Walter Block writes:  “Diversity, equality and inclusion amounts to the complaint that there are too many white males on the faculty.”  For those of you who, thankfully, left the university world (or never went there in the first place) before the cultural Marxists took over and essentially ruined American academe, I would like to add a few comments.

To understand the pervasive insanity that is “wokeness,” you have to understand that we are at the end of “the long march through the institutions,” as the early twentieth-century Italian communist Antonio Gramsci advocated.  (One good thing that Mussolini did was to imprison Gramsci).  Today’s politically-correct or “woke” university administrators and faculty are the political grandchildren and great grandchildren of Gramsci and his fellow “cultural Marxists.”  It may have just hit you in the face in the past couple of years but it has been ginning for decades, four of which I observed as a university economics professor.

When the old Jesuits who ran my former place of employment, Loyola University Maryland, died off and the younger generation took over, they immediately revealed themselves to be Gramsci-ites (aka, communistic ideologues hiding behind priests’ collars).  Walter Block is correct when he says that all there is to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the mating call of the cultural Marxists, is institutionalized discrimination against white heterosexual males.  Walter left out the heterosexual part.

At the very first meeting of the business school faculty, of which I was a part, with the new academic vice president (one Timothy Law Snyder), the very first thing that he said was:  “There are too many people in this room who look like me.”  Too many white heterosexual males.  He announced a statistic that 80 percent of Americans live in neighborhoods where their race is the majority, and said “we are going to change that.”  No talk at all about academics, just an announcement that the primary purpose of the institution from that point on would be institutionalized discrimination against white heterosexual males (not in those exact words of course, but “diversity, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla”).

For many years, every August the faculty would receive a memo from the administration boasting that the average SAT score of the incoming freshman class was a point or two higher than the previous year.  The cultural Marxists ended that by doing away with SATs altogether as an entrance requirement since they did not result in the correct racial mix of students.  They also pledged to spend many millions of dollars to achieve the correct racial and gender mix of students and faculty, which they did.  When they made this very clear, my economics department colleagues, mostly sheepish bureaucrats counting the days to retirement, made it a point to tell the administration that they were all on board with this, apparently hoping that that would mean another one percentage point pay raise that year.  I sent them an email asking if they were really in support of abolishing merit in hiring and replacing it with institutionalized discrimination against white heterosexual males.  No response, of course, but the email did apparently make its way to the administration.  The person I suspected of this little invasion of privacy was an affirmative action hire.  (The department had already voted to extend an offer to a Stanford Ph.D. with an excellent teaching and publication record who was the student of a Nobel prize winner, but the administration forced us to withdraw the offer and hire this person instead, who was not even a Ph.D. yet).  They took this so far that the university was once sued by a black man who had interviewed for a job as affirmative action officer but was told by his interviewer that he was not quite black enough; they wanted someone who was really, really black.  True story from an academic looney bin.

To the really committed communists in academe it is not so much whiteness that they hate, but the institutions of Western civilization.  After all, many of them are white themselves like their ideological godfather Gramsci.  Since the institutions of Western civilization are mostly the work of white men (“dead white males,” as the cultural Marxists sneeringly call them), it is necessary to wage a crusade against white males as symbols of Western civilization, just as the Nazis crusaded against Jews as symbols of capitalism, as F.A. Hayek explains in The Road to Serfdom.

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