| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Diversity Equity 2.0
00:07:38
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| Pigs have wings. | |
| The New York Times has criticized a university DEI program. | |
| This month, we got a great long article called The University of Michigan Doubled Down on DEI. | |
| What went wrong? | |
| The subhead is, a decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever. | |
| Some states are banning college DEI, but Michigan has gone full tilt. | |
| In 2016, it announced DEI 1.0, a five-year strategic plan. | |
| The university president at the time said that academic excellence is inseparable from diversity, equity, and inclusion. | |
| Last year, Michigan announced another five-year plan called DEI 2.0. | |
| As the new plan notes, It was clear that achieving the comprehensive goals set forth in DEI 1.0 would require fundamental and at times seismic shifts in the university's organizational culture. | |
| Five years of shaking weren't enough, so at the main Ann Arbor campus alone, for DEI 2.0, the number of employees who work in DEI-related offices or have diversity Equity or inclusion in their job titles increased by 70%, | |
| reaching 241. | |
| The five top bosses of those 241 people are all women. | |
| Here are some of their 236 minions lined up for a group photo. | |
| They meet every month. | |
| They've got a lot to do. | |
| The main school at Michigan is the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, or LSA. | |
| Its inclusive teaching page explains how to sniff out white supremacy culture, which is everywhere because white supremacy culture is the water we swim in. | |
| It's disguised as such things as perfectionism, objectivity, a sense of urgency, either-or thinking, or individualism. | |
| If you see any of that, you must disrupt it. | |
| This cracked DEI team has been shaking the campus for a year and just issued its DEI 2.0 Year One Progress Report. | |
| It starts with a message from the president, an Asian by the name of Santa J. Ono. | |
| Santa explains that diversity, equity, and inclusion are core values of our university. | |
| They must be at the heart of everything we do. | |
| Here is the goal. | |
| In living color. | |
| People. To have ever more diverse students, faculty, and staff. | |
| How do you get that? | |
| Just look at the picture. | |
| Just phase out white men. | |
| This 88-page pilot support uses the words Black or African American 37 times. | |
| Native American or Indigenous 41 times. | |
| Some variant of Latino or Hispanic 11 times and Asian 8 times. | |
| The enemy hovers almost invisibly in the background. | |
| The word white appears only once. | |
| Anti-racism explicitly challenges systems and norms grounded in white supremacy and anti-blackness. | |
| The report is fixated on practice. | |
| It uses the word 50 times in 88 pages. | |
| Goals and practices. | |
| Communities of practice, DEI practices, best practices, exemplary practices, creative practice, integrated practices. | |
| Here's a little for you. | |
| What do these words mean? | |
| Promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion within a variety of settings using micro, mezzo, and macro practice skills. | |
| I finally figured out what practice means. | |
| It's the actual mechanics of discriminating against white men. | |
| And it's working. | |
| Look at all this increase in non-white staff since 2016. | |
| Asians up 41.5%. | |
| Blacks up 23.1%. | |
| Hispanics a whopping 60.5%. | |
| But uh-oh, Michigan lost some American Indians. | |
| Maybe they can hire Senator Warren. | |
| Look at the upper left. | |
| An 18.9% increase in women brought them to 70.8% of the staff. | |
| Women run the place. | |
| No stats on white men. | |
| DEI 2.0 loves pilot programs. | |
| They're mentioned 24 times as in culture-shifting pilot programs. | |
| I think pilot programs are supposed to sound like innovative, exciting new ways to disrupt white supremacy. | |
| And that goal takes many forms. | |
| More than 600 students, staff, faculty, and others Here's a snappy visual of a year's worth of DEI training. | |
| 53,868 doses for staff. | |
| 2,695 doses for graduate student instructors and teaching assistants. | |
| But it's never enough. | |
| In order to reach UM's 60,000-plus faculty and staff, additional trainers will be recruited. | |
| That's partly because diversity has spread in every direction. | |
| And it's not just enhancing the experiences of LGBTQIA2S-plus communities, who are mentioned 10 times. | |
| Now, there's neurodiversity equity and inclusion. | |
| This applies to people whose brains aren't normal. | |
| Not just autism or ADHD, but such things as tick disorders and dyscalculia. | |
| The report says new campus buildings must have adult changing stations, no more than 2,000 feet apart and no more than two floors apart. | |
| What's an adult changing station? | |
| It's a room where an incontinent adult in a wheelchair can be given a shower and a change. | |
| Michigan has even a Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program that uses land as a tool for facilitating community integration, mental and emotional health and well-being, culturally | |
| appropriate food access, and overall cultural retention. | |
| Not even Michigan's Arboretum and Gardens are spared. | |
| They have a strategic plan to Pillar 1: | |
| Catalyzing equity and justice through bio-cultural diversity | |
| You see, like all organizations that work to create experience and meaning, Botanical Gardens and Arborita are deeply enmeshed within interlocking systems of dominance. | |
| Who knew? | |
| The solution is a polycentric paradigm, de-centering singular ways of knowing and co-creating meaning through a variety of epistemic frames, including dominant scientific and horti-cultural modalities, | |
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Black Students Speak Out
00:04:19
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| two-eyed seeing, kino ma'aj, and other co-created power realignments. | |
| The Times article reports that black people are not happy about all this branching out. | |
| Yes, that's her name, of the Black Student Union explained that DEI is superficial and that she doesn't hear enough about blackness. | |
| Blacks say Michigan's DEI is too inclusive, systematically neglects black students, and fails to denounce and combat anti-blackness. | |
| Don't they care about adult changing stations or dyscalculia? | |
| Blacks say Michigan can't create a more welcoming environment for black students because it doesn't enroll enough of them. | |
| That is a problem, because ever since a state referendum in 2006, Michigan can't use racial preferences, and blacks have been stuck at about 4% of undergraduates. | |
| Before that, it had close to 10%, but that took heroic efforts. | |
| A 2021 study by the Center of Equal Opportunity found that the black-white odds ratio increased significantly in 2005, rising to 70 to 1. The odds ratio means that if a black and a white applicant had the same qualifications, | |
| the black was 70 times more likely to be admitted. | |
| The odds ratio for Hispanics was 46 or 48 to 1, depending on the measure used. | |
| In 2023, the Supreme Court sharply limited race preferences, so Michigan has to use all sorts of jiggery-pokery. | |
| For example, the Times says it puts a high premium on applicants who support DEI. | |
| And what do you know? | |
| Most of them turn out to be BIPOCs. | |
| Many people at Michigan told the Times that white women are some of the craziest DEI police. | |
| They want to do something, be a part of the cause, said one professor. | |
| Also, since there is such a din about diversity and exclusion, any campus disagreement inevitably becomes more complicated because DEI gurus have to pronounce on the solution. | |
| Naturally, there is a witch-hunt atmosphere. | |
| The cocktail chatter is, I can't say anything in class anymore. | |
| I'm going to get run out of class. | |
| There's an enormous amount of fear. | |
| No one dares criticize DEI. | |
| A former dean, a woman of color, said that endless reports, directives, teaching tools, lectures, and seminars are a fog that hides a startling lack of substance. | |
| No one knew what they were supposed to be doing, the former dean said. | |
| And no one would tell us, but we had to show that we were doing something. | |
| Well, of course no one knew. | |
| Neither the Times nor the former dean has the slightest idea what the real problem is, which is that the whole thing is a fraud, top to bottom. | |
| It's supposed to be about breaking down barriers, but there are no barriers. | |
| It's about fighting white supremacy, but there is no white supremacy. | |
| It's about fussing over the marginalized, but the only marginalized are white men, who are too chicken-hearted to say so. | |
| Princess Jamaria Mbup says Michigan needs to combat anti-blackness. | |
| If there were ever any of that, it would be burnt at the stake in a massive bonfire. | |
| This giant hoax started with the absurd assumption that blacks are just as smart and hardworking as white people. | |
| Then it spread to Hispanics, to claims that homosexuality is wonderful. | |
| Neurodivergency is a gift. | |
| American Indians have scientific ways of knowing. | |
| Fat is beautiful. | |
| The habits of hottentots are better than European civilization. | |
| It is mass insanity, of which all this hippy-happy Michigan DEI stuff is just a tiny part, even though it has swallowed up a quarter of a billion dollars, poisoned thousands of minds, and punished countless deserving white men. | |
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Michigan's Marching Road
00:00:41
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| Some state legislatures are fighting back. | |
| The Chronicle of Higher Education fearfully tracks the states that have banned, limited, or tried to ban campus DEI. | |
| Michigan isn't one of them. | |
| Two weeks after the Times article, the student paper hadn't written one word about it. | |
| Michigan seems to be determined to keep on marching down the road to nowhere. | |
| Thanks for watching. | |
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