Why DEI Doesn’t Work
DEI, known as “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”, doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work because it’s laboring under two pernicious lies.
The first lie is that everyone has an equal level of intelligence, and their intellect is evenly placed. I first noticed this because I come from a long line of scientists. My grandmother has a PhD in Chemistry and my grandfather was both a chemical engineer and a lawyer.
My parents had my IQ tested after it became clear that I was suffering from some sort of disability when I was very young. When the test came back, it showed that I have an IQ of 127, but I was a single, solitary point away from having an actual disability when it came to mathematics.
As I grew older, I found myself frequently bored in English class, but I was always behind in math class, and of course, the teacher couldn’t slow down the entire classroom just to help me. I belonged in learning disabled math and honors English, and that unfortunately didn’t happen because the school didn’t accommodate my unique situation.
You can’t cheat on an IQ test, and despite heavy badgering, I’ve never been educated in mathematics beyond Algebra Two. Yet I’ve had a college-level reading ability since roughly twelve years of age.
Suffice it to say it’s not a surprise to anyone in my life that I am a writer and not a doctor. And well, this makes sense: my father is a writer, and my mother focused her time and energy on the field of law, although she never became a lawyer.
You also can’t force someone to have an interest in a subject that they simply don’t like, for example, I have a violinist's dream: a natural bow arm. This means that when I draw the bow across the strings instead of that awful screeching sound that children torture their parents with for years before finally getting better, I get a smooth beautiful tone instantly. The violin teacher at my high school was practically salivating at the thought of getting me into her class the moment she saw me.
This might explain why, no matter how hard I tried, every time I threw a baseball or hit a tennis ball it would curve to the left. I could never throw a ball straight, it didn't matter what I did.
But I don’t like music, I find it boring. Probably because music is very mathematical, and well I have despised math since my earliest memories.
It would be no surprise to me if genetics played a role in this, because after all my grandparents met at Johnson and Johnson, and had four kids: three of which went into the sciences, one who went into Law, and who married a journalist, and that union produced me. My mother was also a musician and so was my grandmother.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence. And I see this in my daughter: My husband likes to play country music in the kitchen and at 15 months old I heard her singing along, with a perfect tone of course. At 18 months, her language skills are already advanced for her age.
The reason why I’m telling you this is because it draws a point: intelligence and raw talent is something that someone inherits. You can’t make someone good at something that they simply don’t have the capacity to do.
IQ is what someone is born with, and as much as 80% of your IQ, or intelligence is inherited. It’s what you're born with. Environment (such as lack of food, disease, and bad prenatal environments) can lower your intelligence, but generally speaking, your intelligence grows, and then it reaches a plateau between 14-16 years of age.
This suggests that providing food on a consistent basis to children would do more to increase diversity in academia than any DEI program ever could.
You can continually try to shove a round peg in a square hole, or you can play on your strengths.
This lie, also known as the “you can do anything if you work hard enough” lie is damaging. And it damaged me as I cried over my math textbooks night after night, my mother telling me I could do better if I only “worked harder.”
Instead of playing to my strengths, and finding out what I’m good at and interested in, I tried to be good at everything. But no one is good at everything. And I think that’s where a lot of modern schooling fails.
The second lie of DEI is that you can focus on diversity while also focusing on merit. But, again this lie is based on the first: that anyone can achieve anything they want to if only they “work hard enough” and “have the right resources.” And what do you do if the “type of people”, for lack of a better verbiage, you want in your programs who are able to do the work are small in number? How do you “increase” that number? This came to an ugly head when talking about something that we all rely on, medicine.
UCLA was once considered a top medical school, yet after hiring Jennifer Lucero, up to 50% of their students failed basic medical competency exams, and UCLA dropped from 6th to 18th place in U.S News and World Reports rankings for medical research.
There is a real reason that medical school can, and should be hard to get into. How exactly is saddling people with tremendous amounts of debt “empowerment”? How is that an accomplishment?
Those 50% of students only have a 70% chance of passing if they decide to retake the exam. How will these students pay off this debt if they don’t pass? The cost of UCLA’s medical school is over $400,000.
To me, DEI feels like it doesn’t help anyone at all. It may “feel good” to offer people an opportunity to do something if you feel sorry for them, but that doesn’t mean that it actually helps anyone at all.
A truly diverse world would be where we acknowledged everyone’s abilities and nurtured them.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
I couldn’t agree more , Audra. (lovely Irish name!) like you I had an IQ test, at 14 in my case, and it came out at 136. I could read fluently at age 4 but could never master mathematics. I tried, I really did, but it was a mystery to me, apart from basic arithmetic which I memorised. I became a teacher of English and tried my best to instil a love of reading in all my students. Whilst many loved reading, some were what we called ‘reluctant readers’. No matter what I tried, these reluctant readers remained so, by and large. Most of them were boys, some of whom were maths wizards. I wish DEI would DIE; it sets up merit where it doesn’t exist and demotes it where it does. The only fair & sensible way to run society is meritocracy.
Genetics certainly matters, but that intelligence has to be nurtured and many fail to do that for children from an early age. If your husband never played any music in the kitchen would your daughter be as advanced in language? The early language and music exposure, 0-6 years, primes the neural development at the most rapidly developing time. I expect you read to your daughter from birth. Raw talent also has to have motivation in order to develop that raw talent. Neither I nor my husband have musical ability but our youngest has an outstanding ear and plays piano, yet he doesn't care to do the work to develop that ability further. He also doesn't do much reading but his verbal scores on standardized tests are very high, likely because I read to him for almost 2 hours each night when he was an infant and toddler. I believe most parents try and do what they think is best for their children, but they are limited to their own experiences, and this can rarely be made up for older children and young adults. DEI tries to do make that up, rather than make changes for succeeding generations. One could have a natural ability for math, but if you have mediocre math teachers you won't see a full flourishing. Genetics is a funny thing and there's a human history's worth of ancestral DNA that mixed and matched to get us here and will continue to mix and match in each succeeding generation. I have 4 full siblings and each one of us is vastly different in our skills and abilities. Each of my 3 children has different abilities and I observed and steered accordingly. As you stated, one can try and shove a round peg in a square hole, but it will be painful.