The DIEing Academy

Academia is broken in every way. Here are a few of them.

Yeah yeah, so it isn't the most original of titles. By now you all get it - those of you who've managed to wrest enough cognitive liberty back from the control architecture to formulate something resembling a coherent understanding of reality, that is. We're talking of course about Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, which I've oh, so cleverly rendered as the acronym DIE, as in DIE whitey, DIE cisgendered scum, DIE Western civilization, and so on. I'm sure you've never come across that one before.

Of course, you won't come across that particular acronym used anywhere inside academia, or elsewhere in the official organs of this decaying waste pile of a society. Sometimes you'll see it rendered as the anodyne EDI, but more often it gets presented as DEI. I can't help but suspect there's a degree of unconscious metaphor there, or maybe deliberate programming, given that Dei is the genitive singular for the Latin Deus, or God. And with the degree to which academia has been consumed by the metastasized ideological plague that is DEI, it is not inaccurate for its proponents to refer to it as the God they act as though it were ... an object of fanatical devotion that displaces all before it, whether truth, or beauty, or justice, or sanity, or simply the good.

Let's get right to the matter at hand, though. Punny titles aside, the academy isn't exactly dieing. It would, at this point, be more accurate to say that it is dead. It is a carcass of vast proportions, which carries on twitching as it has not yet realized that it is dead. Classes are taught, but little if anything is learned. Peer-reviewed papers and scholarly books are published, but the majority of them contain nonsense, whether in the form of deliberately opaque schizophrenic rambling by the aggressive midwit grievance commisars who have replaced distinguished professors of the humanities, or the marketing brochures impersonating biomedical studies authored by pharmaceutical sales reps masquerading as sober professors of medicine.

The rot is everywhere, touching everything, a miasma of mandatory make-believe that has choked off the oxygen of rational inquiry. Whether the subject is race, or sex, or "gender", or climate, or COVID, or most recently Ukraine, there is a "narrative" from which deviation is not to be tolerated. Naturally the narrative is always false; it is precisely because it is false that it forbids even the discussion of alternatives, a taboo that expresses itself in the deplatforming or cancellation of deviants who dare "deny" the sacred narrative, or even to raise the most timid of questions about some minor aspect of it.

Academic discourse, characterized by impenetrable jargon at the best of times, has become a submarine mine field of accepted nomenclatures continuously evolving into deeply offensive expressions of various isms and phobias under the savage selective pressure of the rabid status games played by academics desperately scrambling after the small and shrinking number of jobs. Self-censorship, as everyone knows, has become pervasive - in an environment where yesterday's mandatory vocabulary is today's cancellable hate speech, the only safe expression is to say nothing.

A small anecdote to illustrate this. On a recent review panel, we found ourselves struggling with how to appropriately praise an applicant's outreach plan, which would make it possible for the blind to participate in a certain activity. Well, we didn't say blind, obviously. How crude. Instead, we went with "visually impaired", that is until one of the panelists huffed that this was obviously ableist. Naturally, the complainant did not have a ready substitution at hand, and with none of the panelists able to think of a delicate phrasing guaranteed to avoid offensive interpretations, it was ultimately decided to drop the entire sentence and simply leave the praise phrased in the vaguest possible manner.

A small thing, sure, but illustrative of the problem. When everything is potentially offensive, all communication must be as indirect as possible, and the result is that clear communication using direct and precise language becomes impossible. The result is an increasingly noisy system, from which it becomes ever more difficult to extract useful information. Inevitably, just as clear speech aids clear thought, the reverse is also true, and the minds imprisoned in this matrix become themselves noisy and deranged. It is no accident that our intellectuals, or at any rate our professoriate, have gone collectively mad.

Naive readers might infer from the above anecdote that the panel in question was meeting to examine government grants to academics in the humanities or social sciences, with the goal of alleviating the suffering of the benighted members of oppressed and under-served communities. Sadly, no. I am myself a scientist, from one of the hardest of the hard sciences, and the grant proposals being reviewed were nominally meant to advance the science in question. I say this to emphasize two things to you, so that you'll understand just how bad the situation is, if somehow at this late stage of societal decadence and imperial collapse it isn't yet obvious to you. First, to get funding for a scientific project it is now necessary to demonstrate that at least some of the money will be used in the service of DIE imperatives. Second, that the thought-policing language games so beloved of the cultural Marxists have conquered the daily discourse of scientists just as thoroughly as they have the humanities departments.

You see this everywhere in the sciences, now.

Scientific conferences regularly insist on 'codes of conduct', which are in practice written in such a way as to enable participants from 'marginalized backgrounds' (that is to say, in real language, those with privileged immutable characteristics) to stick it to 'privileged' (that is to say, disfavoured) participants and have them punished on a whim for any perceived misstep or slight. One conference I attended (organized, because of course, by a flouncing genderfluid professor who'd successfully parlayed his boutique gender identity into minor celebrity status, at least in his own head), went so far as to explicitly state that reverse racism doesn't real, so don't go thinking any of the protections in this document apply to you, whitey.

Hiring has been affected, too. A majority of American universities now insist that faculty application packages include something called a 'diversity statement'. Previously such applications consisted of a Curriculum Vitae, a publication list, statements of research plans and teaching experience, and letters of recommendation, a combination in which all materials are of obvious relevance to the duties expected of a professor. In contrast, the diversity statement is exactly what it sounds like: a ritualized declaration of ideological fealty in which the applicant is expected to describe what she has previously done to advance DIE imperatives, and moreover, what she will do in the future to advance them further, should she be hired. You may think this is simply some pro forma boilerplate in which the applicant can simply say the expected pleasantries in order to tick a box and keep the AWFLs in HR happy. You would be wrong: at some universities, the diversity experts are the first to review applications; they of course read only the diversity statements, and only application packages passing this filter are seen by the faculty hiring committee. Should an applicant be hired, when it comes time for them to apply for promotion to tenure, their record in advancing DIE directives plays a role in the decision just as much as their research and teaching.

Another way DIE affects hiring is simply in direct preferences for applicants with certain desirable biological characteristics. The sciences are largely male, White, and Asian. For anyone versed in human sociobiodiversity or simply capable of observing human behaviour and drawing rational and obvious conclusions, there is nothing particularly remarkable about this. Men tend to be more fascinated by stuff, women by people; Whites and Asians routinely beat other lineages in IQ tests, meaning they will be dramatically over-represented at the far right tail of the bell curve from which top intellectuals are (in theory) to be found. For the woke, however, such explanations are heresy, and this is rather a crime of patriarchal white supremacy (we'll forget about the Asians for a moment) crying out to the heaven they don't believe in for redress. It is a massive, systemic problem of under-representation, and it must be corrected by any means fair or foul in order to ensure that the racial, sexual, and sexual deviance demographics of any given department must match at an exact level the demographics of the population as a whole. The result is that applicant pools that start as a rough reflection of the actual demographics of the profession or discipline in question, are forcibly altered to resemble the demographics that are ideologically preferred by the nice ladies in the HR department.

The combined effect of these policies is to filter the applicant pool not for those who are objectively the best at the job, but for those who are ideologically compliant. This is disastrous for scholarship, as the personality profile of a brilliant scholar - an autistic iconoclast who doesn't give a shit if his scholarship makes you wet your panties with impotent butthurt - does not overlap at all with the personality profiles of the ideologically compliant, which at best are those of the detail-orientated apple-polishing valedictorian who always does her homework on time yet never has anything particularly novel or interesting to say, and at worst are those of the political Machiavellian who will say whatever he needs to say to get what he wants, and the fanatical religious zealot whose monomaniacal devotion blinds her to anything remotely resembling reality.

This, then, is the current state of the academy. The intellectual giants that once dominated it halls have vanished, ghosts of a forgotten (and racist and sexist) past. In their place are scheming Machiavellians, corporate sales representatives, and political commissars carefully saying nothing to anyone about anything that matters.

Academia isn't DIEing.

Academia is dead.