No student should should be burdened with a student loan that pays DEI administrator’s salaries. For years I tried to find out how much of a student’s tuition went to administrative costs. Finally, I found whatwilltheylearn.com. Not only can parents and students examine administrative costs and trends, but they provide the FIRE rating. Taxpayers need to get on the schools where the costs are high and rising. Keep up the good work.
I would expect that Dr Harper would say that those "anecdotal" examples showed the DEI departments working exactly like they were supposed to work with the correct outcomes.
Self-destruction is also the point. Destroy then rebuild their communist utopia. The helpers die first historically when communist takes the seat of power. They cannot see it coming.
If y'all want to add another story to your next documentary, Google Kike Ojo-Thompson and Richard Bilkszto. She's a Toronto DEI consultant whose bullying and abuse led to his suicide. She wasn't the only one - others leapt to pile on on social media - and he killed himself last summer. He was a career educator who dared to correct her on some of her claims, esp the one that Canada was way more racist than the US. Sorry, but he got it right - I'm from the US, grew up in the South in the 60s and 70s, and have lived in Canada for 20 years and I can state she's smoking crack if she thinks Canada is more racist.
She fared less well at the City of Sarnia, where she was challenged by several people and ran out of the room with her little tail between her legs, claiming she felt 'unsafe'. (No one physically threatened her. It was far, far worse. They *intellectually* threatened her.)
But, when your livelihood (and she's paid VERY well to spread hate and bigotry) depends heavily on racism, you have to keep it alive and the racism factory cranking. If the world got better DEI consultants would have to get *real* jobs.
Intentions are all that matters, not results. We can't have a meritocracy that measures ideas by their actual impact. The word salad explanations and the meaningless deferrals to obscure ideals are the hint that the BS meter is now off the rails.
Thank you for the exceptional work. It is, unfortunately, much needed.
However it still astounds me that this is what we have to be talking about.
Our lives are short, our time is precious, and there are so many noble pursuits (find a cure for cancer, make the species multi-planetary, etc) that we could be focusing our energies on.
But instead, we spend our times looking into the pit because all too many of us just want something to hate.
Note the catastrophizing language that Dr. Harper uses to make his case for DEI: "It is dangerous" to send students into the world "unprepared to deal with the inequities that have long disadvantaged our democracy."
You may first notice that this condescends to students and their inability to deal with adversity -- either as it affects them personally or affects those with whom they empathize.
It requires the belief that these inequities align under the heading of "injustice" and can have no other cause or explanation.
In condescending to students, it also asserts that such inequities, because they are addressed by the DEI framework, are necessarily of a type by which marginalized people -- as DEI defines them -- are discriminated against because of their a.) immutable characterstics and b.) their sacred, inviolable life experiences, which transcend all existence and explain all undesirable outcomes.
You see how self-serving this framework is: The world is full of injustices large and small -- so many of the small variety too innumerable to count -- and students would be helpless without the guiding hand of DEI training and DEI-informed academic instruction to show them how to identify these inequities and defeat them. Or at least call them out and perpetuate the DEI complex.
My first impression of Harper was that he’s an unserious dandy who is very proud of his résumé. I began to lose interest in what he had to say after he used the word “literally.” When he used the words “misinformation” and “disinformation,” he lost me completely.
Misinformation, disinformation, and misinformation refer to the truth that the powerful do not like because it contradicts their lies. You can test this, every time the government, mainstream media, or social media refers to something as the above three, in time you will see that it was actually the simple truth.
Does FIRE have an official stance on when professors introduce ideological topics or take overt stances in a classroom when the topic is completely outside the class curriculum?
Is that considered freedom of speech or not doing your job?
And I am specifically interested in public universities here.
An area of exploding campus bureaucracy that has not gotten enough attention is the Office of Student Conduct, particularly as it applies to the recognition/non-recognition of student groups. Freedom of Assembly should NOT require a mid-level campus bureaucrat assuming the role of Caesar, giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to which groups of student volunteers get to exist and which do not. The Student Life Industrial Complex (SLIC) must be curtailed.
I have a question about the Heritage study. It uses the number of undergrads as the denominator, but a lot of the DEI "work" involves graduate students, researchers, etc. So I think one reason that Stanford is such an outlier is because it has big grad and research programs (Law, Med, Business, Engineering) but only 8000 undergrads. While Michigan has the big grad programs but also a lot of undergrads. (checking numbers - Stanford has about a 1:1 undergrad to grad, while UM is 3:2) Any chance someone could re-run those numbers with a different baseline?
Stanford seems to just be an outlier on administrative costs per student in general. The whatwilltheylearn.com website claims (and I do not know their accuracy) that per student admin costs for Stanford were $45,553 in 2021. That compares to $21,183 at the University of Chicago or $3,762 at the University of Florida.
No student should should be burdened with a student loan that pays DEI administrator’s salaries. For years I tried to find out how much of a student’s tuition went to administrative costs. Finally, I found whatwilltheylearn.com. Not only can parents and students examine administrative costs and trends, but they provide the FIRE rating. Taxpayers need to get on the schools where the costs are high and rising. Keep up the good work.
I would expect that Dr Harper would say that those "anecdotal" examples showed the DEI departments working exactly like they were supposed to work with the correct outcomes.
Thank you so much for your good work. The sprawl of anti-free speech sentiment is truly horrifying.
ALL DEI bureaucracy is a threat to free speech. That’s is one of its purposes: the silence dissent, as brutally as it wishes.
Self-destruction is also the point. Destroy then rebuild their communist utopia. The helpers die first historically when communist takes the seat of power. They cannot see it coming.
If y'all want to add another story to your next documentary, Google Kike Ojo-Thompson and Richard Bilkszto. She's a Toronto DEI consultant whose bullying and abuse led to his suicide. She wasn't the only one - others leapt to pile on on social media - and he killed himself last summer. He was a career educator who dared to correct her on some of her claims, esp the one that Canada was way more racist than the US. Sorry, but he got it right - I'm from the US, grew up in the South in the 60s and 70s, and have lived in Canada for 20 years and I can state she's smoking crack if she thinks Canada is more racist.
She fared less well at the City of Sarnia, where she was challenged by several people and ran out of the room with her little tail between her legs, claiming she felt 'unsafe'. (No one physically threatened her. It was far, far worse. They *intellectually* threatened her.)
But, when your livelihood (and she's paid VERY well to spread hate and bigotry) depends heavily on racism, you have to keep it alive and the racism factory cranking. If the world got better DEI consultants would have to get *real* jobs.
Amen.
Greg: very good article. I very much appreciate the work you (and your FIRE colleagues) are doing!
(Made me said to see Stanford skewed so far out to the right on your charts. I’m not surprised, though.)
I found it interesting how much less time you talked than him in an already very short segment.
Intentions are all that matters, not results. We can't have a meritocracy that measures ideas by their actual impact. The word salad explanations and the meaningless deferrals to obscure ideals are the hint that the BS meter is now off the rails.
They know they are lying and we know they are lying and they know we know they are lying, but they keep up the charade like all the other cons.
Thank you for the exceptional work. It is, unfortunately, much needed.
However it still astounds me that this is what we have to be talking about.
Our lives are short, our time is precious, and there are so many noble pursuits (find a cure for cancer, make the species multi-planetary, etc) that we could be focusing our energies on.
But instead, we spend our times looking into the pit because all too many of us just want something to hate.
Cance has been cured, did you not hear? I am doing a podcast series on it you might be surprised.
Note the catastrophizing language that Dr. Harper uses to make his case for DEI: "It is dangerous" to send students into the world "unprepared to deal with the inequities that have long disadvantaged our democracy."
You may first notice that this condescends to students and their inability to deal with adversity -- either as it affects them personally or affects those with whom they empathize.
It requires the belief that these inequities align under the heading of "injustice" and can have no other cause or explanation.
In condescending to students, it also asserts that such inequities, because they are addressed by the DEI framework, are necessarily of a type by which marginalized people -- as DEI defines them -- are discriminated against because of their a.) immutable characterstics and b.) their sacred, inviolable life experiences, which transcend all existence and explain all undesirable outcomes.
You see how self-serving this framework is: The world is full of injustices large and small -- so many of the small variety too innumerable to count -- and students would be helpless without the guiding hand of DEI training and DEI-informed academic instruction to show them how to identify these inequities and defeat them. Or at least call them out and perpetuate the DEI complex.
My first impression of Harper was that he’s an unserious dandy who is very proud of his résumé. I began to lose interest in what he had to say after he used the word “literally.” When he used the words “misinformation” and “disinformation,” he lost me completely.
Misinformation, disinformation, and misinformation refer to the truth that the powerful do not like because it contradicts their lies. You can test this, every time the government, mainstream media, or social media refers to something as the above three, in time you will see that it was actually the simple truth.
Does FIRE have an official stance on when professors introduce ideological topics or take overt stances in a classroom when the topic is completely outside the class curriculum?
Is that considered freedom of speech or not doing your job?
And I am specifically interested in public universities here.
You might appreciate this podcast:
https://open.substack.com/pub/soberchristiangentlemanpodcast/p/s2-ep-20-iq-what-is-it-and-how-it?r=31s3eo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
An area of exploding campus bureaucracy that has not gotten enough attention is the Office of Student Conduct, particularly as it applies to the recognition/non-recognition of student groups. Freedom of Assembly should NOT require a mid-level campus bureaucrat assuming the role of Caesar, giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to which groups of student volunteers get to exist and which do not. The Student Life Industrial Complex (SLIC) must be curtailed.
I have a question about the Heritage study. It uses the number of undergrads as the denominator, but a lot of the DEI "work" involves graduate students, researchers, etc. So I think one reason that Stanford is such an outlier is because it has big grad and research programs (Law, Med, Business, Engineering) but only 8000 undergrads. While Michigan has the big grad programs but also a lot of undergrads. (checking numbers - Stanford has about a 1:1 undergrad to grad, while UM is 3:2) Any chance someone could re-run those numbers with a different baseline?
Stanford seems to just be an outlier on administrative costs per student in general. The whatwilltheylearn.com website claims (and I do not know their accuracy) that per student admin costs for Stanford were $45,553 in 2021. That compares to $21,183 at the University of Chicago or $3,762 at the University of Florida.