Photo by Quinn Dombrowski. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Over the last year, there has been a major shift in large companies announcing a departure from their “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) efforts. This has been long worked-for and celebrated by many prominent conservative figures and influencers. DEI has become essentially the board room title for the woke agenda.
Ford, Microsoft, John Deere, and most recently IBM are just a few of the major companies that announced sweeping changes to their DEI efforts. Departments removed, policies ended, staff let go… or were they? A headline last month covering the California Institute of Technology caught our attention and seems to be just one in a long trend, particularly in institutions of higher education, of not really ending DEI policies or departments, but simply re-titling employees and shuffling their placement within the organization.
Caltech announced in April that they were promoting Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux, the university’s assistant vice president for diversity, equity, inclusion, and assessment, to the position of associate vice president for campus climate, engagement, and success. Sounds like an awful lot of words to essentially cover up a cosmetic change to their DEI department without any real substantive change to the policies, and Caltech isn’t alone.
The college newspaper for Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, reported last month also that “At least a dozen Northwestern staff members’ titles across both undergraduate and graduate schools were changed to exclude references to diversity, equity and inclusion.” At a larger scale, CNBC reported the same approach even from Google, simply re-titling major employees before publicly announcing they had ditched DEI divisions.
These less-than-hidden sneaky changes should give us all pause in celebrating any announcements from big corporations supposedly abandoning their DEI work. Even as big name conservatives cover these “DEI dumps” as victories, but it seems to be more of a bait and switch. Do your own research, ask serious questions, and if a company in your sphere of influence claims to be ditching their DEI, double check them and don’t leave any name changes un-included!
This post originally appeared at https://phyllisschlafly.com/family/affirmative-action/dei-bait-and-switch/