Clueless Dean Klotman embraces the fabrications of a disgruntled DEI consultant
By Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD
August 19, 2024
It was in the summer of 2020 that the corruption of America’s higher education institution accelerated, juiced with high octane racialism occasioned by the death of George Floyd.
Colleges and universities queued up to pay an imaginary penance, and a multiplicity of “strategic plans” and DEI initiatives were rolled out.
Higher education still suffers from the fallout of inviting the profoundly unserious ideologues of “DEI” into the inner policy-making sanctum.
Duke University’s School of Medicine is one such forlorn casualty of stupidity and fraud.
The University’s medical school published a plan in June 2021 that is grounded on the most fundamental of fraudulent claims, debunked years ago. Even so, in her introduction, Duke med school Dean Mary Klotkin affirmed that:
The start of our Moments to Movement campaign one year ago marked our renewed and unwavering commitment to fostering meaningful and sustainable change. The resulting strategic plan, Dismantling Racism and Advancing Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the School of Medicine, is made possible through the compelling voices and vision of our students, staff and faculty and the sustained commitments of diversity and inclusion leaders, advocates, and allies.
Klotkin and her duped cronies assertively pledge in their plan to work against various aspects of so-called “White Supremacy Culture,” and it offers a definition that was fabricated in the 1990s by Tema Okun, a disgruntled DEI trainer. The list appears in the Duke plan “glossary,” duly listing punctuality, individuality, and other traits as problems to be overcome.
Did the high moguls of Duke’s medical school stop for even a moment to consider what they were endorsing or its origin? Did they not care that the so-called elements of “White Supremacy Culture” they listed in their plan were completely contrived in the late 1990s by a disgruntled social worker by the name of Tema Okun?
That a medical school at a prominent and prestigious university would admit into the halls of healing the made-up dross of shady non-profits with their non-academic fantasies is alarming, given the life-and-death stakes. The glossary of the Duke plan alone provides a gallery of grotesqueries, with links to various shady non-academic sites such as this one.
It is no secret that This woman Tema Okun completely fabricated the list in a fit of anger after an unsuccessful “consultation” session in 1999, and she told the story of her epiphany in her 2010 dissertation from UNC-Greensboro.
Let’s allow Okun to tell us in her own words, found on page 29 of her dissertation.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I arrived home after a particularly frustrating consultation with an organization I was working with at the time. In a flurry of exasperation, I sat down at my computer and typed, the words flowing of their own accord into a quick and dirty listing of some of the characteristics of white supremacy culture that show up in organizational behavior. The paper I wrote in such a frenzy on that afternoon so many years ago lists 15 behaviors, all of them interconnected and mutually reinforcing—perfectionism, a sense of urgency, defensiveness and/or denial, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, the belief in one ‘right’ way, paternalism, either/or binary thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, progress defined as more, the right to profit, objectivity, and the right to comfort.
Okun acknowledges that she simply concocted the list, like some medieval fabulist.
Okun made it up . . . then put it into an article . . . then put it into a workbook . . . then used the workbook as part of her dissertation . . . then published her dissertation as a book with an obscure independent publisher. She continues to promulgate this fraudulent List today with the help of hundreds of folks, if not thousands, who most likely don’t know better and who repeat it in a way designed to legitimize it.
The elements of the list have since been passed around until, through simple repetition (much like the chanting of magic ritual), it has attained a kind of cult validity among the faithful. Okun maintains this contrived racialist list to this day on her website called DRWorks. In fact, this DRWorks is listed as the source for the List in Duke’s Med School plan (see below).
I have written extensively on the unmitigated bullshit of the “white supremacy culture” list, and I encourage you to have a look here to gain an understanding of how fraudulent the entire DEI enterprise actually is.
While Okun’s fakery turned up in the Duke School of Medicine’s plan to “dismantle racism,” it has assumed a life of its own and continues to appear more often than any zombie false doctrine ought to. Do your own google search for the alarming results.
Many plans, like Duke’s, draw upon the List. I’ve read more of these plans than I care to contemplate, and one thing that stands out in all of them is their obsequious, fawning apologetics and over-the-top rhetoric, as if each is an attempt to outdo the others in supine embarrassment. These “antiracism” plans are all cut from the same racialist cloth, utilizing marker phraseology from the non-academic non-profit world of fly-by-night “diversity” consultants.
The plans constitute a new genre of sycophant pandering that is distinguished by its utilitarian mix-and-match vernacular of “social justice” racialism. I anticipate that plans such as this one will be held up for ridicule in a not too distant future, when their supine rhetoric and treacly paeans to “social justice” and “equity” come back to embarrass them . . . assuming anyone can be found to take responsibility for the pastiche of fakery, fraud, and lies.
The people who assemble these plans are easily visualized. One can only marvel at the success of the dupes who assembled this Duke med school document — cowed, fawning, prostrate, morally untethered, guilty for no discernible reason, eager to confess to anything no matter how outlandish, anxious to share their “critical consciousness” even if it means propagating academic fakery of the baldist sort.
Meanwhile, enjoy below the Duke School of Medicine’s howler of a “strategic plan” grounded in the notion that doctors need not be punctual, professional, attendant to detail, or a host of other behaviors associated with life-saving medicine. The glossary on pages 36-39 give the lie to any pretense of seriousness.
Let’s hope the lack of sobriety doesn’t get anyone killed by, say, a tardy doctor so-guided by Duke’s incompetent moral posturing.