Did you miss the last 80 years of anti-communist, pro-capitalist, free-market propaganda? The american government has been the most powerful ideological force in the world for basically all of living memory.
In this case you had things like the Department of Energy requiring Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans to even apply for funding.
The two big differences I see is that that is a wholly inappropriate avenue for ideological enforcement, and that it's also exceptionally divisive.
Things are changing in modern times but historically free markets, capitalism, and so on were very widely shared values. The contemporary equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive. The government pushing it, and frequently in very inappropriate ways (the military also comes to mind) is just very weird.
> equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive
Equality of outcome, in the sense that we should hire unqualified people for research positions, is thankfully an incredibly rare and frankly insane position that almost nobody holds. Also thankfully, that's not what these required plans were. The requirement was that groups applying for grants have a specific and actionable plan for making sure that equality of opportunity was ensured. In fact, advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas, would directly violate DEI policy[1]. Typically, a plan would reference existing enrollment/acceptance policies of the company/university/department making an application, which are designed to make sure employees/students are not advantaged or disadvantaged by immutable or protected characteristics. Common examples would be:
- Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse to avoid bias towards whatever groups are over-represented at your company already. It's a well-studied phenomena that people are inclined to like others who are similar to themselves. Without any other factors in play (skill is randomly distributed in applicants, all of your employees are free of sexual/racial bias), if your company consists of, say, 80% men and 20% women, and you pick your interviewers totally at random, you will continue to hire more men than women. If you use a 50/50 split on your interview panel then your hiring becomes more meritocratic by virtue of factoring out self-similarity biases.
- Implement structured interviews and standardized qualifications-based hiring, rather than relying on interviewer preference.
- Learning about potential subconscious biases helps people account for them. Incorporating bias training can mitigate (though not eliminate) hiring biases. Of course, as you have no doubt experienced, these training courses tend to be pretty boring and patronizing, but that's true of most employee training, so /shrug.
- Diversifying applicant sourcing. If you only look for applicants via one platform, adding some more that tend to be used by different groups to your sourcing strategy.
You have bought into the oft-repeated lie that DEI is some Harrison Bergeron-esque attempt to cripple institutions. You were probably pointed to one or two extremely poor implementations of such policies that were genuinely unfair. The broader movement, and most implementations of it, are about equality of opportunity. The intentional destruction of public perception of these policies and subsequent removal only guarantees that existing self-perpetuating gaps in opportunity will persist.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222222206/https://science.o...
Archive link, because of course the new admin took down the page.
> Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse
How do you make sure your hiring panel is diverse without having diversity quotas for it?
I understand that many people say this, but academics routinely understand government DEI initiatives to be racial quotas. See for example https://archive.is/So06G about the NIH FIRST program. I don't think that DEI is secretly aiming to cripple institutions, but I do think that its advocates genuinely feel racial balancing is a good idea and dissemble about this in contexts where it would be illegal.
Racist hiring practices are illegal, and should remain so. If Trump has issued an EO to clarify this point, and language to this effect were added to DEI policies, it would be utterly uncontroversial. I would welcome a case being brought against a professor who actively avoided hiring white people under the guise of DEI to really drive home that such behavior is unlawful and unacceptable.