The ouster of diversity hire poster child Claudine Gay as the president of Harvard has prompted a wave of optimism that the pernicious diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies that have become pervasive in higher education could face a reckoning.

Don't count on it.

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The diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy is not just another office that is part of the regular administrative functions of colleges and universities. It is a pervasive and dogmatic ideology that has come to define what Harvard and other universities stand for as institutions. It is their mission.

Fundamentally, education requires that a student be instructed in a particular worldview. A history student is immersed in the world of the past as seen through the eyes of those who teach him, and it is the teacher and the school who ultimately decide what the student should and should not learn.

Harvard and other institutions like it (arguably the entirety of higher education with a handful of exceptions) have determined that the most important aspect of a university education is that students become agents of social change by promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. Membership in a particular protected class due to race or sexuality immediately provides an individual with a reverential status that must be protected by the DEI bureaucracy at all costs.

The institutional commitment of mainstream higher education to the DEI cause, in a sinister way, mirrors the commitment that religious universities have to their dogmatically defined mission. Just as a Catholic university publicly states that its mission is to instruct its students in a manner that conforms and promotes the teachings of the Catholic Church, Harvard and other schools have adopted a similar creed rooted in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This institutional commitment to what can only be described as a secular religious dogma has become so enmeshed within higher education that it cannot be removed simply by closing down DEI offices or by eliminating DEI training programs for students and faculty and removing diversity statement requirements from faculty job applications.

Those steps are certainly welcome, but the commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion lies in the entrenched network of faculty and administrators that control higher education. In other words, you can take the administrator out of a DEI job, but you can't take the commitment to DEI out of the administrator.

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Indeed, the fears that DEI contributed to a culture of antisemitism on college campuses have prompted schools to double down on the principles of DEI and say that Jewish people were included as well.

The only way to root out DEI and the ideological strain from which it was birthed is to eliminate entirely the existing higher education network that has cultivated it. Professors and administrators have to be fired or forced out and replaced with people who have an ideological commitment to a completely different approach to education. After all, personnel is policy.