documents<\/a> via Sunshine Law records requests revealing the stunning scope, scale, and radicalism of UF\u2019s \u201cdiversity and inclusion\u201d programs. Officially, the university has reported to Governor Ron DeSantis that it hosts 31 DEI initiatives at a cost of $5 million per year. But these figures don\u2019t capture the extent of the university\u2019s rapidly growing DEI complex. In reality, DEI is not a series of standalone programs but an ideology that has been embedded in virtually every department on campus. (In an email, a University of Florida spokesman declined to answer specific questions about UF\u2019s DEI bureaucracy and claimed that the university is \u201cnot indoctrinating.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\nThese changes happened quickly. Following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, UF leaders rolled out a massive number of diversity-focused initiatives. In July 2020, chief diversity officer Antonio Farias organized a university-wide plan for \u201cantiracism measures,\u201d which included mandatory diversity training for all students, faculty, and staff; an entire academic year focused on \u201cthe Black experience, racism and inequity\u201d; a presidential task force to explore the university\u2019s racist past; recommendations for renaming buildings, removing monuments, and banning \u201chistoric racist imagery\u201d; and a host of programs, speakers, workshops, and town halls dedicated to racialist ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The programs quickly spread. Under chief diversity officer Marsha McGriff, who replaced Farias in December 2021, DEI blitzed through the university administration. According to internal documents, McGriff\u2019s three-year plan included the creation of an \u201cinstitutional equity and inclusion blueprint,\u201d the expansion of a university-wide \u201cDEI infrastructure,\u201d and the deployment of DEI cadres to each division, school, and college, to monitor and enforce DEI ideology at every level of the bureaucracy. As part of this program, the embedded cadres were tasked with conducting loyalty surveys, with questionnaires asking faculty and staff to rate their agreement with statements evaluating their unit\u2019s \u201ccommitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion,\u201d financial support for DEI, and trainings on \u201cunconscious bias\u201d and \u201cmicro-aggressions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u201cinstitutional equity and inclusion blueprint\u201d has already had a major impact. Slides from a presentation on UF\u2019s six-month \u201cDEI inventory\u201d study, conducted by Damon Williams, a strategist for diversity leadership retained by the university, would appear to show that UF has created 1,018 separate DEI initiatives (slide 55). Williams\u2019s preliminary survey suggests that the process of ideological capture has spread throughout the university\u2019s departments and divisions: 73 percent \u201chave a DEI committee\u201d and \u201cDEI officer\u201d; 70 percent \u201cespoused commitment to DEI\u201d; 53 percent \u201chave a DEI strategic plan\u201d; and 30 percent have \u201cDEI in annual reports\u201d and use \u201cDEI in performance review.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One area of focus for the DEI bureaucrats is to forcibly recompose the racial demographics of the professoriate. In 2021, DEI officials administered a survey to measure affirmative action efforts in faculty hiring and to question departments about their commitment to DEI-style hiring. The list of favored practices included \u201cspecific formal training in diversity, equity, and inclusion,\u201d advertising through organizations \u201cformed around DEI identity,\u201d retaining an \u201cequity specialist\u201d to advise search committees, explicit race-based recruiting of individuals \u201cfrom historically underrepresented groups,\u201d and measuring \u201ccurrent workforce demographics\u201d against targets and benchmarks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The message from the top is not hard to decipher: departments must stack the deck in favor of racial minorities and use racial identity, rather than pure academic merit, as a key qualification in faculty hiring. And the administration will be watching\u2014DEI bureaucrats are maintaining a spreadsheet of departments and faculty that comply with these practices and those that do not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition, UF\u2019s Human Resources department has established an \u201cinclusive hiring hub\u201d that offers trainings, guidelines, and an official Inclusive Hiring Badge in support of race-based hiring. As part of this initiative, faculty are encouraged to submit to racial training programs and participate in racially segregated conversation groups, or \u201caffinity groups.\u201d The university\u2019s official \u201cinclusive hiring\u201d rubric explicitly prioritizes commitments to DEI ideology as part of the faculty hiring process, elevating \u201ccommitment to diversity\u201d as one of the \u201ckey competencies\u201d for job candidates. Other recommendations include a mandatory \u201cstatement on diversity and inclusion,\u201d which, in practice, serves as a political loyalty test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How does the HR bureaucracy view white faculty and staff? With derision. In a multi-day training program called Connected by UF, for example, the HR department and gender studies professor Trysh Travis lectured employees about their \u201cwhite privilege,\u201d \u201cwhite fragility,\u201d and the \u201c\u2018unearned advantages\u2019 of whiteness.\u201d These supposed aspects of white racial identity, according to Travis, require \u201cdiagnosis\u201d and \u201cfollow-up\u201d to achieve a cure. As part of their \u201cpersonal journey,\u201d white participants were encouraged to engage with a twelve-step program called Racists Anonymous and internalize a series of mantras, including: \u201cWe admit our collective history is rooted in white supremacy\u201d; \u201cI have come to admit that I am powerless over my addiction to racism\u201d; \u201cI believe that only a power greater than me can restore me in my humanness to the non-racist creature as God designed me to be.\u201d The ultimate goal? According to one featured resource: \u201cthe abolition of whiteness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The UF Counseling & Wellness Center has also become a hotbed of racial ideology. In 2021, the counseling department held a training program, \u201cHealing and Transforming Racial Trauma in the Counseling Field,\u201d that was designed, in the words of speaker Sandra Kim, to dismantle \u201cwhite supremacy, patriarchy, [and] exploitive capitalism,\u201d which are based on pathological \u201cwhiteness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The event resembled something of an intersectionality competition, with presenters\u2014all professional-class academics, therapists, and consultants\u2014taking turns positioning themselves with multi-hyphenated oppressed identities and claiming complex \u201cancestral traumas.\u201d They translated the basic narrative of critical race theory into therapeutic terms, arguing that counselors must practice \u201cintersectionality-oriented care\u201d that transforms the personal into the political\u2014and demand an overturning of society\u2019s basic structures. While whites might have an \u201cindividual identity,\u201d explained UF counseling professor Ana Puig, minorities have a \u201ccollectivistic identity\u201d and, therefore, healing personal trauma is only possible through political liberation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, Counseling & Wellness Center continues to use psychotherapy as a vehicle for ideology. Administrators and therapists hold racially segregated group-therapy sessions\u2014always organized with a political valence\u2014and promote resources from the activist organization Academics for Black Survival and Wellness, which accuses whites of \u201cwhite terrorism\u201d and encourages blacks to perform \u201cblack resistance.\u201d In this program, one presenter argues that whites are guilty of \u201cphysical repression, beatings, whippings, police brutalization, racial programs, [and] psychological torture.\u201d Another claims that \u201cthe culture of academia\u201d itself is an oppressive environment that also perpetuates the \u201cinstitutionalized effects of white terror.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The objective is not academic scholarship, but Marxist activism: \u201cWe got to save life in the universe from these capitalists in America. They\u2019re out to destroy every damn thing. So that\u2019s the mission.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
UF\u2019s descent into race-based ideology affects student programs, too. Scholarships and other opportunities have turned into something resembling a spoils system, punishing members of the oppressor class and rewarding members of the oppressed class. The university administers and promotes a range of scholarships that explicitly prohibit whites, and sometimes Asians, from applying. The UF\/Santa Fe College Faculty Development Project, Minority Teacher Education Scholarship, and McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, to name a few, all prohibit white students from submitting applications, with the latter also excluding Asian students. These racially segregated programs violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but as DEI ideology has become ubiquitous in higher education, administrators have grown accustomed to violating the law with little consequence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fortunately, legislators in Tallahassee have taken notice. House Republicans have proposed legislation that would eliminate DEI programming at all Florida public universities. They need to recognize, though, that DEI has embedded itself in every department, program, and initiative. It will take continued vigilance and aggressive enforcement to root out DEI and restore academic excellence as the guiding light of Florida\u2019s public university system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Original Article: https:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/dei-captures-university-of-florida<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The University of Florida has created a radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy that promotes racial and political preferences in faculty hiring, encourages white employees to engage with a twelve-step program called Racists Anonymous, and maintains racially segregated scholarship programs that violate federal civil rights law. I have obtained a cache of internal documents via Sunshine Law records requests revealing the stunning scope, scale, and radicalism of UF\u2019s \u201cdiversity and inclusion\u201d programs. Officially, the university has reported to Governor Ron DeSantis […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-threat-to-america"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2710,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2709\/revisions\/2710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}