DEI is a practice that cites equity in theory but discriminates in practice | Opinion

This is in response to Angene Wilson’s op-ed in the Herald of January 31, 2024, defending the concept of Diversity/Equity/Inclusion as a concept that has been a great boon to universities. Professor Wilson looks out upon the world with great caring and compassion and wants all regardless of racial/class/origin identity to have an equal opportunity to learn and do well, and possibly excel. And she wants university professors like the late Bob Olson and Dr. Gerald Smith who can genuinely enlighten students. As an aside, since Professor Wilson suggests that history teaching too often does not teach warts and all (the good and the bad), what knowledge I have of the UK’s history department over the last half century strongly suggests its professors have always taught all facets of history, and do it well. CRT proponents, when arguing that white historians want to sanitize history do so to make a case for their “real” history seen through a CRT/systemic racism lens, like that of the 1619 Project lens.

DEI is intrinsically intertwined with Critical Race Theory (CRT) and “woke” cancel culture. It is the latest manifestation of an understanding of affirmative action policies that spoke of equal opportunity but almost always intentionally discriminated in practice and was the well-spring for a gargantuan governmental patronage system. Affirmative action survived by morphing into the concept of diversity in the workplace and academia that would enrich all by bring different experiences and ideas. But the only diversity was that of gender/and race, not of ideas. In fact diversity of ideas disappeared.

Words came to mean the opposite of what they had meant. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, Kentucky state government’s Cabinet for Families and Children announced that since it was an equal employment employer it was setting a goal of having a work force that was 20 percent minority and 75 percent female. Two decades later President Biden on his first day in office issued an executive order that applied to all the federal government that defined equity as favoring those who had not been treated equally in the past.

All of this was in part due to the rise of Critical Race Theory (CRT) that originated with university professors who insisted that everything had to be understood as a product of systemic racism, that the American ideal of individual liberty and rights had to be rejected along with the constitution that protected such as an elaborate superstructure for the benefit of those in power, and that all people must be divided into oppressed and oppressors, or the colonizer and the colonized. CRT is a pagan insistence that all human life boils down to power relationships and contests. There are no moral absolutes. All concepts of individual moral worth or merit are discarded. As is the Christian concept of tragedy and the necessity of forgiveness (grace). There are only victors and vanquished.

The old university ideal of always seeking truth through continual inquiry and debate is no more. Long ago, a UK history professor and I, an adjunct, had a measure of collegiality for which I was grateful. He identified himself to me, a traditional Baptist, as a communist. Yet, we had several lengthy conversations/debates, and even reached agreement now and then. I have always been grateful for his ironically holding up the last vestiges of free speech on a university campus.

Today I do not think that any professor in any discipline expressing opposition (or a different truth) to present day transgender ideology, diversity as discrimination, new definitions of marriage, a deterministic ideology of systemic racism, and cancel culture, would avoid being canceled.

Professor Wilson has a genuine desire to uplift people. Uplift is the university’s job. Doing so requires universities return to being true bastions of free thought and debate. In a public university one should be free to teach CRT, but not promote it, and seek true inclusion.

J. Larry Hood is a retired state government employee and has been adjunct faculty at area colleges.