Michigan on the Road to Nowhere

Even the New York Times thinks it’s nuts.

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Pigs have wings. The New York Times has criticized a university DEI program. This month, we got a great, long article called “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?” The subhead is “A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever.”

Some states are banning college DEI, but Michigan has gone full tilt. In 2016, it announced DEI 1.0, a five-year “strategic plan.”

The university president at that time said that “academic excellence . . . is inseparable from . . . diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Last year, Michigan announced another five-year plan called DEI 2.0. As the new plan notes, “it was clear that achieving the comprehensive goals set forth in DEI 1.0 would require fundamental and at times seismic shifts in the university’s organizational culture.”

Five years of shaking weren’t enough, so at the main, Ann Arbor campus alone, for DEI 2.0, “the number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles increased by 70 percent, reaching 241.”

The five top bosses of those 241 people are all women.

Here are some of their 236 minions, lined up for a group photo. They meet every month.

They’ve got a lot to do. The main school at Michigan is the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, or LSA. Its “inclusive teaching” page explains how to sniff out “white supremacy culture,” which is everywhere, because “white supremacy culture is the water we swim in.”

It’s disguised as such things as perfectionism, objectivity, a sense of urgency, either/or thinking, or individualism.

If you see any of that you must “disrupt” it.

This crack DEI team has been shaking the campus for a year and just issued its DEI 2.0 Year 1 Progress Report.

It starts with a message from the president, an Asian by the name of Santa J. Ono. Santa explains that diversity, equity, and inclusion are “core values of our university. They must be at the heart of everything we do.”

Here is “The Goal,” in living color: People. To have ever-more diverse students, faculty and staff.

How do you get that? Look at the picture. Just phase out white men.

This 88-page progress makes no secret of its priorities.

It uses the words black or African American 37 times. Native American or Indigenous 41 times. Some variant of Latino or Hispanic 11 times, and Asian 8 times. The enemy hovers almost invisibly in the background; the word white appears only once: “Anti-racism explicitly challenges systems and norms grounded in white supremacy and anti-Blackness.”

The report is fixated on “practice.” It uses the word 50 times, in 88 pages. Goals and practices, communities of practice, DEI practices, best practices, exemplary practices, creative practice, integrated practices. Here’s a riddle for you. What do these words mean? “promoting diversity, equity and inclusion within a variety of settings using micro, mezzo and macro practice skills.”

I finally figured out what “practice” means. It’s the actual mechanics of discriminating against white men.

And it’s working. Look at all this increase in non-white staff since 2016.

Asians up 41.5 percent. Blacks up 23.1 percent. Hispanics, a whopping 60.5 percent. But, uh-oh, Michigan lost some American Indians. Look at the upper left. An 18.9 percent increase in women brought them to 70.8 percent of the staff. Women run the place. No stats on white men.

DEI 2.0 loves pilot programs; they’re mentioned 24 times, as in “culture-shifting pilot programs.” I think pilot programs are supposed to sound like innovative, exciting new ways to “disrupt white supremacy.”

And that goal takes many forms. “More than 600 students, staff, faculty and others attended three Soul Food Sundays celebrated during February.”

February? No. Black History Month.

Here’s a snappy visual of a year’s worth of DEI training.

53,868 doses for staff. 2,695 doses for graduate student instructors and teaching assistants. But it’s never enough. “In order to reach U-M’s 60,000+ faculty and staff, additional trainers will be recruited.”

That’s partly because diversity has spread in every direction. And it’s not just “Enhancing the Experiences of LGBTQIA2S+ Communities,” who are mentioned 10 times.

Now, there’s neurodiversity, equity & inclusion.

This applies to people whose brains aren’t normal. Not just autism or ADHD, but such things as tic disorders and dyscalculia.

The report says new campus buildings must have “Adult Changing Stations,” no more than 2,000 feet apart and no more than two floors apart.

What’s an adult changing station? It’s a room where an incontinent adult in a wheelchair can be given a shower and a change.

Michigan even has a Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program that “uses land as a tool for facilitating community integration, mental and emotional health and well-being, culturally appropriate food access, and overall cultural retention.”

Not even Michigan’s arboretum and gardens are spared. They have a Strategic Plan, too.

Pillar 1: “Catalyzing Equity and Justice through Biocultural Diversity and Polycentrism.”

You see, “Like all organizations that work to create experience and meaning, botanical gardens and arboreta are deeply enmeshed within interlocking systems of domination.” Who knew? The solution is “A ‘polycentric’ paradigm, decentering singular ways of knowing and co-creating meaning through a variety of epistemic frames, including dominant scientific and horticultural modalities, Two-Eyed Seeing, Kinomaage, and other co-created power re-alignments.”

The Times article reports that black people are not happy about all this branching out.

Princess-J’Maria Mboup – yes, that is her name – of the Black Student Union explained that DEI is “superficial” and that she doesn’t hear enough about “blackness.”

Blacks say Michigan’s DEI is “too inclusive,” “systematically neglects black students,” and “fails to denounce and combat anti-Blackness.”

Don’t they care about adult changing stations or dyscalculia?

Blacks say Michigan can’t create a more welcoming environment for black students because it doesn’t enroll enough of them.

That’ hard, because ever since a state referendum in 2006, Michigan can’t use racial preferences, and blacks have been stuck at about 4 percent of undergraduates. Before that, it had close to 10 percent, but that took heroic efforts.

A 2021 study by the Center for Equal Opportunity found that “The black-white odds ratio increased significantly in 2005, rising to 70 to 1.”

The odds ratio means that if a black and a white applicant had the same qualifications, the black was 70 times more likely to be admitted. The odds ratio for Hispanics was 46 or 48 to one depending on the measure.

In 2023, the Supreme Court sharply limited race preferences, so Michigan has to use all sorts of jiggery-pokery. For example, the Times says it puts a high premium on applicants who support DEI. What do you know? Most of them turn out to be BIPOCs.

Many people at Michigan told the Times that white women are some of the craziest DEI police. “They want to do something — be a part of the cause,” said one professor.

Also, since there is such a din about diversity and exclusion, any campus disagreement inevitably becomes more complicated because DEI gurus have to pronounce on the solution.

Naturally, there is a witch-hunt atmosphere: “The cocktail chatter is: ‘I can’t say anything in class anymore. I’m going to get run out of class.’ There’s an enormous amount of fear.”

No one dares criticize DEI.

A former dean — a woman of color — said that endless reports, directives, teaching tools, lectures, and seminars are a fog that hides a startling lack of substance. “No one knew what they were supposed to be doing,” the former dean said. “And no one would tell us. But we had to show that we were doing something.”

Of course no one knew. Neither the Times nor the former dean has the slightest idea what the real problem is, which is that the whole thing is a fraud, top to bottom.

It’s supposed to be about breaking down barriers, but there are no barriers. It’s about fighting white supremacy, but there is no white supremacy. It’s about fussing over the marginalized, but the only marginalized are white men – who are too chickenhearted to say so.

Princess-J’Maria Mboup says Michigan needs to combat “anti-blackness.”

If there were ever any of that, it would be burnt at the stake in a massive bonfire.

This giant hoax started with the absurd assumption that blacks are just as smart and hard-working as white people. Then it spread to Hispanics, to claims that homosexuality is wonderful, neurodivergency is a gift, American Indians have scientific “ways of knowing,” fat is beautiful, the habits of Hottentots are better than European civilization.

It is mass insanity of which all this hippy-happy Michigan DEI stuff is just a tiny part – even though it has swallowed up a quarter of a billion dollars, poisoned thousands of minds, and punished countless deserving white men.

Some state legislatures are fighting back. The Chronicle of Higher Education fearfully tracks the states that have banned, limited, or tried to ban campus DEI. Michigan isn’t one of them.

Two weeks after the Times article, the student paper hasn’t written one word about it.

Michigan seems to be determined to keep marching down the road to nowhere.