The anti-DEI backlash is about the theory, not the execution
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Nick Confessore has an extensive report on the reactionary war on DEI initiatives. (As multiple people have pointed out, it would have been stronger had it not elided the role credulous-to-outright-positive coverage in the mainstream media plays in their strategy, but it’s still a useful piece.) One reason it’s more clever that your usual pretextural and cynical reactionary culture war bullshit is that many people who work in bureaucratic organizations can recognize a grain of truth. Sometimes DEI offices and initiatives are valuable and constructive, but sometimes they’re useless ass-covering at best and actively counterproductive at worst.
What this piece should make clear, however, is that the right attack on DEI isn’t on particular bureaucratic manifestations of the practice that just create meaningless busywork and no-work jobs or act as a cover substitute for actual equality and inclusion. It’s on the very concepts of equality, inclusion, and diversity themselves:
It’s also eminently clear that the opposition of fanatical anti-DEI groups isn’t based on certain bureaucratic manifestations, they’re just opposed to diversity, equity and inclusion per se https://t.co/u75Yx82eFT— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) January 21, 2024
As happens with some frequency, DEI is a fine idea in principle, frequently executed very badly by fundamentalists, but defended anyway because the most vocal criticism comes from bad people who object more to the good principle than the bad execution. https://t.co/reQLn7vlgf— Julian Sanchez (@normative) January 22, 2024
The article has even more Yenor-related content, and this guy is quite a piece of work:
Dr. Yenor and his allies bristled at the conventions of academic life as overly solicitous toward female and nonwhite students. He sometimes shared routine emails from administrators at his home institution, Boise State, deriding them as examples of being “ruled by women.” On one occasion, he forwarded a Boise State email featuring a photo of a female computer science student with close-cropped hair and a plaid shirt. “Gynocracy update!” Dr. Yenor wrote.
Riffing on the woman’s masculine appearance, his friend Dr. Azerrad chimed in with a correction: “Androgynococracy update.”
In another email to Dr. Yenor, Ms. Mac Donald reflected on a further “curse of feminism”: the proliferation of “nannies of color” in her Manhattan neighborhood and the “bizarreness” of women entrusting their children to caregivers from “the low IQ 3rd world” while devoting themselves to making partner at a law firm.
Remember that Rufo and DeSantis’s war in higher ed is motivated in large measure by the belief that having too many women on campus is bad, and academic standards need to be lowered to exclude them, and you’ll understand what the reactionary attacks on “DEI” are really about.