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Most of the DEI requirements I am aware of are additional diversity statements tacked on to the ends of grant applications that could easily be eliminated by the funding agencies. That and getting rid of all the unncessary scholarships for women and minorities, which are easy enough to identify, would have achieved more or less the same results as far as fighting wokeness is concerned with minimal collateral damage.
How?
The diversity statements didn't appear there out of the ether, they are heing pushed forward by people with inatitutional power. Demanding that they merely stop requiring these statements, and change the names of "women's scholarships" to "totally not women's scholarships" will result in no substantial change other than the people who set up this system being marginally more quiet until the next Dem administration.
The cancelled grants can just as easily be reinstated by the next administration. The only permanent effects in that case would be years of lost work on those projects (perhaps majority useless, but some worthwhile) and some scientists leaving for Europe or China, while the net effects on DEI would be the same as in my proposal. If you know of some damage that has been done to academia that can't be undone 3 years from now, I'm curious to know what it is.
The fear that another Trump-esque administration will come to power and do the same thing again will surely remain.
I have a US mathematician friend who is entirely apolitical, but joined the DEI committee at his department (where he helped them implement DEI measures, screen applicants etc., not to mention the implicit lending of legitimacy) a few years ago out of the simple consideration that he was coming up for tenure review and it was a no-brainer to do this simple thing that would greatly improve his chances. There are, I figure, many cases like that. If it stops being a no-brainer career booster and starts being a gamble (will get favoured by the system, but might also get targeted for reprisal in the future if the wrong administration is in power), I imagine far fewer will go for it.
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Again, how?
If UCLA gets their funding cut for woke recruitment practices, but other universities bend the knee, you don't think that creates an incentive for UCLA to clean up house, or doesn't boost the relative position of universities that aren't insane?
Only temporarily. The next Democratic administration will simply praise all the universities that stood up against "the war on science" and move them to the top of the pecking order, while those that bent the knee will be shunned and see their funding cut in a mirror image of what's happening now.
That's already a few years of personell changes and shifting the balance of power within the university system. It can be rolled back, but can't be undone at the snap of the fingers, and is therefore superior the solution you are proposing, that doesn't change anything except for the packaging.
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