The battle against DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) in America’s educational institutions isn’t about the obvious abuses of academic integrity, disregard for achievement, or embrace of institutional racism.  It’s about power and money.  The same goes for DIE’s offspring, ESG (environmental, social and governance), whose proponents have forced public and private companies to adopt policies that are antithetical to their basic missions.

Much of our academic, political, and corporate elite are heavily invested in DIE because its doctrines have enabled them to acquire their positions of power absent competitive merit or achievement.  They will cling to their privileges in the face of embarrassment and exposure.

Accordingly, eradicating DIE’s adverse effects on education and corporations will require an offensive, not a defensive, strategy focused on eliminating the policies and funding that sustain it, in addition to the continuing aggressive efforts to expose DIE’s corruption and adverse consequences.  DIE is based on many false premises.  Accepting them as the terms of battle will result in defeat.

Many years ago, public school administrators, teachers’ unions, and their political collaborators realized that the accusation of racism was a useful tool to obfuscate their roles in failing school systems and wretched student achievement by removing all accountability for the incompetence of the teachers and administrators.  They created subjective goals that were completely unquantifiable and undefinable, like antiracism.

DIE has been used to limit admittance to only likeminded faculty and students by degrading standards and expanding course offerings into squishy subjects for which grades are irrelevant.  The DIE gatekeepers have been most successful at America’s top colleges and universities, where demand far outstrips available places.  These policies have not gone unnoticed by students.

Support for DIE comes from affluent school districts, where students and their parents have correctly concluded that embracing DIE rather than academics is the key to getting into top-tier colleges and from there into the elite.  A 2020 student petition from an affluent and high-performing school district in Westchester County, N.Y., pleaded for DIE certification: “an applicant’s racial literacy is a prerequisite in today’s hyper-competitive college process and college admissions require critical and empathetic thinking towards the racial justice challenges of our time.”

Government adopted the absurdity of “racial literacy” enthusiastically because it gave government a twofer.  DIE allowed government administrators to be relieved of their responsibility for poor governance of schools by first claiming the high moral ground of racism and then using it as the bludgeon to demand more money from taxpayers.  These state and federal government entities deserve failing ESG scores.

Corporations were shamed into accepting the corrupt tenets of DIE by the graduates of the corrupted universities whom the corporations hired and then promoted.  Some corporations, principally the investment managers of America’s pension funds and the proxy oligopoly, saw DIE and ESG as a vast untapped white space for lucrative business models based on forcing clients to kowtow to DIE and ESG dogma.

If DIE and ESG advocates were genuinely concerned about improving the outcomes of minority students and employees, K–12 test scores would be soaring, disadvantaged minority students would be admitted to colleges and professional schools on the basis of achievement, and corporations would not have to issue quotas on minority hiring.

Instead, U.S. test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress hit new lows in the 2022/2023 academic year, minority students’ SAT scores are well below those of white and Asian college students, and corporations are suffering from the forced hiring of unqualified minority candidates.  The organization reported the “first-ever significant score drop in math” for nine-year-olds and the largest decline “ever” in math for 13-year-olds.  Reading scores for 13-year-olds continued a 12-year-long decline.

In contrast, one of the few educational metrics on the upswing is spending on DIE.  LinkedIn has valued the U.S. corporate diversity and inclusion market at $4 billion in 2022, expected to grow at a 12.7% annual rate to $9 billion in 2023 and to $30 billion in 2030.

As further proof that DIE is nothing more than an elaborate power and money grab, the mayors of New York City and Chicago want to dismantle their programs for high-achieving students in the name of equity, and growing DIE administrators are busting the budgets of public and private universities, according to The College Fix.

The DIE edifice has suffered major defeats with its exposure at Harvard and other universities due to the efforts of journalist Christopher Rufo and Ivy League donors.  Despite these victories, focusing on only on DIE is a losing strategy.  It’s like chasing the wind.

Every time critics have landed major blows to the DIE establishment, its beneficiaries change its outward appearance to conceal reality.  A university president exposed for plagiarism gets benched.  University racial quotas ruled unconstitutional get workarounds.

Few schemes that have left so much failure and impairment in their wake have survived for decades without ingenious subterfuge.  In the universities, DIE’s birth name was Critical Theory.  Then Critical Race Theory.  Hit with resistance when it was introduced in K-12, CRT quickly became a softer-sounding Culturally Responsive Education and then DIE (and then DEI).

The recently trending Social-Emotional Learning is yet another camouflage for the K–12 schools to further the toxic mixture of oppressor/oppressed racism and alleged white fragility and act as a segue to the K–12 school system’s current deviation from its actual mission of teaching the three Rs — the depraved mission of gender “transitioning.”

Corporations that capitulated to DIE and ESG are beginning to admit their errors due to declines in productivity and financial performance.  According to an NPR report in August 2023, postings for DIE positions, which had jumped 92% in mid-2020 following the George Floyd–BLM riots, dropped precipitously beginning in mid-2023.

Unlike corporations, lower and higher educational institutions will never voluntarily admit to DIE’s catastrophic effects on students, faculty, and the acquisition of knowledge.  The only way to restore meritocracy to K–12 and higher education is to insist upon it as the sole, colorblind standard that has served as a basis for American exceptionalism and innovation.

Federal and state educational bureaucracies, including the U.S. Department of Education and unelected “experts” who populate state boards of education, must ensure that their policies and administrators hew to standards of excellence and performance.  Gone should be the “Dear Colleague” letters to force boards of education to submit to lower standards and gone should be curricula like the Common Core that destroys young peoples’ incentives to enjoy learning.

Believers in quality education as the basis of American exceptionalism, innovation, and informed participation in civic affairs should fight this battle on our terms, not on the terms of those who want to destroy the fabric of the country and our next generation.

Linda R. Killian is a retired financial analyst and a local Republican chairman focused on educational and zoning issues.

Image via Pxfuel.