By the way, after a welcome and happy pause, we are back to DEI full-speed, taking up exactly where we stopped a few months ago. I was at a meeting yesterday, and it was the summer of 2020 all over again. Every sentence for the first 30 minutes had the word “diverse” in it.
I don’t know what signals the administration received, first, to put the sloganeering on pause, and then to resume it but it works like a well-oiled machine.
Do people actually engage in that type of discussion and language?
I wonder to what extend if people just don’t use that language and don’t engage, it may lose its power.
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The people asked the administration to suggest ways to ask for DEI statements in hiring without openly violating the law. The administration obliged. “We had so many ways to get around that!” an administrator chirped excitedly.
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So… are leftie academics engaged in the sort of formal, semi-covert “small groups” propaganda dissemination the soviets had, and that Ellul talks about? Like, is there somebody in there who answers to the Big Boss outside your uni, who is relaying orders from high command– back off so you don’t get defunded, ok now here are the ways we’re going to work around it, etc?
That’s a great question. I noticed it back when I was a leftist and a union organizer at Yale. Every time when something arose, even something very new, it’s like everybody would receive a secret memo and start saying the exact same thing in unison. I kept asking, “how did you all know what your reaction should be to this completely new thing? Who told you?” And nobody ever explained because, I guess, I wasn’t high up enough in the organization.
Among conservatives, there’s a trillion shades of opinion, many more than there are actual people. Everybody has their own very idiosyncratic take. But leftists are a hive mind. I still have no idea how it works and who flips the switch that turns them on and off.
Chewed on it a while.
The left in the US was not always like that. It must’ve been a takeover, and if I had to guess, I’d say happened sometime after 2003. Would bet you could nail down a precise year if you could figure out when, exactly, they stopped protesting against Monsanto.
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The thing is, there used to be diversity of opinion on the left, different flavors of leftie: granola nature hippies, feminists, left-anarchists, druggie libertarians, yuppie foodies, Bernie socialists, blue collar union dudes, anti-corporation types, well-meaning elementary school teachers.
I think the borg-assimilation thing started with the smoking-ban campaigns and the gay-marriage push– all that seemed to really get going late 90s, early 2000s. There was a crazy amount of money behind it, but the campaigns pretended to be grassroots, hid their backers, and were maybe the first time massive internet propaganda trolling was deployed politically. Was that the point where the money took it over, and the left took up the causes of the rich, globalists, and corporations?
I remember the big 2003 anti-iraq-war protests, where I first realized that these demonstrations, while they attracted a lot of local participants, were being arranged by professional outfits, who were shipping the same colorfully-costumed “protesters” (who apparently didn’t have jobs or families) around to all the protests all over the country, and this was why they couldn’t have them all on the same day. I attended the one in Boston that year, with a photog friend. Looking at the photos later, and comparing them with photos from the other protests– you could spot the same people at multiple events. I had a certain respect for them before that. It evaporated then: like, oh, this is all fake.
Occupy Wall Street was 2011 and it was well underway by then: there were still earnest lefties participating there, but you get firsthand accounts that many participants were clearly getting paid to be there, didn’t care about the cause, just the photo-op, and were actively hounding the true believers out because they were in the way of whatever the agenda was. There was a sense of betrayal that the thing had been so massively infiltrated, but it wasn’t clear by whom. After that, the true believers started drifting off, and a lot of them are “right” these days (same with the gay marriage thing: a lot of the “normie gays” have departed the left since). The last big anti-Monsanto protest seems to have been in 2015. Were they paid even then? Those protests were remarkably impotent. Were the corporate sponsors just throwing a bone to the remaining dupes who still thought they were Making a Difference? I notice the only people who mention glyphosate in the food supply anymore are conservative agrarians. It’s a right issue now.
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This is so true. The Left ditched all of this variety and became the party that serves the interest of very wealthy people with boutique identities and a strong need for ever-expanding forms of consumerism. The categories of the leftists you list all split in two. Many of the granola hippies and feminists now vote Republican because the former don’t want their kids to be drugged and the latter don’t want men in their locker rooms. The rest of these groups went corporate drone.
And you are so right. When I joined the US left, there was all this variety. I loved hanging out with the la-la hippies who planted vegetable gardens in-between doing yoga poses and drying handmade clothes on a clothesline. I’m the exact opposite of them, and being around them was so enjoyable because it was a different world. I loved the blue-collar left. They were so different from the hippies. True variety, true diversity.
But yes, by the time of the Occupy protests, which I hated and couldn’t even explain why, it was all about rich kids with purple hair feeling sorry for themselves.
They’re rebranding DEI as the department of Inclusive Excellence at many universities now. I hope the administration is keeping track of this otherwise all their work would’ve amounted to nothing.
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“rebranding DEI as the department of Inclusive Excellence”
….uh…. shouldn’t that be department of excellent inclusion? Because Department of Inclusive Excellence returns us to the unfortunate acronym….
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It can’t be an accident that these people have no ear for the language. Saying “inclusive excellence” is a mouthful. It’s ugly. It’s unpronounceable. There’s nothing these people are good at. They are the definition of boring mediocrity.
Want to know how they made us sign our prefab email?
“With Cougar cheer.” Yes, the cougar is the mascot. But still, I feel like a total cougar, promising a bunch of 18-year-olds to ignite their passion and peppering my missive with exclamation points like an eager TikToker.
And yes, we were encouraged to make dancing TikTok videos for students. A few departments obliged. I obviously didn’t.
How is it possible that I know young people find a bunch of overwhelming, grey-haired professors dancing on TikTok cringe but other professors don’t get it? We all spend a lot of time around young people. How hard is it to notice that they don’t like it when oldsters pander to them by acting like teenagers?
I should shut up, though, because I’m now a passion-igniting cougar, and it doesn’t get more cringe than that.
Once you deprive people of their dignity, you can do anything to them.
We are now forced to read a book ok that argues that professors shouldn’t do research. The time we dedicate to research is taken away from the highly important task of copy-pasting messages about passionate cougars. You should have seen the Dean’s face when I mentioned that I’m finishing another book. In Ukraine, we call it “he looks like I shat into his pocket.”
LOL, classic ;-D
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Can someone potentially accuse you of harassment for sending emails to 18-year olds about igniting their passions signed as cougar? That must be an excellent way to get rid of inconvenient faculty… just look at the emails they are sending! Perhaps your marketing team is run by an evil genius.
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There are many, many ways this can go very wrong. Thankfully, I have two long emails from the administration instructing me to copy paste this text as is. I’m at the point where I maniacally preserve every communication because you are absolutely right, these people can’t be trusted.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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