University of Florida Purges Prejudice and Saves $5 Million
By Stanley K. Ridgley, Ph.D.
March 1, 2024
In a move celebrated by supporters of the Enlightenment University everywhere, the University of Florida today expunged the noxious ideology of DEI from the ranks of its administration.
A memo to the University from Provost Scott Angle rendered it clear that it was fully implementing the Board of Governor’s regulation 9.016 and closing the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminating DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halting contracts without outside DEI vendors.
“UF fired 13 full-time diversity, equity and inclusion positions and ended 15 administrative appointments for faculty Friday. It also eliminated the office of the Chief Diversity Officer and ended DEI contracts with outside vendors,” reported one Florida publication.
The move to cut valueless bureaucratic bloat from higher education is certainly welcome and is sure to serve as a model for other universities — public and private — around the United States in these cash-strapped times. We can anticipate that other colleges and universities recognize that they lose little and gain much from trimming the DEI fat from the budget and follow UF’s move away from the dominance and constraints of an extremist agenda toward the open university with its Enlightenment values of logic, reason, progress, science, and humanism.
The move certainly contributes to UF’s budgetary bottom line.
Carving this unproductive fat from the university’s budget frees up more than $5 million in funds. This money is now shifted to a fund that will be used to recruit superb faculty. In a university that has so publicly returned to its Enlightenment roots and renewing its commitment to excellence, it promises to become a destination university for the finest scholars in the United States, certainly those weary of the academic fraud of “DEI,” which has so ignominiously seen a rapid fall from grace.
The move to expunge DEI from higher education parallels the slow purging of DEI from the corporate world. In academia, it has gained momentum with recent revelations of cheating in the ranks of DEI apparatchiks. Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion officer Sherri A. Charleston faced more than 40 allegations of plagiarism in January, and now Columbia University’s DEI honcho Alade McKen is dealing with the revelation that he plagiarized about a fifth of his slender 164-page dissertation from Iowa State University’s School of Education.
I fully expect more revelations of this sort as the year unspools.
This crumbling of DEI credibility is unsurprising given the abysmally low standards of education school “advanced degree” work in fields such as “student affairs,” where navel-gazing diaries and a half-dozen interviews with folks down the hallway can serve as a “dissertation.” It does seem to be an education school problem and not simply one of shoddy DEI “scholarship.”
There’s no word if any of those fired from Florida’s DEI positions plagiarized to produce any pseudo-academic work used to enter the university ranks as a bureaucrat. But it would not be surprising in the least to discover that’s the case.
Here is the University of Florida’s memorandum, certainly a welcome sight for those who work in genuine academia.
