One of the great ironies in contemporary college systems is how rampantly anti-intellectual they have become over the course of the last generation or so. Cerebral rigor, open-mindedness, and challenging information have long been underpinning aspects of university life. These days, those same elements are regarded as threats on too many campuses. More troubling is the inability of some schools to apply common sense while looking at the concrete results of a failed experiment.
This takes us to College Station, Texas. Texas A&M University has been leaning heavily into the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives that have been mushrooming across the country at universities and corporations. These social engineering programs are claimed to be set up to make the opportunity and acceptance of minorities more widespread, while critics have maintained these are more like opportunities to exact social revenge and pave the way for activism to gain more power. At TAMU, the critics are being proven correct.
Try to imagine that a social program designed to aid the people was shown to instead be exacerbating the problem being addressed, such as a food bank that was found to have created more malnourishment with recipients or if Alcoholics Anonymous led to more getting locked into alcoholism. There would be calls to suspend the program.
Professor Scott Yenor, writing for The Martin Center, exposes how years of DEI enforcement at A&M have not led to improved conditions and better campus life for the allegedly target student groups. Instead, it is seen that what has been accomplished is a lowered satisfaction level across the board. And yet, in the face of this blatant failure of the DEI programs, the college looks over these results and declares that even more DEI enforcement is needed.
The college has conducted studies of the student body since these DEI measures were implemented, and it shows that respondents indicate the opposite has occurred. Instead of improving the climate among students on campus, they have come to feel less satisfied with their experience. Over just five years, all major ethnic groups showed significant drops in their perception of being part of the TAMU experience.
We have seen DEI methods intended to diminish "white privilege" and make opportunities more available to minorities. Just last week, we saw a Florida university had a DEI program that established a scholarship for which whites were not eligible. These methods, however, are shown to have the opposite effect.
While the chart above shows diminished results for all racial groups, whites experienced the lowest drop, while staggeringly, blacks over that small five-year window saw a drop of nearly 30%. Barely half of all black students at TAMU felt inclusiveness at the school, where inclusion was the primary thrust of the DEI program.
A likely cause for some of that result is the DEI push to show POC students the areas where they are supposed to feel exclusionary efforts. Whether it is exposing students to something they previously never felt or experienced or reclassifying things to show an imbalanced result for others, it appears possible that the feeling of exclusion was manufactured. Instead of opening up opportunities, the DEI program instead highlighted claims of systemic oppression, and this further divided the campus rather than fostering inclusivity.
What other explanation can be concluded when you have DEI programs set up to target POC students and make their campus experience richer, and instead, the result is more end up feeling as if they do not belong? It is clear the DEI initiative was a failure. But at TAMU, they are not looking to bring an end to this failing effort; amazingly, these results are instead seen as a reason to ramp up the program.
This is how race hustlers usually operate. They do not highlight successes that are easily pointed out. Instead, when their divisive tactics create a deeper racial chasm, they claim that it is proof they are needed for further time spent repairing the damage. Pay no mind that they added to the damage rather than healed anything.
This is a grifter's hustle, offering a solution to a problem they have created. That colleges play into this is disturbing, and that universities claiming to be institutions of higher learning cannot learn from the most basic level of lessons is as troubling a sign of our future that exists. The evidence is clear, and the scam is obvious, but these high-minded thinkers give in to their base emotional responses.