutional practice, policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in
critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality, or the idea
that systems of oppression should be the primary lens through which teaching and
learning are analyzed and/or improved upon.”

At Texas Tech University, leaders abandoned the use of diversity statements in
professor hiring within hours of the publication of a piece in the Wall Street
Journal documenting how those statements were being used to discriminate and
keep out qualified candidates. The collapse of DEI continued to spread the next
day, as Rufo reported on Twitter, “ Texas Gov. Abbott's chief of staff sent a
letter to all state universities warning that their DEI programs violate civil
rights law .” The speed of DEI’s capitulation may make the French stand against
the Germans look like Thermopylae.

The fact that higher education leaders could fold so quickly should not come as
a surprise. The truth is that few university administrators, faculty, and
students have any deep commitment to protecting DEI bureaucracies. It’s fair to
say that the only enthusiastic supporters of campus DEI bureaucracies are those
employed in them and the relatively small group of rabble-rousing students who
can be organized by the DEI machinery to menace other administrators, faculty,
or students who deviate from their orthodoxy.

A ‘Defend New College’ protest in Sarasota, Florida, Jan. 31, 2023.
(Octavio Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

This is the other key innovation of DeSantis’s strategy — and why it is likely
to succeed. It was previously believed that university leaders, faculty, and
students were so ideologically committed to DEI that those institutions could
not be changed even if reforming politicians gained control of boards of
trustees and ordered changes. Even many strong opponents of DEI thought that
higher education was too recalcitrant to reform. DeSantis could see DEI for the
paper tiger that it is, allowing him to tear it down.

Understanding how weak the support for DEI bureaucracies is on campus requires
dispensing with old stereotypes of academics and thinking more clearly about how
they perceive their interests. Senior university administrators should be
thought of as being like the senior leaders of communist regimes just before the
wall fell. They may mouth devotion to the communist revolution, but they are
defined more by ruthless ambition than ideological commitment. Administrators in
higher education rise within their institutions and get to move to higher-status
universities not by scholarly accomplishment but by carefully avoiding scandal
while checking all of the boxes of fashionable initiatives.

Those fashionable initiatives may look like ideology, but since fashions
regularly change, successful administrators need to have weak ideological
commitments so they can readily change to conform with the initiatives of the
changing guard above them. If the dean makes interdisciplinary collaboration a
priority, the associate deans need to be on board. If a new dean prefers
focusing on enrollment increases, the associate deans have to be all-in for
that. Newly appointed deans invariably launch new initiatives because this is
how they demonstrate “leadership” to get that dean post at a better university
or become provost someday. Like in crumbling East Germany, university leadership
is a never-ending string of five-year plans that rarely last more than half that
long. No one can be ideologically committed and succeed in such an environment.

University faculty members can be more ideologically committed, but their
highest priority tends to be autonomy. That is, they want to be left alone to do
whatever they want, whether that is focusing on their esoteric interests,
pursuing some ideological agenda, or simply being allowed not to work too much.
Even faculty ideologically sympathetic to the goals of DEI tend to be hostile to
DEI bureaucracies because they rightly fear having their autonomy infringed
upon. No professor wants to live in fear that something they say in class or
write in an article will be reported as a violation of DEI bureaucracy-issued
guidelines. And enough of them are familiar with Robespierre to know that their
own ideological commitment may not be sufficient protection.

Surveys of professors confirm their preference for autonomy over DEI goals. For
example, a recent survey asked U.S. academics whether they gave priority to
academic freedom or social justice. Professors favored academic freedom over
social justice by more than 2-to-1, with 58% prioritizing academic freedom and
26% preferring social justice. Professors were also asked whether the selection
of course content should be driven by whether that material is “inclusive,
representing the racial and gender makeup of the students,” or based on what
would “feature the most intellectually foundational books and articles in the
field.” Academics favored assigning “foundational texts” (47%) over choosing
materials based on their inclusivity (39%).

To be sure, most academics are liberals, and some are radical ideologues. But it
is entirely mistaken to believe that professors have been fully captured by DEI
bureaucracies and will fight any effort to rein them in. Some professors may
oppose DeSantis simply because they fear being controlled by him and his
appointees more than they fear being controlled by DEI bureaucrats, but most
would prefer being controlled by neither.

If efforts to dismantle DEI can effectively convey their commitment to academic
freedom, they may find far more allies than opponents among the faculty. Even if
faculty cannot be won over, in fear-driven universities, professors will bend to
their new bosses as they did to the DEI bureaucrats before them. Academics are
not a particularly courageous lot, given how eagerly they crave job security
through tenure over the higher pay many of them might command outside of
academia.

FOR MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER MAGAZINE

Students and their families are another reservoir of support for efforts to
dismantle DEI. When we think of students, some of us might imagine blue-haired
youth with nose piercings who delight in screaming at the top of their lungs.
But radical activists are a tiny fringe of the student population. Most students
just want to have a good time while they earn degrees that get them jobs. Their
families tend to want those things even more, as long as the good time is not
too much of a good time. Very few of these students or their families want to
live in fear of crossing the DEI bureaucracy. In fact, recent polling found that
63% of students report that they censor themselves because they “fear
reputational damage if they speak their minds.”

DeSantis is like President Ronald Reagan standing before the Berlin Wall
demanding that it be torn down. At the time of Reagan’s speech, it seemed like
an impossible dream. But within a decade, it was a reality. Support for DEI
bureaucracies in universities is no stronger than the support that existed in
crumbling Soviet regimes. By recognizing that he had the legal authority,
consistent with norms of academic freedom, to push for dismantling DEI, DeSantis
is about to reveal how quickly he can loosen the grip that DEI has had on higher
education. Other governors will soon follow suit. In a few decades, we will all
wonder why no one stood up to DEI earlier.

Jay P. Greene is a senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at
the Heritage Foundation. Prior to that, he was the chairman of the Department of
Education Reform at the University of Arkansas for 16 years.


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