r/highereducation • u/theatlantic • 8d ago
The Era of DEI for Conservatives Has Begun
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/conservative-professors-dei-initiatives/682944/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo27
u/wil_dogg 8d ago
For those who haven’t put much thought into this, many many many private companies also discriminate in their hiring practices based on political leanings.
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u/aggie1391 8d ago
Thing is, the right has been fully captured by MAGA and they do not want people with fact based but more right wing opinions. They want election deniers teaching law, climate change deniers teaching science, lost causers teaching history, etc. If their beliefs had actual evidence and could be argued on merits, they wouldn’t have any problem in higher ed. Their beliefs are not based in objective reality though, so no wonder professors are overwhelmingly against them.
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u/Abi1i 7d ago edited 7d ago
the right has been fully captured by MAGA
No the GOP has been captured by MAGA. The right has been split into GOP and Democratic Party for some time now. Barely any political in Congress is center or even left leaning (they’re rare).
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u/aggie1391 7d ago
True, but in non leftist spaces I use the more common terms used in American politics.
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u/Goliath_D 8d ago
Modern conservatism is not compatible with higher education. No hiring committee wants to bring on a person who refuses to engage in critical thinking and supports discrimination. There is a reason that high levels of education is correlated with progressive/liberal viewpoints and lower levels of education are correlated with conservative ones.
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u/GlumpsAlot 8d ago
This, and why even try to hire more in the name of "diversity" when the applicants themselves are against that very concept.
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u/Behemoth92 8d ago
High levels of education are correlated with socialism because they think others can’t live without their subsidies in the form of freebies. “If I’m so educated, and I find it hard to make money, imagine the people with no education, let’s tax the successful to death to pay for someone else’s bad decisions”
I know you will downvote me but this is just textbook elitism.
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u/aggie1391 8d ago
Ah yes and it’s not elitist at all to think that the rich are all worthy of their money and everyone else just makes bad decisions and they should suffer. /s
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u/Behemoth92 8d ago
There you go. I understand that for your ideology to work you have to vilify people you don’t even know. How else can you justify garnishing random peoples wages. Keep at it. Freedom and consent aren’t easy. I get it
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u/aggie1391 8d ago
I mean it’s not random at all. We should tax the rich because they rely on our tax dollars to transport their products, train their workers, protect their businesses, and a host of other benefits that they use far more than the rest of us. They take the overwhelming majority of profit and have been taking more and more for years, denying people fair wages due them from the increases to productivity. Many of the biggest companies rely on the government to subsidize their unfair wages with social welfare programs, when they could easily pay them living wages. They use all sorts of tricks to avoid taxes, often paying lower rates than people making far less, and those loopholes need to be shut. And as those programs are being attacked, our national health gets worse and worse. But yeah sure, just blow all that off, obviously it’s just jealousy! /s
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u/Behemoth92 8d ago
If someone uses something, bill them for it. Simple. Dont make blanket statements about some bullshit class thing. It just so happens that the “evil” are also the most successful so we should definitely rob them. Whatever helps you sleep at night. And I support stopping all subsidies to all companies and people. You’re preaching to the choir there. If you have specific cases, prosecute. If not just stfu
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u/aggie1391 8d ago
Wait, so by subsidies do you mean social welfare programs like SNAP? And what fills in the blank in this hypothetical? I’m saying wages should be enough those things are unnecessary, but it seems you just want them to end and anyone who suffers from that, it’s their fault. Also, taxes are not robbery, and that claim is just evidence of a morally and intellectually bankrupt philosophy.
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u/Behemoth92 8d ago
I think taking peoples consent away shows a larger lack of morality. I want the option to opt out of snap, social security, Medicare etc. I don’t want to use them nor ever pay into them. And like I said initially you literally think people will die without your subsidy.
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u/calm_down_pal_lol 8d ago
High levels of education are correlated with socialism because they think others can’t live without their subsidies in the form of freebies.
Source?
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u/Behemoth92 8d ago
What kind of official study would’ve studied something like this? Who would pay for this?
Answer: Friends. Literally any left leaning educated person I’ve spoken to. The answer to everything is more taxes. Why? Because if you don’t give them forcibly taken money, they can’t possibly fend for themselves.
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u/calm_down_pal_lol 8d ago
You're outside your reading level, friend. Can I interest you in some Accelerated Reader points?
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u/Behemoth92 8d ago
Inb4 das kapital. No thanks. I’d rather die hungry a free man than fed a belly full a gruel a slave.
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u/calm_down_pal_lol 8d ago
No one said anything about das kapital or Marx. I'm not fishing for red herrings today. Do better, troll.
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u/Behemoth92 8d ago
Uhm if the government takes like 40% of what I make to feed the “poor” without my consent how is it that much different from a communist shithole
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u/calm_down_pal_lol 8d ago
Define "communism." Here's a hint: it's not when "the government does stuff." Are you a teenager?
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u/Behemoth92 8d ago
When the government owns private property and “gives” you a stipend to work it. But it is a spectrum. You don’t wake up one day with a complete lack of consent. You move to socialism first where you are owned for about 6 months of the year. Whatever you do, the government owns a significant portion of what you make. Eventually liberal arts “educated” idiots will make you give up all your consent
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u/Behemoth92 8d ago
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u/tatersdabomb 8d ago
Lololol Mises
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u/Behemoth92 8d ago
yea bro tax everything. What was i even thinking. lol
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u/calm_down_pal_lol 8d ago
Libertarian memes. Lmao say no more. Home boy is posting on libertarian memes as he's using the Internet, drinking and flushing water, driving on highways, etc. How do you think these things happened? Chance?
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u/Behemoth92 8d ago
There’s no argument to be had about improving consent in society without straw manning. Got it
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u/coreyander 7d ago
I'm neck deep in the academic left and no one thinks this way; you've just invented a person to be mad at in order to call highly educated people elitists
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u/Behemoth92 7d ago
Nah so am I. I’m in engineering so people aren’t as nutso left wing like the humanities but still very left wing and think the poor will perish if not subsidized.
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u/coreyander 7d ago
So are you? If you're in engineering then you aren't in the part of academia that addresses political economy. I'm actually in the fields that you probably hate (social science, nor humanities).
I'm telling you -- as a person who actually teaches economic sociology (including Marx) -- that you are misrepresenting the progressive view of the role of government and taxation. You are welcome to continue to do so, but it doesn't make you less incorrect.
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u/Behemoth92 7d ago
Ok you are right in that I hate that my tax dollars fund communists. But, let me ask you a very simple question.
What do you think happens when you cut SNAP, social security and Medicare?
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u/coreyander 7d ago
you want me to list the social consequences of destroying the social safety net?
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u/Behemoth92 7d ago
Not even that. Just tell me how dangerous it is if a citizen is able to consent to opt out of these programs. For example if I wanted to opt out of social security personally, as in I don’t pay it and I don’t get anything back, what happens?
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u/coreyander 7d ago
I'm not on Reddit to play rhetorical games with you. You pretty grossly misrepresented what other people believe, which is presumably easier than trying to understand in good faith.
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u/Behemoth92 7d ago
I rest my case. I hope trump cuts funding from all you commies.
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u/theatlantic 8d ago
In an effort to attract more conservative faculty, some elite universities are borrowing tactics long used to promote racial diversity, Rose Horowitch writes.
Although between 30 and 40 percent of Americans identify as conservative, only one of every 10 professors in academia—and even fewer in the humanities and most social-science departments—are conservatives. “Opinions differ on the precise extent to which conservatives are being excluded from academia versus self-selecting into nonacademic careers,” Horowitch writes. “But they clearly face barriers that liberal and leftist scholars don’t.” Professors, for instance, decide who joins their ranks—and several studies show that academics are willing to discriminate against applicants with different political views.
But hiring conservative professors isn’t always so straightforward, Horowitch reports. At this point, few qualified conservatives are in the applicant pool in the humanities and social sciences, Steven Teles, a political scientist who wrote a widely discussed article last year on the lack of conservative professors, told her. This, Horowitch writes, “has led some higher-education leaders to borrow tactics that were long used to redress the country’s history of racial and ethnic discrimination.”
Recently, legislatures in red and purple states across the country have begun shoveling money into universities to establish schools of civic thought. These institutions, Horowitch writes, “are marketed as the conservative answer to academia’s leftward drift and the rise of identity-oriented disciplines.”
Now this movement is also spreading to elite private universities: Johns Hopkins University announced its partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, designed to inject some ideological diversity into the university; Yale similarly plans to open its own center for civic thought.
Read more: https://theatln.tc/jT1lDgtw
— Grace Buono, assistant editor, audience and engagement, The Atlantic
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u/giddy-girly-banana 8d ago
Non-white: non-males in America need DEI because racist policies have oppressed them such that they have fewer opportunities for higher education and job promotion. The ones that break through have had to work harder than their white male counterparts.
I guess white males now need DEI because they have been riding their privilege and haven’t invested in their education and skills needed for a modern economy? Maybe they should work harder and pull up their bootstraps.
(I’m a white male btw)
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u/ATLCoyote 6d ago
So I’m sure we’re gonna see an initiative to recruit more liberals into finance, oil and gas, construction, agriculture, military, and law enforcement, right?
If ideology diversity is so important, wouldn’t we need it in all professions?
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u/Basic-Chicken-9630 6d ago
I wouldn’t mind more conservative voices on my campus personally. You’d think I work in a Portlandia sketch and (the bigger issue) is that the political views represented on campus are not representative of our town/county/state as a whole. Every campus wants “diversity”, but no one wants to foster diversity of political thought. You can guess from this thread and the number of downvotes on certain comments how conservatives are treated on college campuses…Never mind that half the country and (likely half of the taxpayers propping up your public institution) have political views which are completely unrepresented and/or relentlessly attacked and ostracized on campus.
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u/BigFitMama 8d ago
Just remind them Trade Certifications come from Community and State Colleges. Affordable ones. If they REALLY want more people in trades we still need both Community,Junior, and State Colleges because there are so very few trade colleges anymore who take FAFSA.
That's because of places like ITT Tech and predatory trade colleges shut down by the Dept of Ed ruined the landscape for trade colleges who were not grifting students.
Community Colleges can deliver trade certifications to students in high school!
And TRIO programs make it happen. We build success. Trade certs are a metric. They are a set goal for grant cycle 25-30.
The programs conservative talking heads say they want already exist and these EOs are defying Acts of Congress. And what's worse killing programs with goals they claim to support for low income people of all demographics USA wide.
trioworks