Spend any amount of time on a college campus and you’ll realize academia is obsessed with the idea of “diversity.” The University of Texas at Austin takes this obsession and turns it into policy with its Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, a social justice screed that details how the University will make campus “a more diverse and inclusive space.”
What exactly does diversity mean? Well, UT’s own definition for diversity is just a laundry list of adjectives; black, brown, gay, transgender, etc. Almost any word that can be used to describe a person is fair game. With such a vague definition, it’s not immediately clear what the University is aiming to achieve, besides giving them the power to simply remake the student population not based on merit, but their vision for what a leftist utopia looks like.
What’s even more concerning is that UT doesn’t even have a budget for this, admitting in the FAQ section, “There has been no firm dollar amount placed on implementation of the plan.”
I’m glad taxpayer dollars and my tuition money are being so carefully spent.
Reading between the lines, it’s easy to see what the University is really trying to do—carry out their highly racialized social-justice agenda. In the Students section, they say they plan “to achieve a level of enrollment whereby students from underrepresented groups no longer feel isolated.” In other words, UT has racial quotas that need to be fulfilled.
It’s the same in terms of faculty, where they want more diversity hires. There is a laundry list of coded language in the document which deals with how they would achieve this, but one of the most galling is the proposal that diversity bureaucrats be able to singularly hire director-level faculty. And of course, they want social-justice courses to be required for academic and non-academic faculty alike.
Again, the diversity cult is not unique to UT. In fact, this type of thinking has reached such a level of normalcy that it’s causing an unsettling amount of complacency. The fact that a public university in Texas can be so brazen about their political agenda and wasteful use of resources is cause for concern, especially for those who value independent thought and quality education.
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