Rocky Top Goes Woke
University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK) is instituting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies, with the goal of making staff and students “diverse.” The usual bunkum is described, but the bit likely of greatest interest hereabouts is this:
UTK’s diversity plans put many academic disciplines in a bind. The physics and astronomy department, the faculty of which is entirely white and mostly male, had to invent a “diversity plan” knowing that 80 percent of physics Ph.D.s nationwide are men and that the discipline produced only 22 black Ph.D.s out of nearly 2,000 awarded in 2017, the last year for which we have reliable data. In light of this difficulty, the department promised to “provide a clear set of guidelines” about “expected behaviors” with respect to “diversity and inclusion” and to develop an anti-bias reporting mechanism. The department’s plan envisions no curricular or partnership changes; it aims merely to reflect the racial and sexual makeup of the “American physics community and, eventually, our nation.” Something has to give: either the school will stop devoting resources to a department that cannot deliver “diversity” for the foreseeable future, or the department will sacrifice professional standards in the name of those goals. Similar dilemmas confront the biological and engineering sciences.
It’s long past time that this sort of nonsense was not only dispensed with, but investigated. *Nobody* in the US benefits from this sort of thing apart from grifters. Foreign adversaries, however, must look upon this with glee. Do they also look upon this as the culmination of plans? The FBI *really* should be looking into it.