DEI: The Latest Threat To Religious Liberty And Academic Freedom

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, commonly known as DEI, has arrived at Notre Dame.
It wasn’t a smooth landing.
The School of Architecture recently hired Ms. Crystal Bates to be its first “Program Director for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Alumni Engagement.” When her appointment was announced, several puzzled alumni apparently questioned the wisdom of creating such a post. That’s when Architecture Dean Stefanos Polyzoides lost it.
“I write to you today to ask you, as alumni, to join me in denouncing these hateful comments by fellow alums of the school,” he wrote in a public letter to graduates of the program reported by the Daily Caller.
Dean Polyzoides’ letter criticized “horrific and deeply hurtful activity on social media” by those alumni. Apparently, that door swings both ways: John Sailer, a National Association of Scholars Fellow, reports that the Dean’s letter triggered a deluge of hate mail for one student who dared to question the policy.
(We contacted Dean Polyzoides and Sue Ryan, University Director of Media Relations, for comment, but have received no reply at press time.)
Ms. Bates is one of several new DEI officials at Notre Dame. Yvette Rodriguez assumed a similar post at the College of Engineering a year ago, and Keona Lewis came on board this February as the University’s Associate Provost for Academic Diversity.
Does the arrival of these new directors signal a new era of “academic excellence,” reflecting the vision of longtime Notre Dame President Theodore Hesburgh, CSC?
Not necessarily.
Since President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Fr. Hesburgh to the newly created U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1957, Notre Dame has been a leader in the progress of civil rights. That was the same year that Aubrey Lewis, who brilliantly played both offense and defense in Notre Dame’s backfield, was elected the first black captain of the Fighting Irish football team.
Toward the end of his life, Fr. Hesburgh said that “besides the addition of women [in 1973], the most dramatic change in the character of Notre Dame’s student body in my lifetime has been the growing racial and ethnic diversity.”
Opportunity has thrived for years at Notre Dame. So what gives? With all the progress, why the fancy acronym, the new DEI appointments, and the controversy?

How We Got Here

Some background is in order.
We note that the “D” in DEI does not stand for “discrimination.” That term has for years meant “discrimination on the basis of race,” and Fr. Hesburgh fought it tooth and nail all his life. Fr. Hesburgh believed in opportunity. In 1964, reflecting on the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education opinion decided ten years earlier, he wrote “that in this fair land of America, all Americans should have equal opportunity to develop themselves to their full potential as persons.”
But that was then. “Equal opportunity” is now apparently passé. In fact, “DIE” now means the opposite: “Equity” — not “Equality.”
“There’s a big difference between equality and equity,” Kamala Harris said on November 1, 2020. “Equity means that ‘we all end up in the same place’.”
Upon hearing that line, Liz Cheney commented that Harris sounded “just like Karl Marx.”
Ms. Cheney is on to something. Because “Equity” doesn’t seek equal opportunity, it demands equal outcomes. By force, if necessary.
And today, with a magical touch of the dialectic, Notre Dame has proudly chosen to “discriminate on the basis of race” in order to appease the secular gods of the DEI trinity and achieve equal outcomes.
No longer will merit and performance be the standards at Notre Dame. “Equity” demands otherwise.
And DEI’s new discrimination will be applied to a much broader catalogue of categories than “race” alone.

The Inclusion Delusion

When Joe Biden brags that he has the “most diverse cabinet in history,” he means that he has hired more transsexuals, homosexuals, feminists, racial minorities, and lesbians than ever.
They “look like America,” admirers swoon.
Of course, they operate the most incompetent administration in recent memory, but hey, that’s the price of “Equity.” Forget “merit” and “opportunity”: they’re racist, sexist, and probably homophobic.
And what does that “I” in DEI stand for, anyway?
In June 2021, Joe Biden released his “Executive Order Advancing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Government.”
That order applies to a host of Federal agencies that, between them, hand out hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in Federal grants a year.
And the same order also applies to Federal grantees like Notre Dame.
Do DEI, no Federal grants.
So it’s no accident that, in that same month of June 2021, Father John Jenkins, C.S.C, released the Notre Dame’s Board of Trustees’ “Task Force Report on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”
Fr. Hesburgh opposed racial discrimination. Fr. Jenkins demands it. Fr. Hesburgh supported equality of opportunity. Fr. Jenkins opposes it.
But here’s the dirty little secret: What’s this “Inclusion” all about?
Just ask Joe Biden. In October 2021, he published his “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality.” For Joe, “gender” means not only “sexual orientation” but “abortion.”
“Defend the constitutional right to safe and legal abortion in the United States, established in Roe v. Wade, and promote access to sexual and reproductive health and rights both at home and abroad,” Biden’s “strategy” reads.
Fr. Jenkins got Joe’s message and spread the word. On cue, at Freshmen Orientation for the class of 2027 last fall, Vice President for Student Affairs Fr. Gerry Olinger, CSC, told students that “the Catholic Church’s teaching [is] at the heart of how we approach diversity on our campus, including differences in sexual orientation and gender identity.”
Entering freshmen were required to answer questions about their “gender pronouns” and their “sexual orientation,” helpfully coached by a video defining “sexual orientation, lesbian, gay, bisexual, gender identity, transgender, cisgender, gender expression, and questioning,” according to the Irish Rover, a campus alternative paper.
Students were not allowed to be in classes without affirming their duty not only to respect sexual confusion and deviancy, but to affirm it and embrace it. (The Sycamore Trust reports that Fr. Olinger and Dolly Duffy, executive director of the Alumni Association, refused to answer questions regarding the school’s “indifference to Church teaching on sex, marriage and gender.”)

DEI = WMD

Put plainly, today’s Notre Dame is sponsoring an ideological “reeducation camp” designed to deprogram any students harboring orthodox Catholic beliefs on family, marital love, sexual morality, and children. It has hired a phalanx of controllers as the enforcement mechanism that will monitor, report, and punish all violations of Fr. Gerry Olinger’s dialectical deconstruction of the truths of Humanae Vitae.
And be advised: DEI is not a passing fancy. It is the Sexualized Socialist Left’s grim reaper designed to kill the soul, destroy morals, and enslave a society of obedient, grateful victims.
In higher education alone, DEI’s growth is viral. Unlike state institutions, Notre Dame is not required to reveal its various administrative costs, regardless of its considerable federal funding. But consider: at Ohio State University, 132 DEI administrators and their staffs cost $13,405,605.00 in salaries and benefits alone last year.
And that’s just one university. But DEI is infectious, it’s tyrannical, and it’s inundating the country’s institutions at every level. A Google search for “Human Resources” and “DEI” renders some 60 million results.
We will continue to follow these developments in coming weeks. DEI is not going to die.