Sally Kornbluth and MIT: doubling down on DEI
Sally Kornbluth is the last woman standing. the last of the three university presidents who appeared before Congress and could not say that calls for genocide and rampant antisemitism in any way violated the rules of their schools. They were certain such things depended on “context,” but none could be found under their enlightened leadership. Heather Mac Donald at City Journal reports on Kornbluth’s plans:
MIT president Sally Kornbluth announced on Wednesday that the university would soon reveal its inaugural Vice President for Equity and Inclusion (VPEI). If one wanted evidence of the disconnect between university culture and the outside world, Kornbluth’s announcement provides it.
Since October 7, universities have been the focus of nearly unprecedented public attention, triggered by student and faculty support for the Hamas terror attacks on Israel. Alumni from schools like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania charged their universities with complicity in anti-Semitism and demanded that Jews be included in the roster of “marginalized” groups protected by the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy.
Image: MIT President Sally Kornbluth. Wikimedia Commons.org. Public Domain.
Mac Donald notes the trio’s moral depravity has awakened donors to DEI destruction on campus, and is costing billions in donations. The damage to university prestige is incalculable.
It’s been hard to miss this new consensus among university critics. National and state legislators, governors, and other public figures have called for the elimination of DEI administrations. Denunciation of the equity and inclusion bureaucracy is now part of every call to reform of the post–October 7 university—to the point that left-wing defenders of the university are railing against what they view as conservatives’ exploitation of the Hamas campus crisis to defund essential diversity initiatives.
That anyone supposedly charged with “higher education” would think DEI “essential” speaks volumes.
And yet here was Sally Kornbluth on January 3, blithely trumpeting the imminent arrival of MIT’s latest diversity sinecure, the VPEI. The university already has an Institute Community and Equity Officer (ICEO) charged with being a “thought leader on the subjects of community, equity, inclusion, and diversity,” according to the ICEO’s official description. This equity officer oversees MIT’s Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition, which requires each academic program to improve the “representation” of “underrepresented” graduate students, faculty, postdocs, and undergraduates. The Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition posits that the “composition of our community, and of our leadership, should reflect a commitment to diversity.” It provides no argument for why MIT’s “composition” should “reflect a commitment to diversity,” nor evidence for why such a commitment is compatible with colorblind academic excellence.
Kornbluth has heretofore avoided the intense heat directed at the now-ousted presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, despite having given a similarly robotic (and similarly hypocritical) defense of campus free speech at the now-infamous December 5 House hearing on anti-Semitism. The best that could be said of Kornbluth’s congressional performance was that she avoided the condescending hauteur and sense of aristocratic weariness with GOP yokels that characterized then-Harvard president Claudine Gay’s testimony. MIT’s Jewish alumni started organizing after what they viewed as the administration’s inadequate response to student lawlessness during a pro-Palestinian occupation of MIT’s main campus building on November 9, 2023. But the MIT alumni have yet to reach the critical mass or clout of alumni from the Penn and Harvard business schools. Kornbluth’s seeming blindness to DEI’s loss of legitimacy raises further questions about her fitness to lead MIT, however, at the very least on grounds of sheer political cluelessness.
MIT has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the world’s preeminent science schools, a reputation built on academic, scientific excellence and accomplishment. In other words, MITs reputation, and ability to fund raise, relies on merit, on enrolling the best scientific minds and training scientists that produce replicable results. In that pursuit, nothing matters but merit. DEI is incompatible with the very purpose of MIT, yet Kornbluth apparently thinks it the path to personal aggrandizement and institutional success.
Now, however, MIT, too, has succumbed to the ideology of color-consciousness, as the 2020 cancellation of a speech on planetary science by geophysicist Dorian Abbot made clear. (Abbot had co-written an unrelated article supporting meritocratic excellence in college admissions and faculty hiring.) An MIT computer scientist, Mauricio Karchmer, has just resigned, citing the priority put on “promoting a particular world view” in “many of MIT’s departments and programs.”
Kornbluth exemplifies a rule of thumb: anyone in a university leadership position not affirmatively opposed to race politics supports antimeritocratic ideas.
If MIT wants to continue to contribute to civilization rather than its downfall, Kornbluth will be given the opportunity to virtue signal elsewhere, and DEI will be shown the door. I’m not holding my breath awaiting the outcome of that science experiment.
Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.