Diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology is one of the biggest drivers of campus antisemitism, Jonathan Pidluzny, a higher education expert, told members of Congress on Thursday.
Pidluzny, director of higher education reform at America First Policy Institute, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee that the root of antisemitism on campus is DEI. He was one of several witnesses who appeared during a hearing titled “Crisis on Campus: Antisemitism, Radical Faculty, and the Failure of University Leadership.”
“It’s the atmospheric cause: the ideas in the air that dispose young people to find antisemitic faculty and students so compelling,” Pidluzny said. “DEI’s real priorities are drawn from critical race theory. The goal is to use the university to reengineer American society away from its aspirational ideals, equality before law, equal treatment according to individual merit.”
“DEI teaches that the world is made up of oppressors and the oppressed, victims and those with privilege. This divisive ideology primes students to make snap judgments about each other based on skin color and identity group stereotypes,” he added. “Jews are coded as the oppressors by virtue of their political and economic success. This is what creates a kind of permission structure for students to join in with the true radicals cheering for the Hamas terrorists who deliberately killed children and raped students.”
Pidluzny explained that DEI is an ideology that was created by academia, and that its consequences are most pronounced on college campuses because universities spend large amounts of money every year on forwarding it, saying “their armies number in the hundreds.”
“DEI pushes relentlessly for equity — equal outcomes — and to dismantle ‘systemic oppression’ by making race and identity central to everything we do and everything we think,” he said.
In written testimony provided to the committee, Pidluzny explained some of the funding metrics for DEI, pointing out that a large portion of university funding is provided by taxpayers, and that their billion-dollar endowments only get taxed at a 1.4% rate.
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Many universities spend upward of $20 million per year on DEI, pushing the ideology in hiring, tenure, admissions, curriculum, training, spending, and strategic plans. Pidluzny noted that the “DEI administrative complex,” which is used to “reshape every aspect of the university,” costs more than $250 million over a decade.
“Their strategy is to create positive and negative campuswide incentives that reward activism and punish dissent from the new orthodoxy,” he wrote.