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Notes -
University of Texas Austin Fires dozens of DEI-related employees
https://president.utexas.edu/organizational-changes
The University of Texas is, notoriously, much more liberal than the state for which it is the flagship, and in light of the frequent motte discussion about how conservatives can make whatever laws they want, and progressives will just ignore them, I thought it was worth sharing the abovelinked letter. I guess you need more of a submission statement than that, so I'll begin with picking out a few highlights.
Now I would prefer it if those deans focused on DEI were offered the opportunity of becoming janitors or being summarily terminated, and called the RINOs representing me to the state requesting that change to SB17, but it's, undeniably, an effect, and a fairly significant one given that my impression is that academics really resent having to actually teach classes and prefer to do either pure research or at least focus on passing asspulls off as research, and also that DEI programs seem to have providing comfortable employment as a primary goal over actually doing anything. I'd also like to point towards teaching and research being the actual functions of a university, and even if these people could be replaced with less odious professors requiring them to be mission focused is a major improvement.
And, to note, this is an effect began with the state legislature banning DEI, and not for some other reason, or at least that's what the letter opens by assuring us.
It's worth noting the UT's endowment is literally the size of Harvard's, and so 'money problems' is not the secret real reason. I haven't crunched the numbers on this, but I suspect that the endowment is big enough relative to operating expenses that UT could just ride out any measures imposed by the state as a noncompliance penalty short of "send in the state troopers and haul faculty out in handcuffs". Not that I'd put the latter past the state, but UT would be extremely reasonable to think that that particular measure is not a step one in the event of a noncompliant university and so they'd kind of have a while to drag their feet.
CNN is reporting that the total number of staff cut is unknown(https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/us/university-texas-austin-cutting-dei-jobs-reaj/index.html)
And that same article also gave me material for a minirant:
Ma'am, you going to college is not about the experience. It's not about enrichment or programs you value- it's about you getting an education. Now I suspect that the president of a university black student alliance is getting an education in something extremely low value, but still- the government isn't funding college to make students feel valued and empowered and grant them a fun experience. The need to offer more fun, luxurious experiences to students seems like a part of cost disease in higher education that makes life worse for everyone who can't afford the ludicrous pricetag. Honestly, if I had my way, students at government-funded universities would be required to live in the same conditions as enlisted members of the military, with barracks and early morning calisthenics, for at least the first year, and barred from using loans or government funding to finance any lifestyle improvements or extracurriculars past that.
Rant over. Discussion prompts- is this a falsification of the narrative, so popular on the motte, that it doesn't matter how conservative a government is, it can't stop the cathedral from doing whatever it damn well pleases? Is this evidence of the cathedral being less monolithically progressive than commonly believed? Is it some Texas specific factor?
At law schools specifically, while it is difficult to find data beyond personal anecdotes for a variety of cathedral-related reasons, a lot of what are now called DEI positions have historically been used to improve the "Employment at 9 months post graduation" statistics for URM students.
It's a fun little prestige shell game: elite institutions admit a whole pile of under-qualified students, who even if they do happen to have test scores comparable to their white/asian peers will be branded by their skin color as AA admits, when they have poor results the institutions hire them, and then point to all the great outcomes those students have had like working in academia at elite institutions.
Schools with huge endowments use them to float weaker students for a time to improve their numbers to remain elite schools with huge endowments.
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I would have thought so too, but a couple years back I got to see online the begging letter reasons behind Harvard from someone dealing with finances, that says "ignore the huge endowment, we really can't get our hands on the money, so we are not as wealthy as it looks at first glance; that's why we're always begging off alumni and looking for donors".
So it may well be that despite the endowment, the money specifically for DEI is drying up and that's why the jobs are being dumped.
Are they a reliable narrator on the matter? I can certainly imagine a bunch of constraints on how endowment money is used, but it also seems true that there's just always going to be a lot of pressure to just acquire more no matter how rich they already are.
In any case, I still think it's super weird that middle-class people give even a penny to their schools. I understand if you have enough money to get your name on a building or an endowed professorship or can swing the politics of a department, but I genuinely don't get what someone gets out of giving a few hundred bucks to a school.
I wondered about that, and I've lost the link long ago, but they claimed to be on the accountancy or financial management or whatever of Harvard, and that the perception of "you've got a huge endowment, you must be swimming in money" was not correct. All kinds of baked-in running expenses and loan repayments and the like meant that they can't just get their hands on the endowment as it is and use it up, and that the income generated is not keeping up with the demands on it.
As you say, this may well be motivated reasoning and not reliable, but it was someone trying to explain why Harvard couldn't just give $$$$$ to disadvantaged students etc.
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Sports, mostly.
What the hell does someone get out of giving a couple hundred (or thousand) bucks to a school with a Big Ten Network contract pulling in tens of millions? I just don't get it. I get spending money to go to a football game, but I have no idea why someone picks up a call from their alumni org and replies that they'd be happy to cut a small check.
Often, some (often overstated)level of influence over minor traditions that may be important to them, personally- this was how the same UTA was previously talked out of getting rid of its fight song 'the eyes of Texas are upon you' at least once. Alternatively, frequently better opportunities for either networking or a notionally better chance at getting sporting tickets or something like that.
Realistically, most alumni don't donate, and a good chunk of those who do are donating to specific organizations affiliated with the school(eg the marching band) or have too much money to know what to do with anyways.
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Couldn’t resist booing the out group?
Presidents of student alliances and other campus activism are often self-selecting for people wanting to go into politics, so they're building up contacts, networking, experience, etc. before moving on to joining a political party as part of the organisers.
See, for an Irish example, Ivana Bacik - moved from student activism in Trinity College to setting up a nice middle-class professional career and is now leader of the Irish Labour Party. And that was my impression of the Students' Union set back when I was doing a technical training course at the dawn of time in a local 'college'.
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Rigorous majors generally don’t head up campus organizations.
Rigor and value aren't synonymous. I would guess that the head of the university black student alliance is getting a valuable education, at least for them, regardless of what I think of whatever their major is.
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It literally doesn’t matter whether it’s statistically true, (though, yes, it’d be nice to see you at least verify your sneers are accurate).
Sticking a “and also he’s probably fat” at the end of a paragraph is clearly intended to be insulting, not to advance your thesis, and “it’s okay that I said that, since most Americans are overweight” is not a defense.
As ZorbaTHut has recently reiterated the first rule is
She's majoring in Kinesiology according to LinkedIn. No idea if that's rigorous or not.
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The narrative on theMotte (and DSL) is mostly one of covert defiance, not overt defiance. That is to say, people "grudgingly agree" and then either don't actually do what they said they would do, or contrive to achieve the same results a different way.
This is a case of a lack of overt defiance - they have said they will comply. Okay. Mostly in accord with that narrative. There remain the questions of whether they will actually comply, and also whether if they do comply, they will come up with some excuse to produce the same outcomes.
If a student spends a day in the local activism space holding a sign saying, for instance, "I think black people are genetically predisposed to crime; ask me why"* and is still a student 6 months later, that would definitely be a falsification - that's real change in outcomes, proof by pudding.
*I am not personally claiming this sentence to be true, merely using it as an example of a sentence which gets one in trouble on purely DIE grounds - it's not threatening or harassing anyone, but is blasphemy against SJ.
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Let's wait and see. I'm reminded of the time when Zhou Enlai said "Too soon to say" when asked about the consequences of the French Revolution. It turns out that was actually a myth and he was talking about 1968 France.
Nevertheless, the day of the announcement is too premature. Lots of people thought that Brexit and the 2016 election were turning points, that narratives were beginning to fall apart, that the tide was shifting.
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I don't remember which college it was — it has to have been years ago that I read about it, probably on campusreform.org — but I do remember reading about a school that disbanded its 'DEI office' (I don't think that acronym was in broad currency yet then, so it was called something else), redistributed its budget, let go of its staff, etc. What then happened was that each individual department opened up their own separate office, out of their own budgets. So you had a DEI office for the English department, a DEI office for the history department, a DEI office for the engineering department, a DEI office for the math department… and, as a result, the school ended up spending more money and having more people work on "diversity." Note how many of the DCCE's programs are being redistributed to "overlapping" activities — why not start doing all the DEI stuff out of those?
And even if that doesn't happen, then the individual professors can keep up promoting the ideology instead, without the "remaining DCCE activities." After all, this doesn't do anything about the massive ideological slant of the college faculty (of pretty much all college faculties in America except the explicitly right-wing ones like Liberty and Hillsdale). Does this really change anything beyond a little less money going to DEI and a few less DEI commissars?
That is, assuming they actually are letting a significant number go. After all, beyond our weepy student, do we have any evidence that "all the staff members… are just going to be gone"?
Because they could just be making this big, dramatic show of "complying" (at least on the surface, per my earlier arguments) with SB17 — despite, as you note, having the funds to resist doing so — knuckling over to those evil, anti-intellectual (because stupid) Republicans who are attacking them for no reason other than that those politicians think they have a left-wing bias, when really, it's that reality has a left-wing bias, and this is just Scopes 2.0 — slack-jawed bible-thumping morons trying to prevent professors from teaching truths that these close-minded, superstitious bigots refuse to accept — so as to generate a backlash, starting with big-budget donors, alumni, media, and on to broader academia, to produce a backlash against those politicians and to get the bill overturned. After which, everyone gets transferred back to the restored DEI office.
And all this is before larger-scale authorities get involved. Expect UTA's position in the college rankings to plummet to the likes of Liberty, Phoenix, and Grand Canyon. The accrediting bodies could start reviewing their accreditation… or just withdraw it. The Department of Education can declare their students ineligible for Federal financial aid. The Federal government could enact overriding legislation. SCOTUS could strike the bill down as a violation of academic freedom, and thus free speech.
This is nothing. Its material effects are likely to be minimal, and it will almost certainly end up reversed (and then some) by the inevitable backlash. In the end, UTA is going to wind up even further Left.
Why would you expect a backlash? Affirmative action is consistently highly unpopular with the general public, bringing it back doesn’t have the chance for much public sympathy. UTA’s best odds for maintaining their DEI system is to stall for time.
I'm not expecting a backlash from the general public, I'm expecting an elite backlash — wealthy, politically-connected donors; major media figures; esteemed academics; etc.
"Public sympathy" is irrelevant, because most people are powerless peasants whose opinions don't matter. It's elite opinion that matters.
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