• Politics is everywhere, and has been for a long time.
• Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative polemicist, has been appointed to the board of New College, a public liberal-arts school, and has vowed to rid the place of leftist excesses.
• Many universities ask faculty applicants to write a statement of commitment to an extreme form of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is known as “anti-racism”.
• Rufo has vowed to eliminate oaths to such doctrines and to replace the DEI office with a much smaller office of color blindness.
• Justice William O. Douglas argued that the state should not contract the spectrum of available knowledge.
• Critics have accused Rufo of trying to turn New College into a space of extremist indoctrination.
• Rufo has argued that universities’ embrace of DEI follows what the activist and sociologist Rudi Dutschke called the “long march through the institutions”.
• Rufo is a political appointee interfering politically in a highly political environment, and his initiative could go badly for him and for his governor.
Published February 10, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Graeme Wood’s original post DEI Is an Ideological Test
