If you want to know the best way to flush a quarter of a million dollars down the toilet, just ask the wokesterly types at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

They went all in on DEI dating from 2016, and bought themselves a huge boondoggle that left their campus a pinched, miserable wasteland where nobody wants to speak up out of fear of being called 'racist' or 'triggering' some snowflake, racial grievance complaints have exploded, idea diversity is utterly absent, and an expanding army of bureaucrats runs the show.

That's not the conclusion of a conservative like me, it's what the New York Times found after an investigation of 60 campus denizens, virtually all of them liberal Democrats, including the professors.

It must have been the professors who egged longtime New York Times investigative reporter Nicholas Confessore into writing his 9,000-word long and engaging anatomy-of-a-failure piece for the New York Times magazine about this monstrous failure of DEI. I've heard this kind of talk myself from Columbia University's professors and staff, so it must be common. It took me about three hours to read it, but it was delicious, savory, reading well worth the time to do it.

He opens with how the University of Michigan, one of whose denizens first coined the term 'affirmative action' in the 1960s or 1970s, went all in on DEI as of 2016, spending money like there was no tomorrow on putting DEI into every aspect of the U-M education -- from the changing the botanical names of plants in the gardens, to reminding viewers in art galleries of racism even if the paintings had nothing to do with it to making engineering students pass tests on systemic racism.

A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.

When Michigan inaugurated what it now calls D.E.I. 1.0, it intentionally placed itself in the vanguard of a revolution then reshaping American higher education. Around the country, college administrators were rapidly expanding D.E.I., convinced that such programs would help attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty.

Today that revolution is under withering attack.

He continued:

But even some of Michigan’s peer institutions have soured on aspects of D.E.I. Last spring, both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences said they would no longer require job candidates to submit diversity statements; such “compelled statements,” M.I.T.’s president said, “impinge on freedom of expression.”

Michigan hasn’t joined the retreat. Instead, it has redoubled its efforts, testing the future of an embattled ideal. A year ago, the university inaugurated what it calls D.E.I. 2.0. At Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus, the number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles increased by 70 percent, reaching 241, according to figures compiled by Mark J. Perry, an emeritus professor of finance at the university’s Flint campus and a D.E.I. critic.

As a result, complaints about racism, egged on by this army of administrators, exploded. Professors were singled out and harassed for reading passages from Faulkner that contained characters making racial slurs. A student expressed her outrage at hearing a white person read the literary passage and walked out of class. A white male professor abased himself before class with pre-apologies for whatever racism he might unwittingly commit -- triggering a round of racism complaints for the preemptive apology itself. Nobody teaches Huck Finn anymore, an English professor noted.

And Confessore couldn't find anyone with anything nice to say about all this DEI washing over the school with all that cash; they all thought it stunk.

But over months of reporting this year, I found a different kind of backlash building, one that emanated not from Washington or right-wing think tanks but from inside the university’s own dorms and faculty lounges. On Michigan’s largely left-leaning campus, few of the people I met questioned the broad ideals of diversity or social justice. Yet the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.

D.E.I. at Michigan is rooted in a struggle for racial integration that began more than a half-century ago, but many Black students today regard the school’s expansive program as a well-meaning failure.

But it did have a corrosive effect on university life as bureaucrats went around court rulings about color blind admissions and figured out a way to endlessly hire DEI wokester bureaucrats as university 'fellows..

Confessore, to his credit, even tied that to the crushing of intellectual life on campus, including idea diversity. He described in detail how DEI's rise has choked the life out of free inquiry from campus life.

This section is damning:

On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.

Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.

Instead, Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them.

Confessore takes it even further -- he explains DEI's rise as a bureaucratic monster

These growing bureaucracies represented a major — and profoundly left-leaning — reshuffling of campus power. Administrators were even more politically liberal than faculty members, according to one survey, and far more likely to favor racial preferences in admissions and hiring. They promulgated what Lyell Asher, a professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, has called “an alternate curriculum,” taught not in classrooms but in dorms, disciplinary hearings and orientation programs.

He also indicated that it had specifically shut down conservative voices on campus:

Officially, Michigan’s D.E.I. plan includes a pledge to increase political diversity on campus. When I asked Chavous if there were any programs aimed at achieving that goal, she described an effort by the new dean of the Ford School for public policy to ensure that its curriculum exposed students to a range of political perspectives. By most accounts, conservatives remain a small minority at Michigan, perhaps 10 or 15 percent of all students. There had always been social pressure to conform to the prevailing liberalism there, faculty members and students told me. But it seemed to intensify as D.E.I. expanded, as if the peer pressure had a kind of institutional sanction.

The final sequence describes late-stage DEI as tinder for antisemitism, which indeed is the case on campus.

Then he went into a Star Wars bar scene of all the various wokesters, each more bizarre than the last, had used DEI to advance their aims, getting on the record interviews and taking these crazy-weird photos of them in soft-focus Vogue-like glamour shots, as they spewed irrationality and nuttery in a slew of different directions. Each freak who was introduced to the verbal portrait gallery was grosser and stranger than the last one. It was like something out of Tom Wolfe, satire, but not satire, just leftists being leftists.

As J.D. Vance has emphasized in another context, they don't exactly listen to themselves as they say what they say. Confessore probably needed to do it this way to gain their confidence for the piece.

All and all, the story of how the blob was spawned and grew is told in a stellar compelling way with very little bias anywhere in the piece. Now that the New York Times (Home of the 1619 project) is on the record as calling DEI a failure, can its stamp-out be far behind? Confessore puts the DIE into DEI, and we are all richer for it.

Image: phoebelb, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0