One of the seldom discussed aspects of the ongoing revolution in contemporary higher education is the problem institutions are having filling courses that are designed to impart the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) message to students.
The Narrative in the Media
In the mediasphere, the conversation on DEI in higher education is mostly about, for example, the fear that conservative “politicization” will drive enrollments down. Students, it is claimed, just won’t stand for conservative reforms of the type instituted by Florida’s Ron DeSantis. This perspective, however, overlooks all the work that higher-education institutions have been doing for decades to politicize curricula and drive enrollments downward via their own politicized mechanisms.
Under-Enrollment in Politicized Courses
On occasion, there has been modest press reflection on the fact of under-enrollment in “Studies” and other highly politicized courses. Almost a decade ago, the Chicago Tribune ran a story noting that African-American Studies programs were facing defunding in Illinois state schools due to low enrollments. But colleges have little incentive in the post-George Floyd era to linger over questions of enrollment or even to report on the situation.
Secrecy and Data Accessibility
It is not easy to get data on this and other aspects of the consequences of DEI expansion on campuses, because institutions are interested in hiding inconvenient details. Yet those of us on college faculties are aware, for example, of how faculty recruitment has been altered in recent years to skew decision making away from scholarly productivity and promise and toward candidates’ identities and DEI politics.
The Role of DEI in Faculty Hiring
Recently, John Sailer of the National Association of Scholars managed to get access to piles of documents from one school, Ohio State University, that describe precisely what is being done to revolutionize faculty hiring. There is voluminous evidence in these documents showing how hiring committees are decreasing their emphasis on the scholarly records of candidates and explicitly making hiring decisions in a discriminatory fashion along DEI lines.
The new marching orders are clear. You must hire people with the correct ideology on DEI, which in practice means active discrimination against any candidate who has not fully signed on to the anti-scientific ideology of antiracism and critical race studies.
DEI Statements as Ideological Vetting
This is the purpose of the DEI statements now being required by just about every American institution of higher education as part of the faculty hiring process. These statements are ideological vetting mechanisms to ensure that those who lack the right ideological faith are not brought on board.
DEI-Centric Curriculum and Enrollment Issues
And once colleges have hired these DEI true believers, what will they teach? Many contribute to the expanding number of courses that are more about activism than about learning a body of knowledge.
As previously hinted, information on DEI-intensive course enrollments is hard to come by. Schools don’t usually make course-enrollment data publicly available, and they are even more motivated to keep this information private when it reveals that courses designed to speak to DEI goals aren’t attracting many students.
Case Study: Enrollment Challenges and Outreach
At my own institution, departments facing enrollment problems have begun reaching out to the campus community in mass emails to try to stir up student interest. The English department, for example, recently sent out a campus note that listed “a number of courses with space available.” All of the courses were, by their titles alone (“Latinx Theater,” “Sex, Sexuality, and Rape Culture in the 18th Century,” “Affrilachia: Regional Literature, Race, and Power”), identifiable as classes focusing on identity politics.
That email got me exploring enrollment data (which are listed on our course-registration site) for the English department’s other courses. I discovered a number of other DEI-centered classes that had very few students in them. These included “Fiction and Reproductive Justice,” “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” and “Radicals and Renegades.”
Another department on campus, History, went even further in endeavoring to shore up faltering enrollments in identity politics-centered courses. They sent out a campus email inviting students to an “informational session,” lasting an hour, on several under-enrolled courses, among them “Black Women’s History” and “Brujas, Machos, y Travestis” (The latter is in Spanish and means “Witches, Machos, and Transvestites.” “Machos” literally means “males,” but it is also used in slang to refer to male-presenting lesbians).
Forced Enrollment through Curriculum Changes
Another way in which schools are endeavoring to fill such courses is by changing curricular requirements such that they fulfill university-wide “learning goals,” which all students must meet in order to graduate. A recent example from my campus is illustrative.
Previously, it was required that all students in the College of Arts & Sciences take a given number of courses with the designation “Diversity in the US” to graduate. The process by which a professor got his or her course that designation was distant from the course’s specific approach to diversity.
But that requirement came to be seen by our faculty as too unsubstantial in supporting the DEI regime, so the “Diversity in the US” requirement was eliminated and replaced with a straightforwardly ideological one. The new designation bears the far less subtle name of “Race, Power, and Inequality.”
To get that designation on your course, it is not sufficient that the class merely discuss the fact that inequality exists in human societies and that it frequently has racial dimensions. Instead, the “Race, Power, and Inequality” designation requires that a course “confront, critique, and seek to dismantle narratives and structures of power and privilege that deny the full human potential of minoritized and marginalized groups and individuals.”
Implications for Enrollment and Curriculum Integrity
Ideologically driven courses like those listed above, which might otherwise face difficulties getting students into seats, have that task made somewhat easier by obtaining a university designation, since all students are required to take some number of RPI courses. It also means that those courses that formerly carried the “Diversity in the US” designation, but that cannot be RPI-designated because the professor insists on purely scientific and non-propagandistic treatment of the question of race and inequality, will suffer a hit to their enrollments.
Conclusion
Perhaps it speaks well of the common sense of many college students that they are not interested in spending time and money on “woke” courses. It certainly speaks poorly of college leaders that they insist on creating them, staffing them with ideologically screened faculty, then forcing them on hapless students. The challenge of filling DEI-centric courses highlights a broader tension within higher education between maintaining academic rigor and meeting contemporary ideological demands.
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