I remember after a massive container ship lost power at the entry to Baltimore harbor back in March… and slammed into the Francis Scott Bridge sending it crashing into the water below. Several Mexican born bridge workers were killed in the accident. Obviously, they weren’t remotely in control of the ship, but MAGA GOP officials found a way to blame woke diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies as a cause of the incident. For example, as the Washington Post (March 28th) reported:
“Utah state Rep. Phil Lyman (R) blamed DEI policies for the bridge collapse. The Utah gubernatorial candidate running against Gov. Spencer Cox (R) shared another account’s post online that attacked Port of Baltimore Commissioner Karenthia Barber, a Black woman whose biography says she owns a consulting practice that takes on work related to DEI. Responding to the post about Barber’s background, Lyman wrote on X on Tuesday morning [3/26] that ‘this is what happens when you have Governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens.’…
“Anthony Sabatini, a Florida congressional candidate, blamed DEI for the bridge collapse in a post on X the morning of the collapse. And Hung Cao, a Republican challenging Sen. Tim Kaine (D) in Virginia, expressed similar frustrations, agreeing with conservative radio host Larry O’Connor, who said [Biden appointed Transportation Secretary Pete] Buttigieg ‘spends more time talking about racial equity with regard to highways and about climate change than about focusing on the fundamentals of keeping our country and our infrastructure working.’” These days, with MAGA pretty much openly catering to White Christian nationalist values as their core platform, coming out against of anything aimed at leveling the equality playing field for racial and ethnic minorities is MAGA fair game.
Slamming several major blue state university programs for woke DEI policies, red states have indulged in a pattern of mockery of universities that practiced admissions policies that opened doors to minority students who did not have the glorious high school opportunities of traditional applicants. Mostly schools in blue states. And while there are indeed a few phenomenal universities in red states – UT-Austin, Duke, UVa, NNC-Chapel Hill, Emory, Rice, Vanderbilt, etc. – their numbers pale in comparison to the number of such top ranked institutions in blue states. Still, last June in a 6-3 decision across two cases – Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina – the US Supreme Court “severely limited, if not effectively ended, the use of affirmative action in college admissions…
“Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that college admissions programs can consider race merely to allow an applicant to explain how their race influenced their character in a way that would have a concrete effect on the university. But a student ‘must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,’ Roberts wrote. The majority effectively, though not explicitly, overruled its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s consideration of race ‘as one factor among many, in an effort to assemble a student body that is diverse in ways broader than race.’ Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the Roberts opinion.
“Justice Sonia Sotomayor – a graduate of Princeton and Yale Law School who once called herself ‘the perfect affirmative action baby’ – dissented, in an opinion that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor emphasized that the majority’s decision had rolled ‘back decades of precedent and momentous progress’ and ‘cement[ed] a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society.’” SCOTUSblog, June 29, 2023. From the MAGA anti-educated elite leadership comes a typical but dramatically absurd slam that suggests that schools that had minority admission plans could not be trusted to graduate competent students.
Writing for the May 30th Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik examines a MAGA trashing of one of America’s mostly highly regarding medical schools: “The right-wing and Republican project to eradicate diversity and inclusiveness from American society has become more absurd with every passing day, but it will be hard for anyone to produce a more vapid and fatuous effort than a recent article labeling UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine as a ‘failed medical school.’
“The reason for that label, according to the right-wing Washington Free Beacon, which published the article, is that UCLA has ‘prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.’… To its perverse credit, the Beacon doesn’t conceal the racist import of its claims; on the contrary, it announces it outright, citing the school’s ‘race-based admissions’ and quoting one of its anonymous sources (there is no other category) as saying, ‘We want diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it.’… An admissions officer is quoted anonymously as grousing, ‘All the normal criteria for getting into medical school only apply to people of certain races. For other people, those criteria are completely disregarded.’
“The article purports to rely on complaints from eight of the school’s faculty members. The medical school’s full-time faculty numbers more than 2,000, with an additional 2,000 to 2,500 part-timers or adjuncts. That should give you a clue to how deeply the Beacon delved into the facts before issuing its eye-catching conclusion… But that’s only one aspect of a piece that trips over its supposed ‘facts’ at almost every turn, openly cherry-picks data to confirm its biases, and treats every factoid as an artifact of the quest for diversity. Its author doesn’t even appear to understand the difference between the student admissions process and the process of accepting residents, who are medical school graduates, many if not most of whom received their medical education elsewhere.” Indeed, UCLA’s Geffen Medical School has continued its top ranking by US News and World Report, in its annual rankings: it rose three spots to No. 11 in research and maintained its No. 6 position in primary care. In Los Angeles, it is the number one rated hospital… and the Medical School’s faculty is heavily populated with doctors from that medical facility.
I have to ask if “woke” educational practices – such as whitewashing slavery and racial discrimination from lesson plans and schoolbooks and severe book banning from school libraries of books that have been in those libraries for decades – produce graduates who are wokefully unprepared even to attend college. Is this rightwing political effort to castigate education that is trying to improve the overall impact of their efforts really good for America?
I’m Peter Dekom, and does any of this sound as if the GOP is prioritizing elevating quality access to higher education that actually will benefit society as a whole?
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