Student belonging. Has there ever been a more heartwarming concept than that?
For elementary and secondary school students, a feeling of belonging to the group they spend the majority of their waking hours with can mean the difference between academic success or failure. For how can a student who is being bullied or otherwise ostracized by their peers think of anything else but getting through the day?
But how about at the collegiate level? Should it really be a priority for college administrators? While we want students in higher education to feel accepted, is it really necessary to coddle them?
Hanover Research’s Dr. Amy Kurfist thinks so. In fact, she believes that “student belonging” will be the next frontier in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on campuses across America. According to Kurfist, “it is imperative for colleges and universities to shift more focus to inclusion and belonging, even as they continue other DEI efforts.”
Imperative? The college years used to be a time for young adults to hone their critical thinking skills as they prepared to take their places in the real world, where very few will care about their “sense of belonging.” The focus on the social constructs of DEI on college campuses does students no favors and leaves them woefully ill-equipped for life after academia. Rather than empowering students, DEI weakens them, which is, in fact, its unspoken goal.
The same people who insist that 12-year-olds be allowed to decide their own gender tell us that 20-year-olds must be protected from microaggressions, perceived racist slights and exclusion. But ask them how they feel about the inclusion of, say, members of the campus Republican club, and they wither.
Although it feels like DEI has exploded onto college campuses and into U.S. corporations in just the past few years, it’s actually been incubating inside of America’s most elite universities for decades. And its adverse effects are already being felt. As these students graduate and take their places in society, they bring their distorted worldviews and unrealistic expectations about humanity with them. This puts them at a serious disadvantage to those educated in more traditional school systems that are based on merit, discipline and academic rigor. The end game is a weaker, less influential, less respected America and, by extension, a far more dangerous world.
The prioritization of DEI on U.S. college campuses has become a big business. And a lucrative one. The right-leaning American Enterprise Institute discovered that the incomes of DEI employees often exceed those of fully tenured professors at the same universities. For example, the University of Michigan’s Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer Rob Sellers earned $396,550 plus fringe benefits estimated at 32.45% of salary in 2018. The average income for a tenured professor at the school that year? $147,000.
Moreover, the race to staff already bloated college administrations with DEI personnel has driven administration to student ratios to levels unheard of just a decade ago. The current ratio for Yale University undergraduates is 1 to 1. Aside from DEI being needless and even counterproductive, paying the salaries of this new class of employees is causing college tuitions to surge to prohibitive levels.
Following a 2021 study, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., concluded that DEI has “become a primary function of higher education.” Worse still, they found that these efforts “have little relationship to students’ satisfaction with their college or their personal experiences with diversity.”
Disturbingly, they learned that, “the DEI bureaucracies are often larger than the faculty of the largest academic department on a campus.” They cite Georgia Tech where DEI employees outnumber faculty members of the history department by a ratio of 3 to 1. The study found that at Syracuse University, there are 7.4 DEI personnel for every 100 faculty members.
So, what are universities getting for their money? Well, not much if you ask Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Jay Greene. He told Fox News that while the “ostensible objective” of DEI is to make “college campuses more welcoming and inclusive,” its real purpose “is to create a political orthodoxy and enforce that political orthodoxy, which fundamentally distorts the intellectual and political life on campus.”
In a separate essay, Greene explained: “DEI takes a bunch of good words and in Orwellian fashion, uses them to advance the very opposite of what those words mean. … DEI classifies us as either oppressor or oppressed, with the former deserving whatever harsh consequences they might get while the latter is entitled to whatever benefits they can grab.”
At its core, DEI is a Marxist tool used by the left to advance their radical agenda. And sadly, this toxic ideology is sweeping through our universities at breakneck speed.
A previous version of this article appeared in The Washington Examiner.
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