Stanley K. Ridgley | DEI and the Challenges of Meritocracy

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by Dr. Stanley K. Ridgely. He earned his PhD from Duke. He's an author of a great new book called DEI Exposed, and he's also a full professor at Drexel University in the management area. And so today we're going to be talking a little bit about his book, DEI Exposed, and really just all the issues surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how that's changing. So Stanley, I'm really excited to have you here. Thanks for being on the show. Well, James, it's great to be here. You're an erudite guy. I hear your audience is equally erudite and learned, and I'm looking forward to discussing this issue. I think it will. I think it will. So, well, I was able to read through your book last night and this morning. And so I'm just interested in hearing from you, sort of maybe give a brief summary of what DEI actually is, just to frame the conversation so we know what we're talking about, and then we can go from there. Well, sure. DEI, it's always been in the news now for quite some time. It stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it's kind of a packet of policies that a lot of people propound. And the problem with DEI, one of the main problems, I think it is the source of all the subsequent problems, is that many people misunderstand what DEI actually is. And I wish I had a dollar for every time someone wants to tell me what DEI actually is and how I don't understand DEI and how castigated I've been because I don't believe in diversity, which is kind of, it's absurd when you think about it. If DEI does not mean create a level playing field, does not mean we're going to give everyone a shot at the brass ring. It doesn't mean teaching about racism or teaching about slavery on the universities or in the universities. It's not what it means. And most people tend to fill this empty decanter of DEI with that type of old wine, and then they invest their virtue and their vanity in that definition, and it becomes very easy to criticize people who say, well, I don't like DEI. And they say, well, what's wrong with you? It's moral, right, and proper. And it's something we should be pursuing. But, of course, it's not because that's not what DEI is. And this is why I call it the biggest con of the 21st century. It's a con game. The actuality of DEI as it is practiced on the college campuses, which is actually what's most important, it is a noxious, toxic ideology, Manichean at its source. It is a doctrine of evil and good, oppressors and oppressed, villains and victims. And the villains and victims are identified by basically the color of their skin. That is it. That is DEI. And people must be apprised of this. If you are a villain because you are a white person, then you must admit this and admit complicity in the program and work against this white supremacy culture that infests our society because America is a racist country and it is suffused with white supremacy culture. Again, more nonsense. If you happen to be on the other side of that, the victim, well, then you must be disabused of any type of individualism that you may have and recognize that you are a victim, a racial victim. Now, this is pernicious in the sense that, and the most basic demonstration point I can make is that if you, James, and I were walking down the street and we saw someone coming towards us, we would really basically have no opinion whatsoever on the person aside from if we happened to be a particular kind of neighborhood and the person is dressed abnormally, I guess, from what we would normally expect. Other than that, we make no judgments. And that person is a perfect stranger and probably goes on his or her way. On the other hand, if a racialist in the DEI sense sees that person coming down the street, that person is slotted as either a villain or a victim. And it does not matter their parentage. It doesn't matter their education. It doesn't matter their upbringing. It doesn't matter what they do for a living. It doesn't matter. The most important characteristic of that person is that person's race. And that tells you all you need to know about that person. That, at its root, is DEI. And this is what I expose in DEI Exposed. The question is, how did such a pernicious ideology make it onto the college campuses if what I'm saying is true? And I should tell you that what I'm saying is basically I'm a conduit for what DEI people say for themselves. And my book, DEI Exposed, is over 450 pages, 600 footnotes. It is cited, documented, chapter and verse, of what they themselves say about their belief system and what they do on the college campuses. Well, in the summer of 2020, when we had all of the BLM riots on into 2021 with the response of the universities, for some reason, universities felt that they were somehow responsible for the death of a criminal in the streets of Minneapolis, places as far away as Berkeley, as Chicago, and Duke University, and Alabama, and certainly all in the Ivy League, that somehow universities were complicit. And suddenly, we discovered that racism was rampant on America's college campuses, an absurd proposition, but one that was propounded by the universities themselves. I'll give you the example of Princeton University. Summer of 2020, July 4th, a letter, a public letter, was sent out, signed by 300 faculty members and some staff of Princeton University, accusing their own university of institutional racism and, quote, rampant racism on the campus. Now, Connor Friedersdorf is a very good journalist at The Atlantic, and he asked the most obvious question that a journalist would ask. He contacted all 300 signatories of this letter and said, can you give me an example of this rampant racism on the Princeton campus, any example in the last 15 years? So 300 signatories of this accusatory letter could not provide him a single example of the rampant racism that they themselves claim was ongoing at Princeton University. This gives the lie in a very dramatic fashion to this con game that was being played by the racialists. So you're saying, probably, you know, well, why would they be doing this? Why are they trying to perpetrate this con game? Well, grifters of every sort, and I mean con artists of every sort, have been trying to, leftist cons, con artists, have been trying to propound a social justice, left-wing, progressive agenda on the college campuses. And this was their golden opportunity to fling open the doors of higher education and invite these grifters, these basically, and I will be honest on this, okay? I'm honest in everything I say, but I'm going to be brutally honest in the sense that these are modestly educated mediocrities with no discernible skill sets, these diversity officers, coming onto the college campuses, rooting themselves in a highly paid bureaucracy, spreading out their toxic doctrine in every corner of the campus. And suddenly, people like myself, you know, faculty are being told, wait a minute, you're here and you're telling me who to hire, who to fire, who to, you know, what to teach, what courses to teach, the syllabus content. Who the heck are you? Who are these people on the college campuses? These are the kinds of people that we expunged from the college campuses over the heart, you know, heart expungement over the past several centuries with the scientific revolution. We got rid of the alchemists. We got rid of the astrologers. We got rid of pseudoscience, superstition of every sort. And suddenly, they're back. They're back with a vengeance. And I have to say, this collection of morons that I have been studying now for six years is finally having its comeuppance in the sense that they're being revealed, the mask is coming off, and we are slowly pushing them off the campus. Not fast enough, in my opinion. You know, I think that's a, so having some experience in higher education, I definitely saw pieces of that coming in, even I left higher education in 2018. So I started to see some of these rumblings start coming up. You start to hear students talk a little bit differently. You start to see students celebrate different things, you know, those kinds of deals. But I think my big question is, there's a philosopher named Slavoj Žižek, if you're familiar with him, yeah. And so he's kind of fun to listen to occasionally. I listen to him once in a while. He's character. He's definitely is. He's got this interesting quote about ideology and he says, you know, ideology is efficient not because it doesn't address real problems, but because it, it frames the way, and I'm paraphrasing this, but it essentially frames the way we address real problems. And so then he concludes that they're not only wrong answers, but there are also wrong questions. And so I'm wondering if we see in DEI both the wrong answer and a series of wrong questions, I guess I'm wondering, is there a real problem that

Right, prior to the DEI movement and all this sort of stuff. Or is there a reason that this emerged? It was just the wrong thing to have emerged. Does that question make sense? It sure does. And I think that we're always looking for a kernel of truth that we can build an ideology around. I say this notionally, of course, I'm not doing that. Sure. Well, we always want a kernel of truth that we can always point to as being the source of our ideology and the reasons why we are on the moral high ground. Well, DEI is no different than this. Of course, what DEI proponents always say, they always say in public, in their public pronouncements, is that they lead with love and inclusion. It's all about the teaching about slavery and teaching about racism and serving marginalized students, et cetera, et cetera. It's basically an uber affirmative action, basically setting up programs that are going to affirm to recruit to the university and affirm the humanity of various people. And for these folks, unfortunately, the proof that they're always searching for that there's a problem always goes back to the 50s and the 40s and that kind of thing. For these folks, it's always Selma. It's always Rosa Parks. It's always the governor of Alabama standing in the schoolhouse door. It's always the National Guard in Arkansas. These problems for these people have never been solved. These problems have never been addressed. It's always something of the distant past. And the wonderful thing for them is to think the past is never going to change. You cannot change the past, but you can always bring it up as if these problems were never addressed in some, you know, actually some very forceful way with regard to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 65 and a whole series of court cases. The idea that somehow these problems still infest the mentality of America is absurd. And we always have to be on the watch for the kinds of things that they that they these DEI proponents surface. I will give you an example, more recent example, is that virtually every single event that I've ever attended, and I do I do a lot of them for my research. I don't shun them. I go to them. It begins with a well, it begins with a land acknowledgment. That's the funniest thing about this, the land acknowledgment, which is, OK, well, our university is situated on the sacred lands of the Lakota tribe, the traditional custodians, BS like that. OK, and it's like it has no actual no actual, you know, substance to it. It's simply kind of a tipping my hat in a moral I want to sound morally, I want to sound virtuous. I have no intention of giving any land to anyone because of this. Then it then it moves into a genuflection to George Floyd. George Floyd has done yeoman's work in these these these kinds of activities, these types of events. They always were harken back to George Floyd as if he had something to do, anything at all to do with what is happening on America's college campuses. Randall Kennedy, the black law professor at Harvard University, who was certainly no right winger by any stretch, actually had to say, you know, well, I can appreciate all the activities that you're engaging in. I have to say that the activities would be better directed somewhere else in a more progressive, positive way than attacking America's campuses because America's college campuses are the least racist places in America. That's a fact. And when you've got Randall Kennedy saying this, you know, maybe it's the time to scratch your chin, cock an eyebrow and say, you know, maybe I'm on the wrong track here. But no, no, no, no. Just doubling down on George Floyd, Rosa Parks, Selma is all kinds of horrendous things going on in the United States. And DEI is going to address this. Well, DEI doesn't address any of this stuff. DEI is, as I described it to you, it's not this this wonderous thing that we're going to we're suddenly going to serve marginalized populations. Let me interject here once, James, is the fact that how DEI is actually described by good moral, upright people who think they're doing the right thing, that, by the way, is illegal now. And it was declared illegal by the Supreme Court two years ago in Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill. The idea of racial discrimination in admissions, because when you're discriminating in favor of someone, it means you're discriminating against someone on the basis of race. It's against the law. And now all that is left is this notion that we're going to teach you to hate your fellow student by virtue of the color of their skin. That's the that's the ugly truth of DEI. It's interesting. I think as I'm just listening to you talk and I'm thinking about the whole conversation, there's been this sort of as I was reading through your book, here's where I here's where my mind kept going to. DEI takes away the agency of individuals to a large degree. This is this, you know, the victim mentality, the cultivation of a victim mentality and the cultivation of a villain mentality. And so we have sort of this bifurcation of DEI on the one side and meritocracy on the other side. And in the conversations I've had about meritocracy, I think what meritocracy does well is that it does give autonomy back and agency back to an individual. It pushes us to work harder. It suggests that as you do the work, as you develop your skill set there, that's a good thing to do. That's not demonized. That's not a problem. You know, we should have ambition. We should have appropriate pursuit of competence, those kind of things. Whereas DEI really didn't do that as much or if at all. Right. So what I'm wondering is. All that to say this question. Have we ever had this right? It sort of strikes me that when we go back to a time of meritocracy, that meritocracy has its own myths built in. Right. Like, I mean, I came from a small rural town in central Illinois and I did well in school. You know, I got into a decent enough college. I went to Washington University in St. Louis first and then transferred up to University of Illinois in Chicago. But I was not networked in any sense of the imagination. And so but you could you could kind of see how other people who were networked. Right. Could go further no matter how hard I worked. Right. And so we have this sort of this sort of meritocracy system that I think can be oversimplified in the same, in an opposite direction that DEI was. But if I'm playing devil's advocate, which I'm just trying to kind of get your response to this. How do we how do we move forward post DEI? How do we how do we recognize that, look, hard work, agency, ambition, really crucial. But there are still, you know, there are going to be people who have to jump over 16 hurdles. Right. And other people who are going to have to jump over none. And you have this sort of challenge in American society. So if I were if I were being as generous as possible, I'd say that's almost the underlying root tension that I tend to see in the DEI movement is this idea that there really are. I'm jumping over 16 hurdles. This guy is jumping over zero. How am I supposed to keep up? Right. And if if we just took that as the underlying tension and I don't know, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that. How do we go? How do we move forward from that? Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed with inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty? More families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Well, it's a very complex question. I'm going to unpack it bit by bit. I would urge listeners to do as I have done if you want to find the answer to your question is to go back to Frederick Douglass and to look at his most famous, most popular speech. And that speech is called Self-Made Men. And I don't think there's anyone who is knowledgeable at all would argue that Frederick Douglass was privileged in any way. He was an escaped slave. He taught himself how to read. He became one of this country's greatest orators and symbols of of freedom and the symbols of what American society can do. Imperfect as it was, which was certainly the case in his time frame and is imperfect as it is. And we're always working to improve American society. But what I think we find from the left and what we find from the DEI proponents, the racialists, they are racialists. They haven't I don't call them racists. I call them racialists because they believe in a certain racist racialist essentialism.

That race determines everything. It's a very Manichean, good and evil type of doctrine that you're in a category of race, and that determines everything. It's very Marxist when you think about it. It comes, it's a distant relation of Marxism, the idea that class determines everything. It determines the way you think, the way you live. It determines what's going to happen. It's historical materialism kind of. And so you look at their beliefs, these DEI proponents, they're proponents of a very primitive Manichean doctrine that really restricts people on what they're able to do, on what they're able to believe. It's an ideology, and the noxious part of it is that they want you to believe their ideology and what it says about human beings and their relationships, rather than your own experiences. They want to substitute this theoretical reality, which is not grounded in anything except prejudice, except paranoia, except narcissism. This idea that this whole identity movement that you have to love yourself and you're a part of a group before you are an individual. If you look at the doctrine of DEI and you look at, I show this in DEI Exposed, there's something called a white supremacy behavior list, white supremacy culture behavior list. And it's simply a list of success behaviors that are accessible to anyone that's Frederick Douglass would have really no problem with. If you read his essay, Self-Made Men, which would be very unpopular today among certain segments of society, you find that the antidote to all of these obstacles is work, work, work, work. He says it four times with additional emphasis each time. He says that you're going to face obstacles. As you said, James, that there are sometimes 16 obstacles here, two obstacles here, no obstacles here. This has nothing to do with race. It may influence and it may be the source of some of the obstacles, but there are so many other obstacles that guarantee that none of us is going to have an equal opportunity in the sense that some of us know certain people. Others of us are blessed with excessive wealth. Others are not. Thomas Sowell is an example of a person who exceeded, succeeded, exceeded expectations and succeeded in his goals of becoming one of the world's great economists. And he was a Harvard product. His dad was a garbage collector. I collected garbage myself as a young man working in the summer months while I was a college student. I worked on the assembly line and midnight shift. I worked in tobacco a long time ago for $1.25 an hour. And so I kind of have an understanding of the proletarian lifestyle. And that lifestyle, that class did not determine my beliefs. What it imbued me with was the idea that I can, it's bootstrapping. You pull yourself up by the bootstraps and education is one of those means by which you can succeed. And so there are lots of paths to success. And the notion that all, well, life is not fair. Well, of course it's not fair in the sense that we're all, we don't live in an artificial Soviet-style society. We don't live in a Marxist society where we all receive the same portion of bread, you know, and we all have the same working hours doing the same thing. That's not the nature of a modern industrial information age society. It never has been and it never will be. All we can do is reduce the artificial barriers to people who are trying to express themselves. What we don't have to do, let me get a drink of water here too because what I'm about to say is so important. You have to recognize the false doctrines that lead us down this path of prejudice. So I'm referring to Duke Medical School has embraced the notion of white supremacy cultures. And according to Duke Medical School, which is a conduit for this white supremacy culture list, here's what's considered, you know, white supremacy culture that you should avoid. Punctuality, professionalism, individualism, frugality, the modern nuclear family. These are all white supremacy cultures, which, as you recognize, these are behaviors that are available to anyone. And the only reason you might want to reject them is if you don't want to be punctual. You don't want to be professional. You don't want to be frugal and you want to have a licentious life of unlimited sex without marriage. I mean, it's obvious what we're talking about here. And the fact that Duke Medical School, and this is on their website and it's in DEI exposed, signed by the dean of Duke Medical School, that this is the absurdities that are being taught on our college campuses. The list I just mentioned to you as being taught at the University of Michigan as a handout, the University of Wisconsin as a handout, Boston University as a handout, the National Education Association as a handout. And of course, Duke Medical School and many, many others. People don't realize this. People would rather propound DEI. Oh, this is this is a Elysian view. It's a utopian view that I subscribe to. And therefore, I'm a moral, virtuous, narcissistic person that I have embraced this. And anyone who disagrees with this, of course, is there's something morally wrong with it, even though what I've just propounded doesn't exist. It's not DEI. Yeah. And it's really interesting. I mean, I think that what you're pointing out there is there's a greater emphasis on rights than responsibilities. And so when we're trying to pull down things like punctuality, there's a basic respect that you have for someone to show up on time. I mean, you know, how long would you have? It worked. It worked too. Right. But I mean, here, like how long would you have waited on the Zoom call if I was 20 minutes late and you just have to sit there and go, well, it'll show up eventually. But punctuality isn't something that we can really expect anymore. Like our society functions on a certain degree of decorum and respect for one another that these ideas of punctuality and professionalism and those kind of things promote. I would I appreciate the artificial barriers idea. I think that's a really important concept that I don't want to lose here. I think that's just a really crucial one because I do see that they're and I think they, I don't know, maybe they are largely gone. But even having a, you know, a wife who is a who works as a professional in health care, you do still see some of these sort of rubs as she's working in particular cultures of health care, you know, but I wouldn't say that they're necessarily, you know, male female binaries and like she's getting put upon because she's a female. Right. A lot of it has to do with she's in the pharmacy profession and within the medical field, pharmacists are relegated to a particular role and scope. And so even if they could expand and make health care systems better and you know, they have knowledge or expertise that could be helpful for health care, the overarching culture just says, no, this is really where pharmacists stop. And so there's progression that needs to happen there, but it wouldn't be achieved by, let's say, pharmacists getting together and saying, well, let's demonize the doctors and the nurses, you know, and play the victim. It's done just through continuing to do the work, continuing to contribute and allowing the overall system to recognize there's more here that pharmacists could contribute than they are right now. Why don't we expand their scope and role? And so I think there's just some interesting interplay in that. Like I said, it has nothing to do with race, has nothing to do with gender. It's it's a more professionally based sort of convention that, you know, sort of holds things back, which is a really interesting sort of dynamic. But I think that that helps me understand and hopefully helps listeners understand sort of where DEI is, where it's been. And now I'd kind of like to pivot and let's talk a little bit about where DEI is going. You know, you mentioned in your last chapter that there's a new president in town, right? So we're in the era of Trump, too. And and he issued an executive order, really started dismantling a lot of these things. But that hasn't been sort of a, you know, there's still pushback to these things, correct? So where are we at with the Trump administration and their relationship to DEI? But also, then where do you see this going in the future? Are we are we rid of this or is this going to sort of backlash back? What are your what are your thoughts on it? Well, the Trump administration, the Department of Education, the Office of Civil Rights, Department of Justice has been very working very hard, working very hard to ensure that the U.S. civil rights laws are followed, that there are equal protection clause of the Constitution is being applied on the college campuses and within the federal workforce. He has several executive orders, one banning DEI in the federal government, another pursuing the problem of anti-Semitism on the college campuses, three banning DEI and its initiatives, noxious, toxic doctrine on the college campuses. It followed up by what's called a Dear Colleague letter to say that you are going to be under investigation if you don't do certain things that aren't fundamental things that you should be doing as a college. Now protecting your students, restricting the use of masks on campus as a weapon of intimidation for students, certain students and a whole host of student disciplinary action, a police force that actually has, you know, authority to arrest people, that kind of thing.

The kind of thing we thought was being done all along. Now, these executive orders are a great first step. It does send a message. One of the great things is we're now talking about these issues whenever they were basically, prior to this, were basically swept under the rug and weren't talking about it. We've seen Ivy League presidents resigning right and left, the president of Harvard, the president of Penn, president of Columbia, and a lot of others are under a lot of pressure right now to basically adhere to the law or face the withholding of federal funds. This is going to be a long, drawn-out battle, and here's why. As Scott Faulkner said, who was a personnel guy under President Reagan, personnel is policy. So you can declare the policy is defunct, we're no longer going to permit this, but if you keep saying people in place who are true believers, in the case of DEI, you're not going to get rid of the policy. You're going to get a renaming of the policy. You're going to get the new name on the office door and new title. I'll give you an example at Harvard University. They just dissolved their DEI program. Of course, they've not dissolved it. They're renaming it the Office of Community Service or something like this, and the same person is in charge of it. She's been given a new title as well. And that person at Harvard is guilty of plagiarism, proven guilty of plagiarism, as is her husband, who is a DEI officer at another university, guilty of plagiarism. This seems to be in academia, which is really a surprise. A real, shows a real disinclination to hold people accountable who were involved in the DEI machinery. And so this is why, and I should say that the federal government is on to this sort of renaming and has stated very clearly, we're not going to accept your renaming, maintaining the same programs, policies, procedures, and personnel, only under a different label. Now, your question is, well, what after DEI? What if we succeed in dissolving that? What if we succeed, as we succeeded with the discrimination in enrollment with the Supreme Court case against Harvard and UNC? The answer has been clear for many years. I've been saying this for years, as have others. It's not original with me. The answer, of course, is affirmative action based on economic circumstances. There's nothing illegal about offering special programs that offer a helping hand, as Frederick Douglass would acknowledge, to people who are economically disadvantaged. Now, and we already know that if you look at the statistics that are provided by the left themselves, if you look at the aggregate wealth of, say, white families, which is about $150,000 versus black families, it's $117,000, you see a vast disparity there. And so whenever you begin to craft and implement programs that benefit the economically advantaged, you are going to disproportionately advantage black and Hispanic families. That's the stark reality of this. You will succeed in your program by benefiting poor whites, poor blacks, poor Hispanics, poor people of every race, creed, and color. And you will lift them all up, the rising tide that we always hear about. But the left hates this. I think Carol Oxley at Stanford University, an expert witness in the trial of the rule of affirmative action illegal, actually said, well, this is not a successful program. It's an inefficient program because it's benefiting some whites as well as benefiting the people that we're targeting. You call false positives. It's a problem that if you're benefiting poor whites at the same rate that you're benefiting poor blacks and Hispanics, even though more of those economically disadvantaged people from those particular categories are going to benefit. This really shows the actual agenda that is at work because DEI people desperately oppose this type of affirmative action, which is perfectly legal. They oppose it because then they can't, number one, they're out of a job. And number two, they cannot propound this fake ideology of oppressors and oppressed, which they desperately depend upon. This is their beef and bones, their meat and potatoes. This is what they believe in. And if you begin to benefit blacks, Hispanics, and other people of color in a way that does not acknowledge this doctrine that they propound, and you lift everyone up, it renders their whole enterprise worthless and delegitimizes it. So that is, again, it's not my idea. I've simply been saying this as the most obvious thing in the world. But you can see why there might be opposition to it. Do you, whenever I hear those kinds of objections, I find it very odd because part of the DEI movement, and maybe it isn't as prominent as I think, but the whole concept that Kimberly Crenshaw has put forward on intersectionality. Now, there is, I think, some compelling reason to think through intersectionality because what it does in principle, if you just think about the idea, you could say, well, then poor whites, right, who are lower class and who don't have as much opportunity, actually should benefit from some of these programs because they have these sort of trajectories of what might be called trajectories of oppression, right? And so it kind of tried to use the language of the movement. But at some point, it's like, no, if you have this characteristic, you're automatically out regardless of what other factors you may be facing. But it's such an oddity to me that that has become that sort of intersectionality has become part of the conversation within DEI circles, but that it's never expanded to its logical conclusion, which would say, yes, there are these varying reasons why someone might not succeed, some of which are individually based. Maybe they're not trying hard enough. Maybe they're not, you know, maybe they've decided to, you know, make some bad choices, whatever have you. Some of them might actually be cultural or economic or what have you. And so we can take all of those into account and then try to decide which one of those are easiest for us to solve, which one of those are appropriate for us to solve, which one, you know, how are we going to address those. But understanding the situation seems to me that it can't be just, as you put it, racialist in its basic sort of nature. So I've always found that a little odd. It seems like that would be a really clean solution just to look at the economics of it. We know that economics is a big driver in education, especially elementary ed, but all the way up through higher education. It isn't determinative, but it's a big influence. And so why wouldn't you address it? Let me ask you a serious question. 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Well, I think one of the biggest reasons is this idea that these people who are running these DEI programs, who are invested in this particular ideology, they're ideologues. They believe their ideology irrespective of what reality actually is off campuses. They want people to conform to this ideology and behave as if it were true. If you want to see the most extreme manifestation of this, look to the assassin Luigi Mangiagoni, who has not been convicted in a court of law, but okay. He was acting in accord with what his ideology told him to do, an anti-capitalist ideology which says that you have to dispose of the capitalist class. And therefore, he assassinated, shot a man in the back whom he did not know, who had not wronged him, and yet represented a class enemy. And this is what an ideology will do for people who buy into this type of noxious doctrine. And so we find different degrees of this belief in an ideology, and you get these DEI people who basically are paranoid. They're paranoid. They are narcissistic. They are hyper-suspicious, and they externalize blame. There are never any internal factors that may explain failure in society. It's always something external to the individual. Someone is oppressing them. And if there's nothing that we can see for sure that's oppressing them, we'll make it up. And they do this two ways. One is the creation of something called the racial microaggression, which you've probably heard of. This basically consists of an oppressed person, person of color, determining that they are being insulted in some way, spoken or unspoken, some action, and by default, the person who is their accusing is guilty of it. This is the way racial microaggressions work. And this

is this pumps up the number of racial incidents on campuses. The second is creating hate hoaxes, hate crime hoaxes, which I think Wilford Riley, who wrote an entire book on the subject, estimates anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the hate crime hoaxes on campuses are fake. They're they're perpetrated by people who are trying to, as they say, draw attention to the problem. Well, they're having to fake the fake the crime to draw attention to the problem because the problem does not exist on their campus. And so it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's no problem here. Well, I've got to draw some attention here because people aren't paying attention. So I create a crime and then, oh, people are, you know, rally around me. It's kind of, it's like the boy who cried wolf, but never gets his comeuppance because there's never any comeuppance about this without people who are Jussie Smollett style, you know, accusing people of hate crimes. And there's very little pushback and certainly no penalty for the people perpetrating these types of things. So that kind of explains the perpetuation of this ideology on the camp. People are invested in it. People make a lot of money from it. When I say lots of money, people don't seem to realize or understand the magnitude of the money. It's a $10 billion industry every year. You look at people like Tabea Shavu Sellers at the University of Michigan, the DEI honcho there, receiving $417,000 a year. And she replaced her husband in that position two years ago. He was receiving $431,000 a year. You look at the University of Virginia, their $20 million DEI program was honchoed by two men, each of them receiving more than half a million dollars in compensation and benefits. The third ranking person was receiving $405,000 in salary and benefits. So there is big money in play here. And I'll leave it up to someone else to determine why these people are getting paid so much money for very amorphous work that we really can't understand and they can't explain. I do think this has been an issue. I will say, you know, when I've dealt with this issue, I've dealt with it on a more philosophical and theological level and a much less practical level. But hearing those numbers, it's kind of crazy to hear those numbers, a $20 million DEI program in an age where we're continually concerned with the cost of higher education. I mean, those two just don't go together for me. I've always been a little suspicious about higher education becoming their own little cities. Even you mentioned, you know, having police on campus and those kinds of things. I've always found it strange that higher ed all of a sudden started handling its own, you know, sexual harassment allegations and those kind of things. These are crimes that could be handled by professionals in a city, but we've somehow decided that embedding them under people who have no idea what they're doing would be a really great move. I mean, I was an academic dean, so I don't feel like I'm speaking out of place. Like I had no, I don't know how to run an investigation. That wasn't what I was trained to do. I'm an intelligent guy, but I, it's not like I think I could do anything. If you threw it underneath me, I could figure it out. Like these are things that college presidents, that college boards, that, you know, just overarching administration are not capable of doing well. Now, they may do it well on certain occasions, but I've always found it so strange that we've decided that college should be the end all be all and all of this stuff should be taken care of by colleges in universities. And we've really, in my estimation, I don't know how you feel about this, my little rant on higher ed, I guess. It just feels like we've displaced teaching and learning as the quintessential aspect of what a university should be doing. And we've added all of this other junk into it. And it just feels like if we stripped all that out, we'd be left with something that's far more pristine, far more interesting and far more compelling for society. Well, the numbers that I referred to, they are indeed astronomical and unbelievable. And there's a dynamic mechanism in place that guarantees this is going to happen. If you look at University of Michigan since 2016 to 2025, nine years, they spent $250 million on DEI with over a thousand permanent full-time and part-time DEI personnel, all administered by Tabea Shavu Sellers at $417,000 a year. Imagine if they had implemented, say, this economically, you know, disadvantaged affirmative action plan, which doesn't require a thousand people to administer, which doesn't require trainings, multicultural trainings on the campuses, doesn't require any of that. It simply requires searching out the people and evaluating the people that can qualify for these types of scholarships and who are academically qualified. How many more people could have been helped and how many more people, how much money could have been saved? Because the evaluation on the campus itself is that $250 million investment has been produced absolutely zero results in terms of their own success, success indicators. And so the numbers, again, really do tell the story in this case. Why do we have this type of gross, grotesque squandering of scarce resources? Well, if you look at the university presidents and you look at the boards of trustees of various colleges, they establish a ring fence. Of course, the president is a political being, bureaucrat being, who immediately establishes a ring fence around himself with his cronies and establishes common cause with the board. Who reports on the president's performance? The president. That's where the board gets its information. They have twice yearly board meetings. And what do you hear in these board meetings if you're a board member? How great the president is doing his job. Well, who's telling you this? It's the president. Now, think about that for a second. And board members who are hearing this sort of thing and they kind of see numbers that are presented to them that are cooked to a certain extent. And sometimes they're being deceived. They rubber stamp it and they they award major salaries to to the president for doing really a mediocre job and I'm being generous there. My own university was paying the previous president $2 million a year. And the president was basically doing an awful job. You can ask most any faculty member on my college campus about that former president who moved on is now ruining another university. Thank goodness for that. We're looking into better days with a brand new president here at my school. But the fact is that they're in cahoots. They're in. If you look at the senior salary structure of most any university and you can find this online in their 990s You look at this, this incredible salary structure where the senior people, the senior advisors are receiving in excess of half a million dollars and up to a million dollars and more in salary where you look at the and the university may not be in the best financial shape. This is where your tuition dollars are going to. Those numbers are not are not aberrations. You look at the University of California system, all 17 campuses, the average, the average I think we just the base, not the average, the base level of pay for a DEI person is about $330,000 a year. Now, you tell me at Berkeley, Berkeley, one of the most left wing colleges campuses in America, that person is by the name of Dania Matos. She receives $331,000 a year. And I looked at what she was doing. And she said her interviews, she says, well, I'm leading with love. Every time there's a racial incident on campus, I, my heart breaks into a thousand pieces and I have to pick all those pieces up once again. Now I ask myself at Berkeley, what are the racist incidents are happening at Berkeley and at Princeton? They can't even name a single instance in the last 15 years. And so it's this when I say con game and get people who they're saying this sort of thing and people are actually believing it. I find that that people really need to put on their thinking cap, their critical thinking skills and say, hey, wait a minute, what you're saying makes no no sense whatsoever. Yeah. Well, Stanley, we're kind of coming up on the end of time here. I want to give you the last word. What do you think? So I'll end with this question. What do you think people really should be looking out for in the future where we're sort of in a new era with Trump too. But you know, if we were going to watch sort of the little trickles of this coming back in to our life and our thought, what are some of the things you think people ought to look out for? Well, if you're on the campus as a student, I give red flags of what to look for whenever you're in a threat situation, whenever the indoctrinators, the people who are propounding these basically nonsense are coming your way. Here's what to look for and know your rights. Know what don't ever trust these people on the college campus. If you're parents stay connected to your kids. Don't listen to these folks on the campuses. Well, your son or daughter, they need time to socialize away from home and no, no, no, no, no. They don't. No, they don't. What people on the campuses are trying to do, and I say this in my book, Brutal Minds, and again, in DEI Exposed, that they don't like parents.

They have names for parents on the campus, toxic parents, helicopter parents, would-be college student parents. They despise parents and parental involvement because parents ask, the good ones ask a lot of questions. And I think that good parents need to be doing that. And students need to understand that when you have someone on the campus in a position of, you know, ersatz authority, that's asking for your trust, saying, trust me, let's trust each other, raise, you know, cock an eyebrow because that person who is soliciting your trust probably does not deserve it. And a good way of defending yourself against this sort of thing is if, if you're, and you're a target, is to recognize that these people have ulterior motives and those motives are not really hard to discern once you know what to look for. And that is the service that I try to provide in both my books, Brutal Minds and of course, DEI Exposed. And with regard to long-term macro reform, I think that the president and his team at the Department of Education are definitely on the right track. You may not like his techniques. You may not like the really hardcore, brutal rhetoric that the man espouses and really propounds, but if you actually read the executive orders that are being issued, you actually read what is being, colleges are being told to do. I think that there are very few people in this country who would disagree with it and say, wait a minute, I thought colleges and universities were doing this already, but now we're finding out that you have to be doing it now. Wait a minute, it's time to start doing this. And I think that the only thing that universities and colleges understand is money, money and bad publicity. And it's about time, you know, they've run up a bar tab for the last 25 years and the bill is coming due. Very good, Stanley. I really appreciate your book. I would recommend it to listeners. If you are interested in this topic, if you want to get some kind of real talk around DEI, check out the book, DEI Exposed. Stanley, really appreciate you being here today. I think these are good words. It's a conversation that needs to be had and a conversation that we need to keep going, because we don't want to be captured by ideology. We want to really be doing service to our fellow man. We want to be loving our neighbors. And we want to make sure that these systems and processes aren't disadvantaging people, even as they might be trying to help people. And this one particularly, I think what you raise in your book, DEI really hasn't helped anyone. And so it's a really good read for folks who want to be introduced to this topic. I think you introduce a lot of the key things, give a good foundation for it. And just appreciate you expanding on those words here in the podcast today. So thanks for being here. Thank you. The pleasure was all mine. As my wife will tell you, I'm always ready to talk. I get that a lot, too. All right, Stanley. Thanks a lot. Thanks, everybody, for being here. And we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everybody. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. This is my skyship, Dreamer. My cargo is stories. And our destination, dreams. With Abide Sleep Stories for Kids, you can help your children fall asleep fast and learn about God. To find these kids' bedtime stories, go to lifeaudio.com or search your favorite podcast app for Abide Stories for Kids. You can also download the Abide app for more biblical meditations at abide.com.