How DEI Is Supplanting Truth as the Mission of American Universities
One of the things The Free Press has been doing since its inception is documenting and exposing how many of our most important institutions—medicine, the media, the law—are increasingly being captured by an ideology that is hollowing out their core functions.
Today, John Sailer, a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, tells the story of how that’s happening at American universities across the country.
You don’t have to have ever stepped foot on a college campus to care about the revelations in today’s piece. Because as we’ve seen again and again, what happens on campus doesn’t stay there. It’s just a preview of what’s coming for the rest of us. —BW
In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a longtime accounting lecturer at UCLA, made the news after a student emailed him asking him to grade black students more leniently in the wake of the “unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.”
Klein’s response was blunt. It stated in part:
Thanks for your suggestion in your email below that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota. Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only? Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black–half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half?
He went on:
Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the “color of their skin.” Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK’s admonition?
Thanks, G. Klein
Klein’s response enraged students. They organized a petition to remove him that quickly gained nearly 20,000 signatures, resulting in the professor being placed on leave and banned from campus. But the story got national attention, and a counter-petition signed by more than 76,000 people demanded his reinstatement. In less than three weeks, Klein was allowed to return to the classroom.
Yet his encounters with what UCLA calls Equity, Diversity and Inclusion were far from over.
Just under a year later, Klein, the author of a textbook on ethics in accounting, was up for a merit raise. For the first time in his 40 years at UCLA, Klein told me he had to submi
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
