What Duke University advanced with banners and fanfare, it is quietly withdrawing under cover of darkness. The concept of equity—that revolutionary idea previously gaining traction and spreading fear among the established corporate world and academia, is ending not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Among the many government agencies, universities and corporations pulling back on wokism is my former employer. In 2021, Duke University Health System tainted itself in an unholy alliance with the DEI/Woke contagion, proclaiming itself wedded to “health equity.” Henceforth, went the public decree, Duke’s resources would be allocated towards ending disparities in group outcomes, disparities which they asserted were caused by implicit bias (unconscious racism).
Duke University Hospital by Ildar Sagdejev. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Duke, like many corporations, embraced DEI when it was fashionable. But that craze was so yesterday. Now that DEI is a political liability, it lasted at Duke almost as long as Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Research Center lasted at Boston University. Duke’s love affair with equity has come to an abrupt and unceremonious end. A year ago, after being summarily ousted from Duke for daring to question equity, I suggested in my Farewell Address, “I wouldn’t be bamboozled, cowed or silenced by this tulip bulb mania [of equity] which is bound to collapse.”
And collapse it has. Without notice or memorandum, Duke has rewritten the outdated 2021 Pledge and covertly replaced it with a new 2025 Pledge that is devoid of any reference at all to equity, now a scorned lover. Also removed from the old Pledge is the claim that “racism is a public health crisis.” It, too, has been jilted. And what about our erstwhile friend, implicit bias? Ghosted, not a word mentioned. T
his repurposed Pledge no longer reflects the original goal of enforced outcomes rather than equal opportunity, so what’s its purpose? With its raison d’être having now been scrubbed, can we all go back to business as usual before we were so rudely interrupted by ungrateful, grievance-motivated, identity malcontents?
Cynics will say Duke is being forced to sit down in agreement on the outside while defiantly standing up on the inside. But is there really any going back to five-year plans after having read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago?
The disillusionment with DEI is widespread and fixed despite its obnoxious full-court press. DEI didn’t work, it was expensive, it was divisive, it was struggle sessions, it was discriminatory, it was red-guards, and it was an affront to meritocracy.
Aren’t we all breathing a collective sigh of relief now that DEI’s nuclear capabilities have been hit by multiple bunker busters like the Students for Fair Admission Vs Harvard/UNC case, and the unanimous Ames decision where Justice Thomas made clear that if proponents of DEI were hoping it had nothing to do with their DEI programs, they are sorely mistaken? Not only is the Supreme Court not having it, but the Executive branch has labeled equity “immoral, discriminatory, and illegal.”
Did Duke remove equity from its Pledge because it honestly has come to believe that the equality of individuals within a society is superior to equity for its groups? If so, can we hear a profession of faith from Duke attesting to its conversion?
But if Duke is just going along to get along, then it must lack the courage of its convictions, being merely a sunshine soldier. Is Duke too afraid of losing Federal dollars to say what it really thinks? If so, how duplicitous and cowardly.
I lost my job and endured strained relationships to stand by my convictions. If Duke is still a devotee of equity, own it, and make the Pledge reflect your internal memos. But if Duke has undergone a Damascus Road experience, testify. How long will you dither between two opinions? You can’t ride two horses with one ass.
The most audacious goal, the most freeing utterance, the most ennobling axiom ever penned by our nation, was also the most extreme, the most radical, and the most progressive: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.” We can do no better than this. As Benjamin Franklin famously quipped, the American people have been given a Republic, if we can keep it. That protection begins by recognizing that people are equal; groups are not. Happy 4th, Y’all!