DEI, Censorship, and the Worst of Intentions Run Amok

How the Jackasses, the Pachyderms, and their Ruling Class Bosses control your inner monologue

Yesterday morning, I stopped by the cannabis dispensary, and when I handed my ID to the woman at the desk, she accidentally touched fingertips with me and apologized profusely. I said, jokingly, “Lucky we’re not at a university or they’d drag you down to HR and have you get a ‘talking to’ from DEI.” She replied, “Actually, I’m glad those places are available at the schools.”

“Sure, but they really abuse their authority,” I answered.

“I guess…”

She looked flummoxed, but she did have a point. Students absolutely do need a recourse when a professor or administrator abuses their authority, whether that abuse involves racism, sexism, or any quid pro quo exchange. It happened to me, more than once. They’ll even steal your work if you let them. University professors — as anyone who’s spent any time in drag school (that’s not a typo) will tell you — get their little heads puffed up with all sorts of unwarranted pride, displaying their diplomas and publications throughout their office, as if they were setting up some sort of academic equivalent of the ecclesiastical: decorating themselves with the requiste regalia, proof that they have been vetted by a holy see, and above all, can be trusted.

Universities are where dominant culture is perpetuated, not a crucible in which radical politics is birthed or old and counterproductive concepts laid to waste. Gramsci, Chomsky, and currently, researchers in the field of mismatch theory, have all documented how elite institutions reproduce the class structures of the oligarchy and the corporatists (not that the lines between the two don’t blur on occasion). This is especially true in America, where people like Jodi Dean, Cornell West, and scads of others have had their reputations sullied, been dismissed from their teaching assignments, or simply fired, as the above article in The Guardian illustrates.

Yes, we indeed need these resources, official avenues of complaint and redress, for students. But what I found shocking in the woman’s reply was her surprise at the notion that anyone could say anything negative about what has become the insane overreach of DEI departments across this country. I had a Japanese student who once accused me of cursing at her, at length and fluently, in Japanese, which I would have felt really bad about had I been able to speak a word of Japanese. She was sent packing, fortunately, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, but they treated me like a criminal. At one point, the assistant director of HR looked at me and said, “It doesn’t matter if you said it, she felt hurt.”

I’m sorry, but I do not possess the necessary levels of phony white liberal guilt and hypocrisy to be played that easily.

None of this is any surprise because these departments and their employees are not there to mete out justice, but rather perpetuate an ideology and in doing so, earn a pension. If that were not the case, such an absurdity would be impossible for anyone to utter. Again, you can’t make this stuff up, but this is what they do, and they do not find statements like the above to be preposterous, which was made all the more evident when I explained the preposterousness to her.

Here’s a reminder: When you get fired, suspended, or muzzled for doing something righteous — as did Jodi Dean and countless numbers of students by standing up for Gaza — it’s the DEI that comes knocking on your door.

More recently, we saw Columbia kiss the ring of Mango Caesar, just like Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, NY, who bent over for Genocide Joe, suspending Dean for nothing more than publishing an article in support of Palestine. Universities, corporations, and governmental bodies are a blob, one giant, oozing entity that shares organs and has the same goal: making sure that shit don’t change.

So, in a supreme moment of irony, someone like Dean, who truly does stand for the principles of equity and inclusion, who speaks for the marginalized brown people across the globe whom we bomb into rubble, is muzzled. It’s a crystal clear illustration of Sheldon Wolin's concept of inverted totalitarianism: a wall of indoctrination and institutional power, hiding behind phony virtue signaling, going about the business of crushing dissent while maintaining control through its various tentacles, like DEI departments, NGOs, and think tanks.

Exploitation and censorship posing as a rainbow colored unicorn powered by technicolor farts: A fairy tale for adults.

Thus, in one sense, some may perceive Trump’s desire to squash these departments as sensible and logical. But again, this is another lie from the people who own you, another inversion of the truth, and simply a shift from a blue-hued totalitarianism to a traditional, blood-red fascist autocracy.

Who wants either abomination? Still, the response on the part of Columbia is tragic and cowardly. Regardless of what one thinks of DEI, the university’s caving to executive authority is proof of what I alluded to earlier: these are in no way radical institutions where novel concepts are birthed. Universities are as essential to the hammer, and to making us a slave to that hammer, as are the oligarchy, the media, and our politicians. It’s absurd to trust any of them, and it is anathema to any of liberalism’s principles to do what Columbia did.

Whatever liberalism may mean in this era, it’s not the liberalism of Diderot or John Stuart Mill. It has, like everything else, been swallowed up by the inversion. This is why many marginalized people in America, people of color, queer people, poor people, incarcerated people, end up believing in and voting for the very crooks and institutions that are offering you solutions which do nothing but pour more napalm onto an already devastating fire.

How do we ensure students have resources at their disposal that won’t end up biting them in the ass, getting good professors dismissed, and functioning not as nodes of institutional control, but a means of empowering individuals? Remember Juvenal’s caveat: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

We are supposed to be keeping our eyes on the guards, and most Americans have been delinquent in their duties, especially if it means a sacrifice in terms of time or brainpower. Universities are a big part of the blob that is responsible for what Byung-Hul Chan, in The Burnout Society, describes as “self-censoring” — a movement away from systems of mass surveillance to a system of indoctrination and incessant cultural messaging that ensures a self-auditing populace and the perpetuation of the dominant discourse.

In other words, it’s the story the ruling class wants to hear and wants you to memorize, word for word.