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| The Breadth of Knowledge |
I’m sitting back and watching the big boys go after each other, the government attacking CBS, Paramount, ABC, manhandling the most prestigious law firms in D.C., and shaking down major universities, like an old-time Mafia boss, threatening them all for millions of dollars, that or break their kneecaps.
Powerful institutions, like Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Duke, the University of California, cowering under the pen of the Justice Department. Ironic, U.S. presidents, vice-presidents, Secretaries of State, department heads, Washington lawyers, judges and legislators have received degrees from many schools like these. Why don't universities put up more of a fight, many of them endowed with millions, if not billons, of dollars in reserve?
What have they done to receive such ire? The main infraction they committed was refusing to bend a knee to the government’s demand that they follow the ultra-conservative education agenda set down by the Heritage Foundations’ Project 2025, the new administration's agenda, of which the president during the elections said he knew nothing, and anti-immigrant brain, Stephen Miller, when asked about Project 2025, looked confused and said he knew little about it.
The universities have really done nothing wrong, so the government created infractions, such as antisemitism and racial discrimination on campus. If those don’t work, the government falls back on the old time-tested boogey man, DEI, “Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion,” a policy meant to increase the enrollment of black and brown students in college classrooms but is seen as divisive by the New Elites.
DEI encouraged faculty to design a university classroom curriculum that reflects the true history of the United States, including the contributions of immigrants who helped build the country.
This isn’t new. In the 1960s, under a federal policy called Affirmative Action, different states designed their own equity programs.
In California, Cal State and UC campuses instituted the first (EOP) Education Opportunity Programs, which assisted “underrepresented” students in college admissions. Some academically talented high school graduates, unaware of university requirements, were admitted provisionally. They showed potential to complete a university education, and, according to studies, most did, becoming teachers, doctors, and lawyers.
It was during this time, around 1969, that I, a blue-collar kid from a working-class family, completed my stint in the Army and decided to enroll in a community college, not really understanding anything about the process since no one in my family had completed a university education. My mother did receive a cosmetology certificate from the local community college.
I’d come from a military institution steeped in diversity. I remember one day sitting with some friends, looking across an army post, and commenting about all the soldiers of every color and creed walking the pathways. In Vietnam, we were an integrated military, in every squad, platoon, and company, Whites, Chicanos, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans. Naively, I took it for granted college would be the same, a place of learning filled with people of different ethnicities and religions.
It wasn’t, not in Santa Monica, not in Los Angeles, and not across the state of California. Even though our parents’ tax dollars helped support public higher education, we weren't benefitting from it, and we had every right to be there.
My first days on campus, I saw hardly any black or brown students anywhere. I saw a sea of “White” kids from L.A.’s influential Westside communities, even a few friends from high school. In time, my eyes adjusted, like moving from the dark into the light, I began seeing small pockets of Chicanos and African American students tucked away in corners of the cafeteria, a classroom, the library, or auditorium. The weird thing was my college sat right across the street from one of the largest Mexican and Black communities on L.A.’s Westside, Santa Monica’s Pico Neighborhood, where Mexicans had begun migrating as far back as 1920, when my grandparents first arrived from Mexico and settled in the area.
It took Mexican American students and teachers to walk out of high school classes in protest, getting their heads busted by police in the process, to bring awareness to the problem. Students wanted to attend college. Finally, federal and state governments facilitated the increase of Affirmative Action programs at more colleges and universities The numbers of minority students began to change, albeit slowly. According to a UCLA study, by 2006, Latino students, the largest population in Los Angeles, reached a whopping 7.6 percent enrollment at UCLA. African American student remained less than 5%, and Native American kids barely reached 2%.
As Affirmative Action staff scoured the local high schools for bright students, informing them how to register and survive the system, enrollments climbed. Today, the percentage of Latino students at UCLA is about 22 percent, Asian and Pacific Islander 35.5, Blacks and Native Americans still under 5 percent, and White students about 25 percent.
Of course, “White” students from Los Angeles, many educated in premier private schools, have the choice of attending universities across the country, both private and public institutions.
Los Angeles Latino and Asian students remain closer to home and attend local public and some private universities, like USC. Los Angeles is the home to the largest number of Latino and Asian Americans in the U.S. In West L.A., Japanese Town is only a few miles from the UCLA campus.
However, when I think of DEI, I recall a story I heard about the history of higher education in the United States. Diversity, Affirmative Action, or any other name we give equity programs, weren’t originally started for students of color.
In the 1920s and ‘30s, Ivy League colleges began to see themselves as incestuous, years of breeding the same types of students, New England and East Coast blue bloods from the same privileged background who attended the same prestigious prep schools.
As the story goes, somebody in the Admissions Office of one school, asked, “What about the brilliant farm kids from Kansas and the steel workers' kids from the Great Lakes region? Shouldn’t we open our doors to them, so our students can have a more well-rounded understanding of the country?” Of course, this is a paraphrase of the actual conversation, which was longer and much more complex.
The first so-called diversity programs enrolled “White” non-traditional students to the Ivy Leagues, males only, no females. It would take time to diversify and allow females to attend, in fact, not until 1972 at Harvard, 1968, at Yale, and 1969 at Princeton. Though many opposed females on campus, many educators and students saw the benefit of bright females on campus, a step forward.
This helped to open minds, to offer new voices, perspectives, and experiences, just as inclusion of Black and Brown students does today, the real America, not the manufactured, limited version. Faculty reevaluated their curricula and started researching and teaching the history, art, social sciences, and hard sciences of a greater, wider, and stronger America.
It must have been a cataclysmic transformation, since, education, like a large cargo ship at sea, turns ever so slowly. Liberal? A myth. Most universities might preach liberalism, but, at heart, most are traditional, orthodox, and, yes, conservative in their approach to education. It's an institution that doesn't handle change well. Most professors don’t really like change. They prefer to do it the old way, the way they've done it for years, especially in English and foreign language departments, where tradition reigns supreme.
Still, even with their so-called liberal bent, the Ivy League schools must have been enticing. Among its graduates it counts, Republicans like Donald Trump, his sons, Henry Kissinger, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegsteth, Steve Bannon, Mike Pompeo, George W. Bush, William F. Buckley, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, and Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, among others, including Founding Father John Adams.
Though, today, they demonize DEI, Affirmative Action, gender and ethnic studies programs, they all chose to study and receive their degrees from the same universities they now attack. Most were educated during a time when DEI was common in the college lecture. They benefitted from learning about other ethnicities, whether they wanted to or not. Now, they reject the concept, or they must face the wrath of the constituents they themselves have courted.
Their base is the largely non-college educated, hard-working laboring class from the red states., who somehow believe these Ivy League New Elites have their best interest at heart. What do Ivy Leagers have in common with coal miners from West Virginia and Kentucky, farmers from across the Bible Belt, or labor unionists from Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania? They want their Base to believe they see no value in diversity, so they demand their alma maters revert to a time and place where exclusion led to an education closed off to reality.
While the New Elite in government received the finest educations in the country, they destroy education opportunities for the masses, as other totalitarian regimes have done, both left and right, following the same playbook, silencing intellectuals, writers, educators, banning books, and shuttering universities. The New Elite wants us to believe we should remain in an intellectual darkness and avoid the light, to stay asleep or distracted and never “wake.”
It is a travesty universities aren’t fighting for their First Amendment Rights. Legal experts say, in the end, though they might end up with a few broken bones, they will win. Instead, they are caving to their boards and the profit margin. Maybe that really is the state of higher education today, bigger and more beautiful buildings for the children of the New Elite, while the working class eats “cake,” an old term for stale biscuits.
