Bringing this question over from Bluesky, where I first saw it reposted. It’s based on a tweet (post?) on X by an account I don’t know.
Paraphrasing the tweet, “DEI is a novel bureaucracy that had been created within the college system, which represented neither the faculty nor the students, and it was starting to act like many faculty members’ direct supervisor and telling them how to teach.”
My question: Does this explanation fit with how you think DEI works at colleges and universities?
(Just to be clear, in my experience this is not at all how it works. I’m a college professor, a social scientist, and I’ve taught at six different schools over the past 20+ years. I’ve never had anyone audit my syllabus or tell me what I should or shouldn’t teach. A few years ago the faculty in my department did an exercise in diversifying the authors on our syllabi. This was entirely voluntary; we decided as a department to do it, some of us made no changes, and some of us made big changes. We’re interested in hiring someone who specializes in our field’s version of critical race theory, because our student body is majority Hispanic and they’re really interested in taking those classes. If we or the students had different priorities, we’d be trying to hire in another area instead. The DEI office at my current school mostly puts on events and organizes mentoring programs.)