Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs offering special treatment of certain groups over others based upon stereotypical race or gender categories which have permeated academia, businesses, and safety-critical professions are rapidly and appropriately falling out of favor with a return to merit-based criteria.
DEI, at core, is a Marxist secular construct that claims to embrace theory ideology which sets up oppressor-victim class confrontations rather than cooperative collaborations.
As for the embedded “D” word, genuine diversity doesn’t pick and choose winners and losers based on superficial characteristics.
And although the “equity” term within DEI has, by intent, been confusingly presumed to refer to equal opportunity and justice for all as guaranteed in our nation’s Declaration of Independence, it has instead become a trigger word to unfairly justify exactly the opposite.
Differences between equality and equity are fundamental and crucial: differences between assuring equal opportunities and equal outcomes, between equal treatment under the law and fingers on scales of justice, between unbiasedly judging people's behaviors and achievements as individuals or stereotypically as members of groups, between rewarding those who strive for achievements and those who don't.
DEI college program acceptance qualification quotas have watered-down course content and performance standards for all, often enabling less prepared or ambitious students to advance via grade inflation.
DEI in the business workplace affords preferential employment and promotions that can compromise quality service, hamper productivity, and undermine morale.
DEI in life-safety professions such as medicine, airline cockpits, and air traffic control can compromise hiring, training and qualification testing standards with catastrophic consequences.
Whereas DEI remains stubbornly present in eternally woke bastions of academia, it is continuously losing ground through public rejection and consequential losses of economic competitiveness in corporate sector boardrooms.
Here corporate investment policies operating DEI are often close kin to those pressured or mandated by Environmental Social Guidance (ESG) compliance assessments, wherein DEI relates to the embedded “S” component.
Companies stepping back or abandoning DEI and ESG include Amazon, Google, Target, Meta, Walmart, Boeing, Molson Coors, Lowe’s, Ford, Toyota, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniels, Caterpillar, John Deere, McDonald’s, Nissan, Stanley Black & Decker, and Tractor Supply.
That ESG and DEI exodus rush has only just begun.
A 2024 Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) order requiring ESG listed companies to produce audited reports of their climate social justice-premised CO2 emissions and plans to reduce them has thankfully been shelved following numerous court challenges.
Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, formerly a major ESG advocate, says he no longer uses the term because it has been “politicized and weaponized.”
President Trump has issued an executive order that all federal government DEI offices — including FBI and military — are to be immediately terminated.
In their welcome vacuum, I’ll venture to propose replacement by a new and very different sort of DEI, one promulgating Determination, Exceptionalism and Innovation.
Determination recognizes and typically rewards individuals possessing a strong will to succeed in setting goals and overcoming obstacles and setbacks. It draws upon personal resources of purposeful motivation, proactive initiative, and dogged persistence to recognize and act on worthwhile opportunities and challenges.
Exceptionalism demands strength of character in being and doing one’s best to pursue and achieve high values standards. It recognizes those who rise above prevailing expectations in merit-based competitiveness, always striving to improve performance, contribute more, and set constructive examples that benefit others.
Innovation rewards those who recognize unfulfilled possibilities, opportunities and needs … those evidencing insatiable curiosity, an understanding of how things work, willingness to experiment and fail, and essential knowledge and skill sets to create and communicate ideas verbally, visually, and statistically.
Meanwhile, there’s nothing in America’s hard-fought founding principles guaranteeing equal success for everyone, because nothing in life is guaranteed.
Rather, the all-important second paragraph of our nation's Declaration of Independence states: ''We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.''
It guarantees everyone an opportunity to set their own goals, exercise their best talents, and make circumstances better for themselves and others through initiative and imagination.
Shouldn’t that be enough?
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.