Fighting for DEI all over again
The Education Department declared all race-conscious student programming and financial aid illegal and threatened to rescind federal funding for any institution that does not comply within 14 days.
I have such a clear memory from early in my professorial career, when the English and world languages faculty met to discuss a proposal from some of us younger faculty to shift the curriculum of the required three-semester general education seminar to be more inclusive of women and non-Europeans.
The twelve required full-length books in the curriculum included just two women writers, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf; and just one person of color, Frederick Douglass, who was also the only American. The rest were dead white European men like Socrates, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Conrad…you get the picture.
The senior faculty at the meeting, all white men, argued vociferously for keeping the curriculum intact, just as it was. It was all essential reading for young people, they said.
I don’t know if they actually said this, but I certainly picked up on the implication that women and people of color hadn’t produced much of note or worthiness. And one venerable professor said blandly, “The Greeks are people of color, aren’t they?”
I left that meeting with steam coming out of my ears.
Later that year I gave a talk to the assembled faculty and students of the seminar sequence, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s extended essay Three Guineas to buttress my own argument for expanding our curriculum to include more women and people of color from more places in the world.
It took many years, but we finally got there (after those senior faculty had retired).
And now I am beside myself, practically struck dumb, to find us thrust back in time by the bigots now running America, who are trying to bash and destroy all the progress we had made in academia towards recognizing the necessity of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Let me spell it out.
Curricular DEI benefits the majority of people in this country (not to mention in the world) who are not white men, by giving respect and attention to different heritages and walks of life.
It also benefits said white men, by giving them opportunities to learn from and about all the many different human beings who surround them, with whom they will have to interact as adults.
Back in the day, women, LGBTQ+ folks and people of color learned from and about white men, and they needed to, because white men held all the positions of authority (as was the case for me as a graduate student and young professor).
Then, by dint of hard work by many people, the principle of equal rights for all was enshrined in legal doctrine and enforced by the federal government.
Workplaces, including academia, began to change.
Although women and people of color were still not equal in terms of wages and power in 2024, there was at least legal lip service paid to DEI efforts, and there was legal recourse if outright discrimination occurred.
Now we turn the page into 2025, and the entire social landscape is being radically changed, in a back to the future, nightmarish kind of way.
Are we going to have to fight the fights of our ancestors all over again?
Can it be possible that courses like “Black Women Writers” and “Queer Theory” are going to be outlawed?
No doubt there will be pushback. There will be legal challenges.
But particularly for state universities and small, financially fragile private colleges, it will be hard to muster the wherewithal to fight the system.
Individual faculty members have little power or incentive to fight for their academic freedom to teach what they want in their classes, particularly when in the US, some 70% of higher education professors are adjunct and can be fired at will.
Education is a site of possibility, where young people’s minds can be opened—or closed.
The most intolerant people—religious or political despots—are the ones who most tightly restrict free, open-ended inquiry among their youth.
They are called conservatives because they resist change.
And yet even they must know that the only true constant in life is change.
Human thought continues to evolve, in a never-ending relationship with what’s happening around us in the world.
We can try to pretend that climate change doesn’t exist…until the next flood or fire sweeps us away.
We can claim that only white men of European heritage have ideas worth studying, until the undeniable brilliance of the rest of the world makes those narrow views marginal and unimportant.
In my college, it was the demands of the students—not the faculty—that finally got the conservatives to release their stranglehold on the curriculum.
A group of students organized a protest day, in the form of a teach-in about the ideas and authors they were not allowed to study in the required curriculum.
That protest became an annual tradition, and eventually, long after those original instigators graduated, it even became institutionalized, enshrined in the academic calendar as a day that the students could take over and teach about social justice.
Yes, it was a “woke” day. A day to celebrate DEI.
And eventually it became vestigial, because our official, required curriculum had changed to welcome diversity and inclusion of multiple identities and points of view.
I am mourning the loss of that freedom even as I am girding myself to fight for it, all over again.
Are you with me?
Yours in the struggle,
Jennifer
Starting this month!
Come write and speak your truth with me in this powerful four-session Bioneers Learning online class!
In this hands-on class hosted by Bioneers Learning, we’ll look deeply at some of the major social and environmental issues of our time and consider how outstanding leaders have used creative expression to make a difference.
Inspired by these models, you’ll work on expressing your own ideas with confidence, clarity, and eloquence, in both writing and public speaking, coming away with a portfolio of writing, a recorded talk, and a circle of kindred spirits cheering you on.
Four Fridays, Feb. 28 - March 21, 2025, live online from 12 - 1:30 pm with recordings available.
To write and speak our truths, we have to recharge our creative fuel cells, right?
I’m leading three in-person retreats this spring, designed to help you ground, center and reconnect to your own creative spirit.
Read on for details, and come join me!
Meet me in Petaluma, California on March 30 for a daylong writing retreat!
Come on retreat with me and Birth Your Truest Story co-host Audrey Kalman along the Petaluma River in northern California. We'll write, share, grab lunch at a neighborhood cafe, and amble to the river for inspiration. Join us to:
Trace your inspiration back to its source
Follow the twists and turns of your creative flow state
Learn to ride the rapids of your creative life and float gently through the quiet stretches
Write together and share your work
Savor the group energy of our Birth Your Truest Story creative community
March 30, 2025. Early registration ($139) runs through February 28.
Meet me in Rowe, Massachusetts for a weekend retreat in the beautiful month of May!
Come on retreat with me in the budding springtime setting of Rowe, Massachusetts, where we’ll write to explore our deep connections with our Mother Earth, Gaia, as well as how the potent theme of mothering and nurturing has shown up in our lives.
Rowe is a magical retreat center nestled in the northern Berkshire mountains, with trails through mature forests bordering a tranquil lake. It’s rustic in a way that encourages communion with the land and camaraderie with the kindred spirits in our circle.
May 9 - 11, 2025. Sliding scale tuition and a variety of accommodations on site. I can’t wait to share this special experience with you!
Come Riding & Writing in Iceland with me in June!
Riding & Writing in Iceland!
June 2 - 8, 2025
The creative tonic of Iceland has to be experienced to be understood.
Come experience the body, mind and spirit glow that comes from Riding & Writing in good company in a beautiful place, warmly hosted by our friends Gudmar and Christina at Hestaland.
Click here to find out more and see beautiful photos from my past Riding & Writing trips to Iceland.
Friends, it’s my pleasure and my passion to support you as we stretch towards living our lives creatively and to the fullest.
The motto of my author consulting business is “Writing to Right the World,” and the motto of my book publishing business, Green Fire Press, is “Books that Make the World Better.”
If these intentions resonate with you and you are working on a book, or have one in mind, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Supporting creative people bring their work more strongly out into the world is one way I try to make the world better.
I’m sad beyond sad about this. Furious at the same time!! Do we need to wait for 2 more generations’ of political leadership to flip this back to what our young people have expected of their educators for the past several decades??? White men are not actually the plurality - you they’re the dictators of every one of our lives - at present. I hope that college students rise up over this hedonistic ideology.