DEI has destroyed campus meritocracy - opinion

Ask any progressive and they’ll tell you that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is built on an unassailable core truth – the idea that the world is fundamentally divided into two groups of people: the “oppressors” and the “oppressed”. 

These groups are created according to a set of progressive values that center “privilege” and “whiteness,” encourage the “oppressor” to atone for their sins, and validate the “oppressed” in whatever “resistance” they make against their marginalized status.

In this worldview, which is most visibly pernicious on American college campuses, Jews are placed in the oppressor category due to their proximity to “white privilege” and the “colonialist” State of Israel – with no mind paid to the last 2,000 years of persecutions – and “model minorities” like Asian Americans are frequently barred from accessing the same privileges as other non-white groups on account of their comparative (yet apparently ill-earned) success.

Antisemitism falls low on DEI radar

Consequently, even at a time of rising antisemitism, making campuses safe for Jewish students is very low on the DEI priority list. Last year, a review by Stop Antisemitism of 24 major colleges and university DEI offices found that only two of them had any specific programming or materials related to anti-Jewish hate.

It is therefore unsurprising that in the wake of the October 7 attacks, these offices had almost nothing to say – not in the form of statements condemning the violence, nor in the form of new events or programming for Jewish students.

In fact, campus DEI programs were most visible when their employees landed themselves in hot water, like at Cornell University, where a DEI director posted on Instagram the day after the attack about how Hamas was merely “launching resistance” and battling “against colonization.” So much for educating the youth in equality and inclusion.

But DEI isn’t only destroying campuses through its dissemination of hypocritical hate masked as social justice. Instilling this ideology also comes at the expense of campus meritocracy, once a cherished educational value that historically allowed underprivileged students – especially Jews and Asian Americans – to ascend through hard work and talent.

These days, students learn to perform the “right” kind of politics as the new tool of advancement. Students are forced to become masters of progressive performance art to succeed in the DEI caste system, telegraphing a version of themselves marked by the oppressions and social injustices they have overcome, and the various ways in which their identity leaves them less privileged. Asian American teenagers write college essays about how they are “not like other Asians.”

Descendants of immigrant families dredge up minute instances of feeling culturally out of place. Black private school graduates from moneyed families advertise their struggles with racial adversity to disguise their obvious financial privilege and white students have played up or even made up their bisexuality (as one example) to achieve “minority” status. The list goes on.

These students have learned how to play the DEI caste system, armed with the understanding that “merit” in the DEI system simply means overcoming a selective form of oppression, limited to broad binaries of race and gender, rather than referring to a more straightforward version of talent and hard-earned success that rewards high performers of any race or creed.

IT IS VERY clear that the bloated DEI complex offers no real solutions for legitimate questions of diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus, nor does it arm students with a meaningful drive to succeed. Any ounce of energy spent baying for Jews to be included under its auspices is energy wasted. These programs must be replaced with programming and values that incentivize academic meritocracy.

This means insisting on objective measures of assessment, namely standardized testing, another historic tool of upward mobility for high-performing, socially disadvantaged groups – rather than subjective, politicized criteria. Contrary to popular progressive opinion, standardized testing has been found to reliably predict future student success and identify high-performing students from under-served areas. 

In fact, Dartmouth College just announced that it is reinstating its SAT requirement after a recent study concluded that SATs are a good predictor of college achievement – better than recommendations or even grades.

Rolling back these programs also means applying demanding standards to faculty hiring, emphasizing measurable abilities like research productivity, educational credentials, teaching evaluations, and citations rather than on trumped-up personal narratives or diversity committee decrees.

This means scaling back these distended DEI bureaucracies, which soak up a lion’s share of the capital from the growing tuition fees at American universities. Over the past generation, the eye-popping rise in university costs has not led to a significant rise in compensation for tenured faculty.

Instead, most of the money has gone to “administrative bloat,” namely paying the handsome salaries of officials who supervise a sprawling caste of university bureaucrats with largely nonsensical jobs – especially within DEI programs. In 2018, an economics professor at the University of Michigan calculated that the university had nearly 100 diversity administrators, a quarter of whom made more than $100,000 a year.

A 2021 Heritage Foundation report of 65 educational institutions found that there were 1.4 times as many DEI officers as history professors at the schools they surveyed. And like all bureaucrats, these officers are prone to devising silly tasks that justify their generous salaries, such as forcing instructors to curate racially diverse reading lists to be used as criteria in their yearly salary reviews. 

The continued university support of these self-serving, anti-meritocratic DEI offices is a disgrace. The continued university support of these offices, which inoculate students in limiting, oppression-based worldviews, diminishes the academic importance of meritocracy. Actively circulating antisemitic hate is an even greater disgrace. 

We owe it to future generations of students to dismantle this dangerous DEI grift before the educational values that allowed previous generations to succeed through hard work and talent are purged from campuses entirely.

The writer is a prominent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, and star of the Emmy-nominated Netflix original series, Skin Decision: Before and After.