When diversity initiatives conflict with principles of merit and free expression, what happens to those who speak up? This firsthand account explores the tensions between inclusion and conformity.
The level of betrayal you describe here is chilling. Chilling to the core. And your response to all of it is courageous and highly admirable but the harm remains. And the machinery to continue the harm is intact. I am sorry for your loss .
Thank you for sharing this. I know what discrimination and institutional abuse look like because I lived through it.
My experience came through the desegregation policies that shaped public education in my state. As students, we were told that admission to our arts magnet school was based on talent, dedication, and years of hard work. We believed we had earned our place. I certainly did. I had been training as a dancer since the age of two, raised by a dance teacher, and spent my childhood working toward the opportunity I thought I had achieved on merit.
Years later, I learned that merit was not the whole story. The institution’s priority was meeting desegregation targets, and many of us were valued less for our abilities than for the demographic boxes we helped check. We were led to believe we had been chosen solely for our achievements when, in reality, we were often serving a larger political and bureaucratic objective. The realization was devastating. What I had viewed as recognition of my talent increasingly felt like I had been used as a seat-filler in a system that was never fully honest about why it wanted me there in the first place.
The contradiction became impossible to ignore when my sending district refused to pay the tuition bill. Instead of resolving the issue through the adults and institutions responsible for it, the principal’s solution was to make me a “work-study” student.
I wasn’t working for spending money. I was cleaning the school to pay for an education that I had been told was an opportunity. I was a teenager, not an employee. The dispute was between government institutions, yet I was the one forced to bear the burden. Looking back, it is difficult not to see it as a form of humiliation. Rather than being treated as a student whose education had value, I was treated as an obligation to be worked off.
Years later, when I sought accountability, I encountered the same wall that so many others do. Lawyers declined to take the case. Institutions denied responsibility. No one wanted to examine what happened or what it revealed about the system.
The promise was opportunity, diversity, inclusion, and equity. The reality, at least in my experience, was very different. I learned that lofty ideals can be used to justify unequal treatment, exploitation, and the sacrifice of individual students for institutional goals. The people who claimed to be fighting discrimination created a system in which some students were treated as human beings and others were treated as instruments.
That realization left a deeper wound than the cleaning ever did. It forced me to question whether I had ever been seen as a person at all—or whether I had simply been a seat-filler in someone else’s vision of social progress.
I can check the boxes for American Indian, as well as Mayflower descendant. Neither of those boxes qualifies me to land a job at all, but especially so if another is more qualified than I.
Your comment shows the harm caused to people on both sides of this issue. I believe that DEI started with good intentions, and I believe it has helped society. However, now it has been hijacked by extremists who are just plain power tripping.
I'm a prof, although not in as perilous a situation as yours was. I'm at a public university in a red state, and the state government as well as the Board of Regents really do support free speech.
So, if I wrote an email like yours, I would not be fired, but I would probably be ostracized by many of my colleagues. Most of the people I work with have no problem whatsoever actively discriminating against white males in hiring. They would never call it that of course; they would call it "diversifying".
One way you know what DEI is all about is by the fact that its practitioners are never able to honestly name or account for the things they do or advocate for. It's all spin and euphemisms, and it's as blatantly dishonest as it is immoral.
It is odd that free-thinking Academics consider 'ostracizing' a person to be a form of punishment. Isn't being kicked out of a immoral community a good thing? Wouldn't the world be a better place if more people listened to their conscience and rejected immoral communities?
Maybe this says too much about me but I would rather be among those who stood against the holocaust and died than to have killed the innocent and lived. Death is preferable to living a long life after committing such attrocites.
Wow. You are lucky if you get to spend 99% on teaching and scholarship. I just ran the numbers and when factoring committee work (all political), dept mtgs (all political) and dealing with non-academic student issues (sigh) I am lucky to spend 60% of my time on teaching and scholarship. Can we trade jobs?
FWIW: I must apologize for the sloppy analogy: the death camp guards are best compared with those in academia who hunt down and ostracize/ destroy the "wrong sort" - not the honest professors, like you & me. Perhaps the gestapo, KGB or Stasi would work better - the guards were, after all, just following orders. In any case, I'd rather stand for what is right and suffer the consequences than participate in a immoral community.
99% of my work, not of my time. I have the usual array of committees and meetings that are about governance and departmental, college, and university-level things. Most of that is just managing stuff, not “work”.
I think of “work” as creative endeavors. I keep politics out of work. When colleagues insist on pushing their ignorant politics within professional or social settings, I ignore it. It’s irrelevant.
About 40% of my _time_ goes into bureaucratic nonsense.
However, 60% of my _effort_ goes there.
Yet, 90% of _unpleasantness_ comes from bureaucratic nonsense.
The last item is due to so many performative tasks such as updating the official curriculum of each of our Astronomy & Physics courses with a DEI statement. Before it is accepted, some Ignorant Politics Pusher (IPP) evaluates the statement and typically rejects it without specifics (My IPP kept saying that my DEI statement just needed 'tweaks'). Plus, I cannot ignore it because the admin will pull classes from the catalog if they lack an approved DEI statement. Thank god for ChatGTP!
You are lucky to teach in a Red State - where you _can_ ignore it - I teach in a very Blue State. Again: Do you want to swap jobs?
The DEI trainings that my daughters were required to complete at various stages in their educations at various universities all boiled down to ranking identities according to their "privilege." The trainings were annual beat-downs and exercises in divisiveness.
Every application has a line at the bottom informing young people that more interesting identities are preferred.
Thank you. Jim, for having the courage to resist and for sharing this chilling account of administrative abuse. You are not alone. Lukianoff and Schlott suggest the academic purges in the name of DEI have been much worse than in the McCarthy era.
Alas, the problems are even worse in private institutions than in public institutions such as UVa. After 7 years and $75,000 of my own funds, last year the US Supreme Court declined to review my case based on my college’s claim that as a private institution they were immune to judicial review in matters concerning due process or failure to provide academic freedom.
Perhaps if two candidates for the same position have equal qualifications within the uncertainties, the hiring committee should flip a coin.
I have noticed that with dual hiring, departments/universities end up filled with couples. I don't believe that this is entirely meritocratic. It solves *some* academic women's two-body problem. In science, it's usually a man securing the tenure-track offer, threatening to decline the offer unless his wife/girlfriend is hired, and the wife/girlfriend taking a teaching position. This is held up as *the* way to diversify science. The woman quota can be met with trailing spouses. The university gets to save on insurance and tuition remission.
It's interesting that this conflict hinges on forcing people to make empty DEI statements when real DEI consists of basic politeness--noticing who might feel left out of conversations and inviting them to contribute, checking on how students are doing, just not being a total jerk...
I had hoped that I would be fired, given a perp walk accompanied by campus cops, and that someone would film it so that I could go viral. Instead, I had to request a campus cop escort because I didn't feel safe when removing my belongings from the office :).
I really appreciate how you point out that the legal victory may not have been worth the ordeal. I learned that pursuing my case would costs hundreds of thousands and years of effort, so I had to give up. Now I just want to figure out how I can speak publicly without encountering spurious defamation lawsuits.
Imagine how many heads in the media would explode if the preference in hiring was given to the candidate who was 'white' or 'male.' Discrimination is wrong in all forms and engineering 'equity' in any field is just that. Codifying discrimination in hiring policy is directly violating the Civil Rights Act.
“I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.” - Booker T. Washington from "My Larger Education."
This is just as relevant now as it was back in 1911. 'Race' can be substituted for anything else and the statement remains just as true.
I am near retiring from teaching Astronomy in College and Academic positions are no longer desirable. Experts used to think Academic positions were high status but now they are fleeing to the private sector (or foreign lands). Private companies must be profitable in a competitive marketplace and cannot afford the distraction of 'righting past wrongs.' They need their experts to focus on their fields of expertise.
The best of the best always have choices. Do they choose industry, which pays them well to do what they love, or do they choose Academia, which is ideologically centered and feels like a Sharaska?
But think about the students:
The flight of talent to the private sector means only second or third stringers are willing to teach college - the trend in Academic talent is manifest by the decreasing quality of publications. (note: top talent that do remain in Academia, such as Noble Laureates, are usually insulated from both ideology and teaching). This educational brain-drain hits at just the wrong time. As tuition grows, the quality of college plummets, and more students who were promised entry to the Middle Class will be unable to pay off student loans.
I expect to see a wave of class-action lawsuits against Universities soon.
Thank you for standing up to the DEI tyranny. Are there NGO's willing to file class action lawsuits against this travesty? If not; why not.. At the very least, shouldn't there but a GoFundMe type fund to help with legal costs for anyone willing to fight. I do applaud Fair for All for shining a light on the situation. For every day this continues, the damage becomes more difficult to overcome. Not to mention the white heterosexual males lives that are ruined.
No one will take these cases. See the Asian dad who is representing his son using AI because no one would take his case against DEI. I couldn’t get a lawyer either. It would have exposed too much corruption. It wasn’t one thing, it was many.
The level of betrayal you describe here is chilling. Chilling to the core. And your response to all of it is courageous and highly admirable but the harm remains. And the machinery to continue the harm is intact. I am sorry for your loss .
OUR loss........
Thank you for sharing this. I know what discrimination and institutional abuse look like because I lived through it.
My experience came through the desegregation policies that shaped public education in my state. As students, we were told that admission to our arts magnet school was based on talent, dedication, and years of hard work. We believed we had earned our place. I certainly did. I had been training as a dancer since the age of two, raised by a dance teacher, and spent my childhood working toward the opportunity I thought I had achieved on merit.
Years later, I learned that merit was not the whole story. The institution’s priority was meeting desegregation targets, and many of us were valued less for our abilities than for the demographic boxes we helped check. We were led to believe we had been chosen solely for our achievements when, in reality, we were often serving a larger political and bureaucratic objective. The realization was devastating. What I had viewed as recognition of my talent increasingly felt like I had been used as a seat-filler in a system that was never fully honest about why it wanted me there in the first place.
The contradiction became impossible to ignore when my sending district refused to pay the tuition bill. Instead of resolving the issue through the adults and institutions responsible for it, the principal’s solution was to make me a “work-study” student.
I wasn’t working for spending money. I was cleaning the school to pay for an education that I had been told was an opportunity. I was a teenager, not an employee. The dispute was between government institutions, yet I was the one forced to bear the burden. Looking back, it is difficult not to see it as a form of humiliation. Rather than being treated as a student whose education had value, I was treated as an obligation to be worked off.
Years later, when I sought accountability, I encountered the same wall that so many others do. Lawyers declined to take the case. Institutions denied responsibility. No one wanted to examine what happened or what it revealed about the system.
The promise was opportunity, diversity, inclusion, and equity. The reality, at least in my experience, was very different. I learned that lofty ideals can be used to justify unequal treatment, exploitation, and the sacrifice of individual students for institutional goals. The people who claimed to be fighting discrimination created a system in which some students were treated as human beings and others were treated as instruments.
That realization left a deeper wound than the cleaning ever did. It forced me to question whether I had ever been seen as a person at all—or whether I had simply been a seat-filler in someone else’s vision of social progress.
You have the moral character to see the whole picture, which makes you a better person than those box checkers. Thanks for sharing.
I was also surprised to find that lawyers didn't want to take my case...or even take my money in exchange for legal advice.
Thank you for your comment.
I can check the boxes for American Indian, as well as Mayflower descendant. Neither of those boxes qualifies me to land a job at all, but especially so if another is more qualified than I.
Your comment shows the harm caused to people on both sides of this issue. I believe that DEI started with good intentions, and I believe it has helped society. However, now it has been hijacked by extremists who are just plain power tripping.
I'm a prof, although not in as perilous a situation as yours was. I'm at a public university in a red state, and the state government as well as the Board of Regents really do support free speech.
So, if I wrote an email like yours, I would not be fired, but I would probably be ostracized by many of my colleagues. Most of the people I work with have no problem whatsoever actively discriminating against white males in hiring. They would never call it that of course; they would call it "diversifying".
One way you know what DEI is all about is by the fact that its practitioners are never able to honestly name or account for the things they do or advocate for. It's all spin and euphemisms, and it's as blatantly dishonest as it is immoral.
It is odd that free-thinking Academics consider 'ostracizing' a person to be a form of punishment. Isn't being kicked out of a immoral community a good thing? Wouldn't the world be a better place if more people listened to their conscience and rejected immoral communities?
Maybe this says too much about me but I would rather be among those who stood against the holocaust and died than to have killed the innocent and lived. Death is preferable to living a long life after committing such attrocites.
99+% of my work is teaching wonderful students, or doing my own solo scholarly stuff like publications. I don't "do politics" on the job.
So, my job is a bit different than that of a Nazi death camp executioner.
Wow. You are lucky if you get to spend 99% on teaching and scholarship. I just ran the numbers and when factoring committee work (all political), dept mtgs (all political) and dealing with non-academic student issues (sigh) I am lucky to spend 60% of my time on teaching and scholarship. Can we trade jobs?
FWIW: I must apologize for the sloppy analogy: the death camp guards are best compared with those in academia who hunt down and ostracize/ destroy the "wrong sort" - not the honest professors, like you & me. Perhaps the gestapo, KGB or Stasi would work better - the guards were, after all, just following orders. In any case, I'd rather stand for what is right and suffer the consequences than participate in a immoral community.
99% of my work, not of my time. I have the usual array of committees and meetings that are about governance and departmental, college, and university-level things. Most of that is just managing stuff, not “work”.
I think of “work” as creative endeavors. I keep politics out of work. When colleagues insist on pushing their ignorant politics within professional or social settings, I ignore it. It’s irrelevant.
I see. Well, for the sake of specificity:
About 40% of my _time_ goes into bureaucratic nonsense.
However, 60% of my _effort_ goes there.
Yet, 90% of _unpleasantness_ comes from bureaucratic nonsense.
The last item is due to so many performative tasks such as updating the official curriculum of each of our Astronomy & Physics courses with a DEI statement. Before it is accepted, some Ignorant Politics Pusher (IPP) evaluates the statement and typically rejects it without specifics (My IPP kept saying that my DEI statement just needed 'tweaks'). Plus, I cannot ignore it because the admin will pull classes from the catalog if they lack an approved DEI statement. Thank god for ChatGTP!
You are lucky to teach in a Red State - where you _can_ ignore it - I teach in a very Blue State. Again: Do you want to swap jobs?
Thank you for your courage.
Disgusting behavior by the DEI commissars...
The DEI trainings that my daughters were required to complete at various stages in their educations at various universities all boiled down to ranking identities according to their "privilege." The trainings were annual beat-downs and exercises in divisiveness.
Every application has a line at the bottom informing young people that more interesting identities are preferred.
"I will never forget looking back on the building where I arrived as a postdoc 50 years ago and was now leaving in disgrace, never to return."
It is the NRAO director that is a disgrace.
You did not leave in disgrace. You left with your integrity intact as a brave man. Cheers!
Thank you. Jim, for having the courage to resist and for sharing this chilling account of administrative abuse. You are not alone. Lukianoff and Schlott suggest the academic purges in the name of DEI have been much worse than in the McCarthy era.
Alas, the problems are even worse in private institutions than in public institutions such as UVa. After 7 years and $75,000 of my own funds, last year the US Supreme Court declined to review my case based on my college’s claim that as a private institution they were immune to judicial review in matters concerning due process or failure to provide academic freedom.
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/an-open-letter-to-lyle-d-roelofs-president-of-berea-college
The Value of Values — Minding The Campus
The Baffling 'Bull' Behind Title IX — Minding The Campus
https://researchers.one/articles/22.11.00007v1
Your survey does not look offensive.
Jim, thank you for fighting the good fight. "All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing" Edmund Burke
Did the court order them to give you back access to the NRAO data/resources you had, or is your retribution still continuing?
What a shameful disgrace for them.
Thank you for sharing this story. Similar things happened to me.
People who have not experienced this first-hand cannot understand how wrong it is.
People who fight against this are heroes.
Perhaps if two candidates for the same position have equal qualifications within the uncertainties, the hiring committee should flip a coin.
I have noticed that with dual hiring, departments/universities end up filled with couples. I don't believe that this is entirely meritocratic. It solves *some* academic women's two-body problem. In science, it's usually a man securing the tenure-track offer, threatening to decline the offer unless his wife/girlfriend is hired, and the wife/girlfriend taking a teaching position. This is held up as *the* way to diversify science. The woman quota can be met with trailing spouses. The university gets to save on insurance and tuition remission.
It's interesting that this conflict hinges on forcing people to make empty DEI statements when real DEI consists of basic politeness--noticing who might feel left out of conversations and inviting them to contribute, checking on how students are doing, just not being a total jerk...
I had hoped that I would be fired, given a perp walk accompanied by campus cops, and that someone would film it so that I could go viral. Instead, I had to request a campus cop escort because I didn't feel safe when removing my belongings from the office :).
I really appreciate how you point out that the legal victory may not have been worth the ordeal. I learned that pursuing my case would costs hundreds of thousands and years of effort, so I had to give up. Now I just want to figure out how I can speak publicly without encountering spurious defamation lawsuits.
https://substack.com/@sylviab317156/note/p-202514711?r=315un8
Imagine how many heads in the media would explode if the preference in hiring was given to the candidate who was 'white' or 'male.' Discrimination is wrong in all forms and engineering 'equity' in any field is just that. Codifying discrimination in hiring policy is directly violating the Civil Rights Act.
“I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.” - Booker T. Washington from "My Larger Education."
This is just as relevant now as it was back in 1911. 'Race' can be substituted for anything else and the statement remains just as true.
I agree.
I am near retiring from teaching Astronomy in College and Academic positions are no longer desirable. Experts used to think Academic positions were high status but now they are fleeing to the private sector (or foreign lands). Private companies must be profitable in a competitive marketplace and cannot afford the distraction of 'righting past wrongs.' They need their experts to focus on their fields of expertise.
The best of the best always have choices. Do they choose industry, which pays them well to do what they love, or do they choose Academia, which is ideologically centered and feels like a Sharaska?
But think about the students:
The flight of talent to the private sector means only second or third stringers are willing to teach college - the trend in Academic talent is manifest by the decreasing quality of publications. (note: top talent that do remain in Academia, such as Noble Laureates, are usually insulated from both ideology and teaching). This educational brain-drain hits at just the wrong time. As tuition grows, the quality of college plummets, and more students who were promised entry to the Middle Class will be unable to pay off student loans.
I expect to see a wave of class-action lawsuits against Universities soon.
Thank you for your words. Heartbreaking and chilling, at once.
Thank you for standing up to the DEI tyranny. Are there NGO's willing to file class action lawsuits against this travesty? If not; why not.. At the very least, shouldn't there but a GoFundMe type fund to help with legal costs for anyone willing to fight. I do applaud Fair for All for shining a light on the situation. For every day this continues, the damage becomes more difficult to overcome. Not to mention the white heterosexual males lives that are ruined.
No one will take these cases. See the Asian dad who is representing his son using AI because no one would take his case against DEI. I couldn’t get a lawyer either. It would have exposed too much corruption. It wasn’t one thing, it was many.