excalibur
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- Mar 19, 2015
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We are headed down a very dangerous road.
Florida International University, a public institution, has adopted a radical “diversity, equity, and inclusion” program that condemns the United States as a system of “white supremacy,” segregates scholarships and student programs by race, and trains students for participation in left-wing protests and political activism.
I have obtained a collection of documents through Sunshine Law requests that reveal a stunning bureaucratic transformation. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) officials at FIU, who serve a population of more than 40,000 undergraduate students, have steadily operationalized the principles of critical race theory and created a vast web of programming that wraps this ideology into nearly every process of academic life.
The story begins with the May 2020 death of George Floyd in police custody. As riots spread across the United States, FIU administrators and academic departments released a series of statements condemning the United States as a system of “white supremacy.” The university immediately held a racially segregated discussion program—one for “self-identified People of Color,” another for “self-identified White Students”—to induct students into the ideology of anti-racism, which holds that blackness is inherently noble, and whiteness inherently corrupt. FIU bureaucrats explained that these forums were designed to create “a healing space for POC to discuss unique impacts of systemic racism” and to instruct white students so that they could “identify ways to take action against racism” and “advocate for peers and friends who identify as Black/POC.”
Following that summer of protest, the ideological programs at FIU intensified. The university’s DEI officials implemented a heavy mass of programming designed to control language, thought, behavior, hiring, curriculum, and the distribution of resources according to the dictates of left-wing racialism.
This project of ideological capture begins with language. The university’s DEI bureaucrats have published an official “Inclusive Language Guide” that condemns some of the most common words in the English language, such as “husband,” “wife,” “mother,” “father,” “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” “she,” and “he” as “non-inclusive.” In their place, the university suggests, students should use gender-neutral substitutes such as “partner,” “spouse,” “parents,” and “caregivers,” and neologisms such as “Mx.” and “they/them” for a singular person. The racial-categorization rules are even more arbitrary: “Chinese-American” is discriminatory, but “Chinese American” is acceptable; “Jews” is forbidden, but “People who are Jewish” is fine. The point is not to generate stable and accurate language, but to undermine the basic grammar of life, thus softening the ground for political change.
Next, the DEI administrators create internal cadres by recruiting students into publicly subsidized left-wing activism. To this end, FIU offers various programs, such as the Social Justice Badge Program, which recruit, train, and deploy student activists with the goal of implementing the “redistribution of power” and achieving “equity,” or equal outcomes. The badge program invites students to participate in a long series of assessments, conferences, seminars, trainings, and initiatives—a comprehensive political education driven by the bureaucracy, rather than the faculty.
...
Florida International University, a public institution, has adopted a radical “diversity, equity, and inclusion” program that condemns the United States as a system of “white supremacy,” segregates scholarships and student programs by race, and trains students for participation in left-wing protests and political activism.
I have obtained a collection of documents through Sunshine Law requests that reveal a stunning bureaucratic transformation. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) officials at FIU, who serve a population of more than 40,000 undergraduate students, have steadily operationalized the principles of critical race theory and created a vast web of programming that wraps this ideology into nearly every process of academic life.
The story begins with the May 2020 death of George Floyd in police custody. As riots spread across the United States, FIU administrators and academic departments released a series of statements condemning the United States as a system of “white supremacy.” The university immediately held a racially segregated discussion program—one for “self-identified People of Color,” another for “self-identified White Students”—to induct students into the ideology of anti-racism, which holds that blackness is inherently noble, and whiteness inherently corrupt. FIU bureaucrats explained that these forums were designed to create “a healing space for POC to discuss unique impacts of systemic racism” and to instruct white students so that they could “identify ways to take action against racism” and “advocate for peers and friends who identify as Black/POC.”
Following that summer of protest, the ideological programs at FIU intensified. The university’s DEI officials implemented a heavy mass of programming designed to control language, thought, behavior, hiring, curriculum, and the distribution of resources according to the dictates of left-wing racialism.
This project of ideological capture begins with language. The university’s DEI bureaucrats have published an official “Inclusive Language Guide” that condemns some of the most common words in the English language, such as “husband,” “wife,” “mother,” “father,” “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” “she,” and “he” as “non-inclusive.” In their place, the university suggests, students should use gender-neutral substitutes such as “partner,” “spouse,” “parents,” and “caregivers,” and neologisms such as “Mx.” and “they/them” for a singular person. The racial-categorization rules are even more arbitrary: “Chinese-American” is discriminatory, but “Chinese American” is acceptable; “Jews” is forbidden, but “People who are Jewish” is fine. The point is not to generate stable and accurate language, but to undermine the basic grammar of life, thus softening the ground for political change.
Next, the DEI administrators create internal cadres by recruiting students into publicly subsidized left-wing activism. To this end, FIU offers various programs, such as the Social Justice Badge Program, which recruit, train, and deploy student activists with the goal of implementing the “redistribution of power” and achieving “equity,” or equal outcomes. The badge program invites students to participate in a long series of assessments, conferences, seminars, trainings, and initiatives—a comprehensive political education driven by the bureaucracy, rather than the faculty.
...
The Commissars Will See You Now
At Florida International University, DEI bureaucrats have made political activism the center of academic life.
rufo.substack.com