On May 21, the House Education Committee held a hearing, Restoring Excellence: The Case Against DEI , or “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” a euphemism for neo-racism and therefore a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Thankfully, the hearing got this message across and the presiding chairman, Congressman Burgess Owens of South Carolina, should be commended for convening it.
The panel had four witnesses: a Manhattan Institute Fellow named Renu Mukharjee; Dr. Shaun Harper, a TProvost Professor from the University of Southern California; an attorney from the American Civil Rights Project, Dan Morenoff; and Kurt Miceli, a Medical Director of Do No Harm, an organization focused on protecting medical care from identity politics.
The testimonies made good, if basic, points, though no one mentioned President Trump’s January 21 Executive Order Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit Based Opportunity , an excellent backdrop and guide for the hearing, and only passing reference was made to the 2023 United States Supreme Court opinion banning racial preferences at universities, including when they’re rationalized for the sake of diversity.
But the witnesses did point out that a focus on diversity means competence and excellence take a back seat. That’s bad for any activity, not just medical care, but also engineering (will bridges collapse?) and flight school (will planes crash?), as well as the arts, athletics, etc. Mediocrity takes over when excellence yields to the race industrial complex.
Second, Ms. Mukharjee said that racial minorities are actually harmed by diversity practices, as others presume those minorities are less qualified, calling them “diversity admits” or “diversity hires,” which just reinforces destructive racial stereotypes. Medical Director Miceli also mentioned the concept of racial concordance creeping into medical practice, or the idea that black patients need black doctors. That such nonsense gets any traction at all is a bit depressing. Patients obviously want competent doctors, just as Americans want competence generally.
Only one witness was an ardent defender of diversity ideology—Dr. Shaun Harper. He insisted that DEI had been proven to be beneficial on campus in “dozens of essays,” and in “dozens of books” and “hundreds of peer-reviewed academic journals.” His written remarks go so far as to suggest that abolishing DEI puts higher education at a greater risk of violence on the grounds that DEI reduces institutional susceptibility to racial crises, sexual harassment, and other abuses. This seems a stretch, as claims of racial discrimination and sexual harassment have increased alongside diversity initiatives.
Harper makes other questionable claims, insisting, for example, that attacks on DEI are “politicized.” Actually, advocating a merit-based society is apolitical. The idea is to let the best man win or to have the cream rise to the top regardless of skin color.
Harper must know that it is diversity ideology itself that is simply politics—identity politics and racial politics designed to divide and conquer the American people, to destroy our national unity, and to keep us fighting each other instead of fighting for a stronger country. A strong America would include a strong national economy using our own, homegrown American students and workforce. For those unaware, diversity is often a moral-sounding cover for cheap labor. Foreigners flood schools and companies, taking seats and jobs from Americans, since they will work for less. This undercuts and depresses the compensation for workers at home, both blue- and white-collar. The recent H1B visa debate on X raised all these issues. In short, illegal immigration, coupled with top-down diversity ideology, has destroyed the national economy and workforce.
Second, no one should be wedded to labels such as “DEI,” since the labels change all the time. Congressman Burgess pointed this out, calling it the rebranding phenomenon. Not only are university DEI offices renaming themselves things like Access, Compliance, and Community offices, but the concept of diversity itself previously went by other terms, such as multiculturalism. But even before that, it was racial preferences, or affirmative action, or reverse discrimination. Americans reject them all. Americans believe in equal opportunity, not playing favorites, much less playing favorites based on skin color.
Third, Harper also seems oblivious to the real target of diversity ideology: Western Civilization and especially the Christian ethics that formed it. In his long list of groups that supposedly contribute to diversity, for example, Christians of European descent are conspicuously absent. DEI’s animus against Christianity is clear from its promotion of sexual degeneracy. DEI encourages all manner of sexual activity except within the context of marriage and family. But traditional Christian teaching specifically protected human sexuality by honoring it within marriage and ordering it toward children and family life. In short, DEI agitators covertly target Christian morals with race as cover.
Obsessing about race in the West is ironic since the West is probably the least racially bigoted region in the world. After all, most of the globe is beset by ethnic tension—India still informally has a caste system, for example; the Middle East and Africa are still largely tribal, as is much of Asia. Witness China’s subjection of the Uyghur people. Ugly tribalism is the norm, not just throughout human history but still in much of the world. While the West had different tribes or nations, its Christian heritage tried to unify them since Christianity was for “all nations” and depended on individual belief, not tribal supremacy.
Furthermore, millions of migrants risk their lives to live in the West and America. But we’re told we’re systemic racists in need of DEI?
Last, pointing to dozens of studies to rationalize DEI is unserious. First, such publications are self-serving; these authors often have academic positions dependent on DEI bureaucracies. But more importantly, everyone knows that universities were captured by the political left decades ago. “Republicans need not apply” is an understatement; many academic departments actually have zero registered Republicans.
The result is that the American college campus is now a place of left-wing political agitation, not a place of serious learning or research.
Consider that Harvard’s own former President Claudine Gay was a serial perjurer. And Oregon professor Pete Boghossian exposed fraud in academic journals when he famously accepted an essay on dog-on-dog sexual assaults in Portland public parks.
Modern academics cite studies because they get to conduct them—they ask the questions, they decide which findings to publish, and they decide what to promote, all the while pretending the content is objective or serious. It’s not. Witness the rise of fake science.
In saner times, academics used words such as reason, understanding, and even wisdom (philosophy), not studies, articles, and journals.
In the end, among the best and most real teachers are experience and reason. Reasonable people know that a country needs unity and excellence to be strong, not diversity—just as the title of the House Education Committee Hearing suggests.
Teresa R. Manning is Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars, President of the Virginia Association of Scholars, and a former law professor at Virginia’s Scalia Law School, George Mason University. She authored the 2020 Report, Dear Colleague: The Weaponization of Title IX.