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Editorial calls for closure of DEI offices: ‘Don’t expect better college presidents’ until they are

December 10, 2023 | | Print Article

A leading U.S. newspaper has called on American colleges to “eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] bureaucracies and policies.”

“The moral degeneracy of the presidents of three prestigious universities who recently refused to condemn calls for genocide clearly is symptomatic of a larger problem,” the editors of the Washington Examiner wrote on Sunday. “The long-term solution must be to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies and policies, root and branch, from higher education.”

The newspaper called on college boards of directors to “fire presidents who won’t act to rein in proliferating antisemitic outrages on campus,” adding that boards “should insist that DEI regimes be dismantled.”

However, the editors note, it is those very boards that have been enabling DEI on campuses across the nation.

“Congress should yank their leash by making federal financing contingent on the proper application of First Amendment free-speech principles,” they stated.

The Examiner editors blasted university leaders for lacking “an appropriate ethical framework to guarantee real academic freedom.”

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“This appalling deficiency was on full display at a Dec. 5 hearing of the House Education and Workforce Committee when Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania despicably equivocated over a simple question of whether they would discipline students who called for the genocide of Jews,” they write. “All three used the same words, ‘depend[ing] on the context,’ refusing to give a yes or no answer. They whiffed even when given second and third chances by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to affirm that ‘calling for the genocide of Jews … constitute[s] bullying or harassment.'”

The backlash for their equivocations — “even from prominent left-wingers” — has been “fierce,” the editors state.

Indeed, as BizPac Review reported, Magill, on Saturday, “voluntarily tendered her resignation” as a result of the national outrage she helped to fuel.

“These school presidents pretending to value free speech oversee campuses where the use of a disfavored pronoun can get students or faculty investigated,” the Examiner editors write.

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Harvard, they remind readers, was named this year by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression “the worst college in the nation for its weak speech protection.” The Ivy League institution can now boast the organization’s first-ever “zero” grade.

“A Harvard evolutionary biologist can be forced off campus for stating the plain truth that there are only two biological sexes,” according to the editors. “Yet calls for genocide do not necessarily count as harassment.”

“One reason the presidents are so confused or duplicitous about the boundaries between protected speech and unprotected, baleful conduct is that DEI regimes insist that what matters is not the actual words or actions at issue but the group ‘identity’ of the speaker or actor,” they explain. “Rather than applying neutral principles to everyone, which is what the Constitution, laws, Supreme Court decisions, and common decency demand, DEI categorizes people as either oppressors or the oppressed. Then, they penalize harmless speech by the former while excusing seriously injurious conduct by the latter.”

“Anyone who is of an anti-Western group or an open ally thereof can threaten intifada or join mobs forcing Jews to hide in library attics,” they continue. “But a professor, after warning students that she would be reciting offensive language in a culturally contextual fashion, can be fired merely for saying the N-word aloud while reading Mark Twain.”

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The double standards, the editors state, are “morally and legally inexcusable.” Worse, they are an “intended result of DEI.”

“Until DEI regimes are extirpated and replaced by clear, neutral policies that protect speech and punish true threats, university presidents will defend the indefensible,” the Examiner editors write. “If college boards of directors won’t fix this, Congress should use its power of the purse to force the disassembly of DEI.”

Melissa Fine
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