The Biggest Con of the Century — How Race Grifters made Millions
By Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD
This is an excerpt from DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century almost Toppled Higher Education. It has been adapted from the chapter entitled The New DEI Commissars: Surveillance for Political Purity
It isn’t an accident that DEI bureaucrats seem to be everywhere on the campus, urging everyone to “do the work.” Even as it remains a mystery exactly what this work is.
The summer of 2020 triggered the expenditure of multiple millions of dollars to construct Soviet-style bureaucracies on campuses populated with oddly credentialed persons with a sweepingly vague mandate and obscure success indicators for the positions created for them. Every college and university that wanted to insulate itself from the inevitable unrest that would plague hesitant leaders, appointed “Chief Diversity Officers” and a phalanx of DEI political officers to populate the hierarchy.
Here we examine the role of Chief Diversity Officer and the people who occupy the expensive and sprawling DEI bureaucracies they govern. We look at the “work” that they apparently are always doing, we look at the expanding scaffold of political control employed by the bureaucracy, and at the exorbitant salaries and bloated budgets extorted from universities as part of DEI’s resource-extraction strategy.
DEI Commissars of Control
In the Soviet Union, from 1917-1991, the communist party utilized a method of political control of the military that went by various labels. We call it here the commissar method. This commissar method featured the insertion of a political officer — a zampolit — into every military unit to ensure political reliability of the regular officers and to conduct ideological training for the troops.
If you want to see a realistic dramatization of what a political officer looks like and how he behaves, you can see this in the 1989 action film The Hunt for Red October.
The film was based on a Tom Clancy novel about the defection to the United States of a Soviet Admiral with a high-tech Russian submarine and its entire crew. The only potential glitch in the plan was the presence of the political officer, or zampolit, who was tasked to monitor the political loyalty of the sub commander. The zampolit was eliminated soon into the film, at the 18:22 mark.
In Communist China, too, the commissar system was adopted to monitor and control political activity in the universities. Scholars were censured for hewing to “bourgeois theories and methods of research.” Chinese scholar Theodore Chen describes it:
Since liberation, the responsible representatives of Party and state in the universities have come to evaluate the lectures given by a professor not in terms of his ‘creativity’ or his ability for independent scholarly research, but according to his willingness to submit to ‘discipline’. ‘Discipline’ means that the professor lectures in class exactly according to the outline or lecture notes previously approved by the leadership’; he is not allowed to use any lecture material not previously approved.
Likewise, today, diversity officers are assigned to most units within the university to monitor, to advise, and to report on compliance. American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Mark Perry notes that DEI people have spilled onto the campus proper.
“What’s happened over the last five to 10 years is it’s spread out in decentralized ways . . . At the University of Michigan, each college, school, or department on campus will have a diversity officer, including the library, the arboretum, school of nursing – the college of engineering at Michigan has about 10 [diversity officers].”
These functionaries are assigned even within academic units, where they try to exert control over faculty behavior, over faculty hiring, and over the curriculum. They are called “Academic Diversity Officers,” and the overwhelming majority ostensibly report to the deans or other heads of their units but also maintain a relationship to a hierarchy overseen by a chief diversity officer or some similarly named functionary, most times a vice provost or vice president. Christopher Rufo has characterized this commissar system and its functioning thusly:
They created a circular, self-reinforcing system that created its own demand and installed a new, universal class of “diversity officials” across the institutions, which seeks to break down the old protections of individual rights, colorblind equality, and private property and replace them with a substitute morality and system of government based on the principles of critical race theory.
Even some faculty members believe that these DEI commissars should assume pride of place in the midst of faculty business. This faculty business consists of hiring and promotion and curriculum-building. Michael Berube and Jennifer Ruth crafted an entire book to support DEI participation as members of an “academic freedom” committee to police faculty behavior. As I noted in my review of their book It’s not Free Speech:
The authors call for the establishment of Orwellian “academic freedom” committees to police the faculty on campuses nationwide. On each campus, select faculty would join with “professionals hired by the university to DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] positions” to form these committees that will police the speech, teaching, and research of professors. “We propose that faculty and professionals with expertise in the relevant areas be the primary drivers of any committee or review panel. The professionals hired by the university to DEI positions would retain significant influence.”
Involving the “professionals” of DEI in the business of the faculty is a long-term goal of DEI cadres. Berube and Ruth attempt to “redefine” academic freedom to make it more tractable to the control of mediocre bureaucrats who increasingly pervade university bureaucracies. They siphon away faculty autonomy and curricular control even as you read this.
Those of us on campus recognize that these DEI offices are uniformly staffed with modestly educated hirelings steeped in the social justice ideology learned in academically shallow programs such as online diversity certification, educational leadership, or higher education administration. These are the folks who administer secret campus courts, conduct investigations based on anonymous claims, interfere with faculty affairs, run bias response teams, conduct racial re-education struggle sessions, all while evading accountability and crouching behind benign pronouncements of inclusion, accessibility, equity, and social justice.
This bizarre mélange of authoritarian twaddle is dominated by pseudoscience and paranoia, and universities have not only failed to stop it but have actively encouraged and funded it. Fortunately, this noxious era is drawing to a close as the programs are expunged from the colleges . . . we can only hope the louts who permitted this are expunged as well.