The con in our case is the way a group of pseudo-intellectuals managed to get leaders in our business and especially education communities to pay them for their self-proclaimed expertise in addressing an imaginary problem—America’s deep, intractable racism. Using clever tactics, they extracted billions for speeches, seminars, training sessions, and administrative sinecures.
As this unfolded, few people spoke up to say that it was (and is) grifting on a prodigious scale. But now, Drexel University professor Stanley Ridgley has done so with his book DEI Exposed.
Ridgley’s big point is that there is no intellectual substance to the mania for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” that has swept through our colleges and universities. It took root and spread because it fit so perfectly with the ideology of most of our higher-education leaders, who couldn’t resist spending loads of money on DEI programs.
How delightful for them to signal their ideological virtue with other people’s money. Ridgley writes, “In the non-profit world, results are not easily measured and America’s higher education system of colleges and universities are part of that world. This renders them the perfect petri dish for con games. It’s why hokum finds it way in and remains ensconced even as profound absurdities pass as results.”
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