The DEI Device, Or, What Would Marx Say?
Commentary
When I was in college, you never heard the sacred troika, “diversity-equity-inclusion.” I started graduate school in the mid-1980s, and the prevailing attitude toward any such institutional formula voiced by the powers that be with a numbing regularity was jaded suspicion. It was the Era of High Theory (the tail end of it), which combined abstruse arguments about signs and their interpretation with a posture of anti-Establishment mistrust, a holdover perhaps of Sixties protest and liberation from The Man.
That spirit is gone, of course. When a college president mouths the DEI slogan and promises better DEI to come at his guiltily lagging campus, it’s hard to take him seriously. Principled intellectuals should wonder what elite interests are being served, what “false consciousness” is being created in the heads of the workers, the proletariat, the People. In this case, cynicism is warranted. DEI has to be a sham, a fake, a hustle, just another version of the suits making nice while they make life ever harder for their inferiors (for example, by jacking up tuition while telling everyone, “You MUST go to college or end up a loser”)….