“But Mark, you don’t seem to understand, these are good people. These are all good people.”
My interlocutor was a long-time administrator at my university, and an accomplished scholar. In his genial way he was trying to set my straight on some important facts. I had just learned that there would be a new aspect to our annual reports. We would be asked to tell our overlords how each one of our activities contributes to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Teaching? How did it advance DEI? Scholarship? How did it help speed DEI on its way? If you get an honor or an award, you are to say how it contributed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Outside consulting: did it do any DEI duty? And what does the university mean by Diversity, by Equity, by Inclusion? The university doesn’t say. There are no official definitions out there to consider.