The DEI Catch-22

It was only a dilemma for cowards

Departure of Lot and his Family from Sodom (Peter Paul Rubens, 1614)

The latest instalment in my ongoing jeremiad celebrating the decline of the DIEing Academy mentioned at the beginning that the funding squeeze is making academics squeal, but did not provide any examples. To rectify that oversight, I present to you a piece I just came across from The Atlantic, entitled The DEI Catch-22 (archive link to get past the paywall).

The article uses the plight of biomedical researchers at Colombia as a lens to personalize the uncertainty gripping the entire academic sector. Colombia’s research programs have been thrown into turmoil due to the Trump administration withholding $400 million in funding to punish the university as a whole for the administration’s tolerance of antisemitism during the Palestinian solidarity protests that wracked the campus last year. Yes, I know some of you are going to jump into the comments to proclaim vindication for your belief that Zion Don only cares about one thing, but the researchers themselves are pretty sure – based on the programs that have actually been cut – that the goal has really been to terminate anything carrying the merest whiff of the unclean taint of Degraded Expropriating Imposters, that being the DEI of the article’s title (translated from Wokese with as much fidelity to the original meaning as possible).

This, the Atlantic writer laments, is simply unfair, because:

Beyond the capriciousness of punishing researchers for following the prior administration’s rules, the grant cancellations demonstrate the impossible position that Columbia’s researchers are in. If they didn’t pursue DEI objectives before, they could have lost out on grants or even violated congressional mandates. If they did, they’re at risk of ending up as collateral damage in the culture war. They’d prefer to just get back to the science.

The point is superficially reasonable. The US government has for some time encouraged scientists to pursue woke-related research topics – the article mentions a bone disease program that had received funding to recruit gender victims – by allocating increasing shares of the scientific funding budget to left-related ‘research’. More recently, the government even started demanding that grant applications incorporate some element of wokeness, for example with the ‘broader impact’ element in National Science Foundation grant proposals. The ‘broader impact’ is ostensibly meant to help to align scientific research with socially desirable priorities; in practice, what it amounts to is requiring researchers to spend a certain amount of their time acting as social workers, for instance by doing outreach programs at inner city science fairs, or by pledging to scour the land looking for Graduate Students of Colour or Postdocs of Birthing Hole whom they can brag to the NSF about mentoring.

Broader impact is usually something of an afterthought. If you’re studying the electron orbital structure in excited atomic rubidium gases, it’s not really obvious what this has to do with the climate calamity or generational poverty in rural Alabama, which is why researchers default to ‘we’ll hire a black girl to analyze some of the data’ or something. However, the really successful grant applications tend to be the ones that seamlessly integrate broader impact with the core research project ... a trick that only the social justiciars are really emotionally (I almost said intellectually) equipped to pull off, and which has led to these pretenders swallowing an increasing quantity of scarce funding as the Year has become more Current.

Note that I said ‘superficially reasonable’.

Dig just a fraction of an inch under the skin, and that reasonable surface disappears.

I have not the slightest trace of sympathy for any of these people.

Look. In any given case, for any given scientist working inside the university system, there are exactly two possibilities.

One: they embraced all of this with cheerful, delirious, evangelical enthusiasm. Religious devotees of the unholy cause of converting every institution to the One False Faith of Decay, Envy, and Incompetence, they have spent the last decade or more enforcing campus speech codes, demanding inclusive changes to hiring policies, watering down curricular requirements to improve retention of underrepresented (because underperforming) equity-seeking demographics, forcing their research collaborations to adopt codes of conduct, and mobbing any of their colleagues who voiced the mildest protest against any of this intellectual and organizational vandalism.

Two: they had reservations, but went along with it all anyhow because what were they to do? They needed jobs; they needed funding; and anyhow they didn’t go into STEM to fight culture wars. As the article says, “They’d prefer to just get back to the science,” and the easiest way to get back to the science was to just go along with whatever the crazies were demanding. Even if the crazies were demanding that they abandon any pretense of doing actual science.

The first group are enemies.

The second are cowards.

Both deserve everything they get.

And I am going to enjoy every moment of them getting it.

Look, I am going to vent here a bit, okay? Because the mewling in this article succeeded in getting under my skin.

Not long ago I was considered a promising early career scientist, with an excellent publication record for my field, a decent enough teaching record, and all the rest of it. After several years as a semi-nomadic postdoc – which had followed several years as a semi-nomadic graduate student – it was time to start looking for faculty positions. My bad luck: Fentanyl Floyd couldn’t breathe, and the networked hive consciousness of eggless harpies infesting the institutions was driven into paroxysms of preening performative para-empathy.

What this meant was two things. First, more or less every single university started demanding ‘diversity statements’ be included in faculty application packages, alongside the standard research statements, teaching statements, curriculum vitae, and publication list. The purpose of the diversity statement was to enable the zampolit in HR and the faculty hiring committee to evaluate the candidate’s level of understanding of critical race theory, gender theory, intersectionality, and all the rest of the cultural Marxist anti-knowledge; to identify candidates who had already made contributions to advancing diversity; and to identify candidates who had well-thought-out ten-point plans to help advance the department’s new core principle and overriding purpose, that being: diversity.

The second thing it meant was that hiring policies now implicitly – in the United States – and explictly (in Canada) mandated diversity as an overriding concern in hiring. As everyone knows, this means that if you’re a heterosexual cisgendered fucking white male, you are not getting hired.

In other words, I was now expected to write paeans praising the very ideology that had erected itself as an essentially impermeable barrier to my own employment, pledging to uphold this ideology myself and enforce it against others who look like me. “Humiliate yourself before us,” I was being told, “And we still won’t hire you, lol.”

Having some modicum of self-respect, I refused to go along with this. This meant that I simply could not apply for something like 90% of the available positions. And when I did apply to positions that didn’t require a diversity statement, and successfully got an interview, guess what? One of the first questions out of the mouth of one of hiring committee members would be ‘what will you do for diversity’, or ‘I see you didn’t mention diversity in your teaching statement...’ See, even if it isn’t mandated by the administration, that doesn’t stop the imposter-syndrome-having activist ladyprofs from insinuating the diversity test on their own initiative. I once had a dean, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, tell me ‘women in science are very important to me’ right at the beginning of the interview; I very nearly got that job, because everyone on the committee wanted me, but later – after they inexplicably ghosted – found out that she’d nixed it. They just didn’t hire anyone.

Right around the same time, of course, we were in the thick of the COVID-19 scamdemic. You remember, the one that was just the flu, bro, until it became the new Black Death that definitely did not come from a laboratory shut up you conspiracy theorist; which couldn’t be stopped by masks so don’t be silly until suddenly masks were the only thing that could save you; which led to us all being locked in our houses for a year because some idiot wrote a Medium article called ‘the dance of the hammer with your soft skull’ or whatever which then went viral inside the hysterosphere; which motivated the accelerated development of a novel mRNA treatment that no one was going to get because you couldn’t trust the Evil Orange Man’s bad sloppy science until suddenly it was safe and effective and then overnight absolutely mandatory and anyone who refused to take it should be sent to a camp.

Yeah, remember that?

I guarantee you that every single credentialed scientist in that article was on board for all of it.

How do I know this?

Because they all were.

I watched for years, absolutely gobsmacked, as their scientifically trained, critically thinking, empirically minded, just the facts ma’am brains got jerked this way and that by a series of transparent media psyops that a child could see through. I watched as their eyes would cloud over, or darken with rage, when any aspect of the narrative du jour was questioned, only for the narrative to change a week later, and for them to adopt this as the new received scientific truth that could not be questioned with not a single trace of awareness as to the 180 degree contradiction with what they’d been spouting with such self-assuredness just a week before.

I watched as they shrugged with a total lack of concern over the economic and emotional carnage that the lockdowns were wreaking on the working class, men and women whose jobs, lives, and businesses had been ruined for no good reason, people going bankrupt, falling back into drug addictions, dying of overdoses, their children’s brains rotting in front of screens. What did they care? They had email jobs. They were still getting paid. And working from home was nice, actually, I can go to meetings in my jammies and you should see what I’ve done with my garden, say do you want to Zoom it’s been forever?

But worst of all was when the schools reopened, and every single one of them – every aging beardy boomer white guy and every wild-eyed millennial girlboss – insisted, demanded, absolutely required as a non-negotiable condition of their return that the students be forced to vaccinate. Oh, they weren’t worried about the student’s health. It was known by then that only the very elderly – those already beyond the average life expectancy, in fact – were at any serious risk. This wasn’t to protect the students. It was to protect them. And if there were health risks to the students? Potentially catastrophic, life-destroying heart conditions, for instance?

That was of no concern to them.

During this period my own employer tried to force me to get the shot. They made it clear that my job was on the line. I didn’t care about that, because the principle at stake was far more important than a fucking paycheck. Even apart from the health risks, I wasn’t going to go along with setting a societal precedent that participation in civic life can be suspended for not offering up one’s flesh as a biolab for a drug trial, because that precedent goes to dark places very quickly.

In the end, I didn’t get fired, because I was successful in arguing my way towards a religious exemption. But it went on for months and, yes, it was very stressful, actually. Huge numbers of people weren’t nearly so lucky; their principles, their concerns over unknown side effects, or both, cost them their careers. I read about a professor being fired not long ago – just a few months back – at one of the DIEvies, I think, for continuing to refuse the injection. This stuff is still going on, and the lemmings who supported it back then are just as supportive of it now.

In my case, it’s all worked out fairly well so far. I started writing here in the middle of that mess, and I discovered all of you, or rather you discovered me, and some of you have been generous enough to support me while I rant and rave on Internet. It turned out that academia isn’t actually necessary any more: it’s entirely possible – not easy, mind you, not guaranteed, but absolutely possible – for writers and creators of every kind to make a living on the Internet. The infrastructure exists, now, so what do we do even need the ivory tower for? What’s the point of it?

Life on the outside is honestly better. I don’t need to watch what I say. I can write about whatever I want. Hell, I can live wherever I want.

And I owe all of that to you.

Thank you, truly.

I’m not the only one who’s left. The last decade has seen a quiet exodus of good men and, yes, good women from the academy. They got pushed out for their politics, or cancelled for some hate-fact they drew attention to, or excluded because of their biology, or fired for not getting the jab. Most of them, I suspect, have landed on their feet, though I’m sure there are also many more tragic cases. But that doesn’t do much to assuage the bitterness they must feel at having had careers they invested a decade or two of their lives in yanked away for the most ridiculous of reasons, as they watched compliant, unprincipled non-entities being elevated into positions they have no business occupying.

As for those still left inside, wringing their hands as they see their funding slashed, surrounded by an unsympathetic public whose patience has long since been exhausted?

Is it still possible to find fifty righteous men among them? Forty? Thirty? Even ten?

Is it possible, at this point, to find even one?

John Martin, Sodom and Gomorrah, 1852