Has the Death of DEI Been Greatly Exaggerated?

My name is “/\/(;,,;)\/\”. My Pokenouns are Pika/Pika/Chuuu! Or at least that’s what my name tag said at last year’s Departmental Mandatory Graduate Student Welcome Back Seminar. My favorite food is grilled dolphin. My favorite hobby is cooking dolphin. My favorite movie is The Cove. My favorite book is To Serve Dolphin (interpret the title as you please). I do not share personal information like my birth order, number of siblings, or personal motto. And, my favorite music is anything by Avril Lavigne. Or at least that’s what I put on the first Wheel of Identity I was told to complete at the seminar.

When we reached the DEI portion of our itinerary and the time came to fill out a second Wheel of Identity, this one containing questions about my race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, first language, etc., I left many portions of The Wheel blank. However, given that on another task I described myself as a “Team Player,” I figured it would not be very team playerish of me to refuse to partake in the identity-based discussion groups we were supposed to circle through over the course of our DEI activity.

Thus, when the time came for us to join different groups around an auditorium based on convoluted instructions I am not even going to bother to try to explain, I soon found myself with some international students discussing how our first language was the component of our identity we think about most because it causes us the most angst (or something like that). Being a US-born, English-speaking American, I suppose I looked a little out of place there at first. However, as I explained to my international peers, given that English is my first language, communication with the prairie voles that participated in my dissertation research had proven at times to be rather difficult. As I told my group, quite often I got the impression my prairie voles weren’t even trying to understand me when I spoke to them and sometimes I found that quite disrespectful.

As the DEI exercise continued, I worked my way through a series of other groups in which we further discussed matters of identity. Shifting gears a bit, I remember telling one group I had an identity who sort of annoyed people by talking way too much about crypto. I told another I had an identity who was an old British woman that could be quite condescending. I told another group I had an identity who was a cat with a monocle.

After a few rounds of this, though, I started to get the impression this wasn’t what the organizers of the activity had in mind when they told us to discuss our different identities. Then again, they should have been more specific. And, besides, the people with whom I interacted generally seemed to find my interpretation of the exercise preferable to other interpretations. Or at least no one broke down in hysterics. No one became enraged. No one ran to a teacher to tattle.

To some extent, this actually surprised me. Yet, what was even more surprising was just how de-fanged our DEI sessions had become. Back in 2018 when I entered my department’s master’s program, there was a university-wide mandate for all first-year TAs to attend a two day, in-person seminar at which we learned a more academic version of the basic tenets of an overeducated, thirty-five year old, white lady’s lawn sign. No human is illegal. Sex and gender are self-determined. Microaggressions destroy lives. And sometimes you have to accommodate the emotional trauma students experience after national tragedies like 9/11 or a Trump election win. A year later when I was moved to an RA position, it was my understanding this had become mandatory for all TAs.

Now, as I was about to begin wrapping up my PhD in the fall of 2024, I learned that despite the best efforts of a particular clique of faculty in my department, not all grad students were all-in on DEI. I also learned one of my professors really thinks of herself as oppressed despite having a PhD, a roughly $90,000 per year job from which she can’t be fired, and a husband who makes even more.

By the time the afternoon was over, I was practically drafting a “Death of DEI” submission for HeterodoxSTEM in my head. I just needed to find the time to sit down and hammer it out. But then I started to have my doubts.

“Punishment Awaits! Maybe...The House of Knowledge is the Pettiness Palace”

The first of those doubts came a little more than a month later when several graduate students and I stepped into what most of us believed would be a routine meeting. However, at some point, the university employee leading the meeting began lecturing us about how they had received complaints about graduate students in the room making racist and sexist comments, as well as remarks that questioned the intellectual capabilities of some of our school’s undergrads. Even if done in jest, this was unacceptable. The university employee leading the meeting went on to say how disappointed they were in us. Given all the DEI trainings we had, we should have known better.

For reasons that should be obvious, I am being deliberately vague here and may change a few identifying details. However, as we sat there, I knew about 95% of this was almost certainly, definitely about me. Although I feel I’m too old to casually bully people and too young to casually pontificate on what’s wrong with the [insert racial group here], I do have a particular sense of humor that I admit might bother some people. Moreover, I don’t always express views considered acceptable in an academic setting. Hence, the question on my mind was whether one of my fellow grad students actually found something I said personally hurtful or whether this was a matter of someone trying to weaponize DEI over a petty grievance.

To give some slightly altered background, early in the semester, I met a young woman. Let’s call her Usagi. Usagi was an international student from Japan. She didn’t quite understand the American fixation with DEI or the logic of certain DEI policies. She also had a penchant for gossip which led to a number of joking conversations about things like campus romances and unrequited crushes that could get a little NSFW. (I suppose on some level grad school really is an extension of high school.)

Furthermore, like the logic of American DEI customs, the questionable abilities of our university’s undergrads also seemed to baffle Usagi. More broadly, she had come to develop a pretty low opinion of the quality of the American education system. On a couple occasions she shared with me how she sometimes felt frustrated with American undergrads always assuming she was from China. Sometimes, she said, even after she explained she was not from China but from Japan, one of our young scholars would inquire about the part of China in which Japan is located. Subsequently, when the opportunity arose, I sometimes asked Usagi things like whether she could cook authentic Japanese meals as good as what they serve at Panda Express.

As time went on, I came to think of Usagi as sort of a friend. Eventually, I invited her to join me and a group of COVID dissidents and quasi-closeted DEI thought criminals for an event at a local bar. I thought Usagi would fit in well. She told me it sounded fun, but she would have to check her schedule.

In the meantime, while I waited for a final response, we sort of crashed a semi-formal DEI dinner on campus, mostly because we heard there’d be good catering. While there, I casually poked fun at the event and our university, saying things largely in-line with the kinds of things I had said around Usagi before. Yet, when we eventually left, I could tell Usagi was upset with me.

Initially, I assumed maybe a joke landed the wrong way or got lost in translation. Maybe I embarrassed her by interacting with her in public the way I interacted with her when alone or with a limited number of other grad students.

Regardless, I mistakenly assumed whatever I did would soon be forgotten. When it wasn’t, though, I contemplated trying to talk to Usagi to find out what I had done to upset her. Yet, before the opportunity arose, we received our stern talking-to. Subsequently, I began to wonder whether Usagi had actually come to feel like I was bullying her with my occasional Chinese jokes (which, to be clear, were really more about the quality of our undergrads than about her or anyone else of Asian ancestry) and whether she felt hurt or distressed enough by this to report me for it. Simultaneously, I thought perhaps another person was mad at me over an argument concerning scheduling for the use of shared equipment and was using our school’s DEI obsession as a means to get back at me.

But then, not long thereafter, a pair of talking cats (let’s call them Luna and Artemis) informed me that Usagi reported the contents of several of our NSFW conversations, framed them as sexist and racist, accused me of constantly staring at the business-casual Sailor Moon outfit she regularly wore to campus, and was telling other grad students that she no longer felt comfortable around me following my invitation to join me and some friends at a local bar.

When I was contemplating trying to talk to Usagi prior to our group reprimand, I thought, at worst, my comments about the Chinese heritage she didn’t have landed as hurtful rather than playful. At best, I thought maybe I embarrassed her at a quasi-formal on-campus DEI event. The possibility that I was basically the subject of an informal Title IX complaint, however, never crossed my mind.

Fortunately, I know a lawyer who specializes in university-related litigation and was willing to explain to me how to tell if this seemingly informal complaint became something more. He was also willing to talk to me about what my options were if it did. More fortunately, this informal complaint never went any further. However, it did leave me wondering what, if anything, this episode said about the state of DEI in higher-ed in the fall of 2024, a period in which it was said to be waning.

If I looked at the glass as half-empty, apparently grad students were using the threat of weaponized Title IX complaints as a tool for what? Punishing one another over minor grievances? Avoiding potentially uncomfortable conversations with would-be friends? Ending friendships and discouraging perceived suitors? If I looked at the glass as half-full, however, the complaint remained informal. It never led to anything beyond a perfunctory group-reprimand and an awkward conversation with an attorney.

In either case, though, it did make me pause my plans for a “Death of DEI” article until I could better see how my own Title IX near misadventure, as well as the fate DEI (at least in my small pocket of academia), played out.

Why DEI Won’t Just DIE

Following Donald Trump’s 2024 election win and his re-ascension to office, there was no shortage of articles proclaiming DEI’s downfall or highlighting major institutions and corporations dropping their DEI programs. For a moment, I felt like I really missed an opportunity to be among the first to publicly spot the trend. However, as the spring semester progressed, I started to wonder whether such proclamations of DEI’s demise had been premature.

Over the course of my time in my department I had witnessed moral panics over Corona-Law non-compliance. I had seen warlock hunts spurred by a now-former chair’s failure to do enough to reform policing in Minnesota and the resurrection of rumors regarding a professor’s alleged thruple with his wife and one of his now-former graduate students (previously covered here on HxA STEM).

On a more basic level, there also had long been a general sense that if you were a Trump-voter, mildly conservative, failed to at least performatively embrace DEI as an ideology, criticized policies downstream of DEI ideology, questioned the utility of DEI training, supported institutional neutrality, believed human sex is binary and immutable, or held any number of other heterodox views, you were not welcome in our department and might incur both professional and social repercussions if you were found out. The most blatant example of this entailed explicit DEI requirements for those applying for faculty positions in our department. A more subtle one involved a student being called a Nazi on multiple occasions by staff when they were outed as having voted for Trump in 2016.

By this past spring, though, some of this seemed behind us. Other grad students in my program who found out about my extracurricular journalistic endeavors turned out to be largely indifferent, if not supportive. A couple told me they too felt it was odd when thirty-something white ladies with seemingly standard family lives suddenly start informing everyone of their newfound boutique pronouns. Others told me they felt uncomfortable using our recently converted all-gender bathrooms but also felt a strange curiosity about what it was like inside. One female student even felt comfortable openly expressing her frustration with a local gym for allowing penises in the women’s locker room. Hence, maybe there is some room for hope.

Then again, two of last spring’s mandatory departmental seminars were DEI-related. One involved a presentation on research from a woman who seemed to push the general idea that not being capable of college-level work shouldn’t preclude one from being able to earn a college degree. The other involved a group of LGBTQRSIAα5C3PO++ members of our department talking about mostly banal coming-out experiences mixed in with complaints about discriminatory employment laws in other states over which the typical graduate student has little control. (Although not a formal DEI seminar, I also remember a young woman presenting proposed research at one of last year’s departmental talks on how redlining negatively impacts wildlife which is apparently now a sub-genre of ecology research because, as we all now know, raccoons that are alive today were the real victims of a racist practice that was outlawed in 1968).

Additionally, last spring there was a departmental climate survey sent out that, at best, was a well-intentioned but methodologically flawed attempt to gauge the prevalence of harassment in our department. At worst, however, it seemed like a delayed reaction to the aforementioned thruple with the potential to overestimate certain types of harassment (e.g., sex and gender harassment) while overlooking others (e.g., harassment on the basis of one’s political beliefs).

Although these kinds of occurrences probably don’t warrant headlines in The College Fix, and aren’t quite as bad as the warlock hunts of olde, they do seem to indicate the culture within my department hasn’t quite caught up with the perhaps premature pronouncements that the era of DEI has come to a close.

And, from what I gather, things are not much different in other departments at my university. Our Department of Counseling and Higher Education was recently reported to have reformed its curriculum in the name of racial healing by “infus[ing] courses with Afrocentric frameworks” (whatever that means). Our College of Education in March hired a dean whose scholarly work includes one article calling on white critical whiteness scholars to better understand their whiteness and another demanding more pro-blackness classroom linguistic policies. A department I will refrain from naming is said to be in a state of disarray due, in part, to a clique of gender-queer pansexual graduate students that apparently frighten the largely more old-school-Democrat faculty. Following Charlie Kirk’s murder, I received messages from people at my school that alleged grownups in their departments saw this as cause for celebration.

Also, back in November, we were hit with a civil rights complaint because apparently our Black Student Achievement Program and Black Male Initiative somehow were perceived as only open to black students and black male students, respectively. And, when we appeared, at least superficially, to back-off from a public emphasis on DEI by refocusing on inclusive excellence (whatever that means), at least some students seemed upset.

Looking beyond my own university, I would be lying if I said I do not see signs of hope elsewhere in the trend of university DEI offices being shuttered. But, then again, there are questions of how much of this is just a matter of rebranding and bureaucratic shuffling. Apparently, my university is not the only one with a new-found enthusiasm for inclusive excellence. Maybe this is all a glimpse of what DEI will look like in a post-DEI world.

No doubt, academia is filled with careerists who will embrace whatever policy they are told and drop it without question the moment doing so becomes expedient. (I am still amazed at how many academic biologists dismissed the effectiveness of masks and products of quickie vaccine development in the Before Times prior to embracing both whole-heartedly when failure to endorse either threatened their job stability and professional credibility). But there is also a decade's worth of bureaucrats and faculty hired in an era in which professed acceptance of DEI was a basic job requirement. Many of these hires, including tenured ones, likely were doing more than just mouthing slogans and announcing their pronouns for extra points on a rubric. Many of these people were likely true believers.

Hence, even if DEI offices are going away, inclusive excellence offices staffed by some of the same people will remain. Oppressed middle-aged white ladies hired for tenure-track positions while in their thirties will be sharing their She/Them pronouns for decades. Minor grievances and inter-personal problems reported as vaguely Title IX or DEI adjacent will continue to be given added weight. And, both internal and external DEI trainers, even if now seemingly de-fanged, will still be having students fill out Wheels of Identity for years to come.