The College Fix

This is the statement given by Professor Keith Riles to the University of Michigan Board of Regents during public comment at their Dec. 5 meeting regarding diversity, equity and inclusion: 

Good afternoon, my name is Keith Riles. I am a physics professor here in Ann Arbor. I gather that you are having some second thoughts about DEI at the University of Michigan.

With the exception of race-blind, gender-blind programs, such as the GoBlue Guarantee, I urge you to rip out all of the DEI industrial complex at these campuses.

I have warned for more than 20 years, going back to my time on SACUA, that affirmative action, now cynically repackaged as DEI, is corrosive to this institution and is typically implemented illegally.

Although I believe the rationales for affirmative action withered away decades ago, I’m not here to argue about those rationales or about the pros and cons of policy choices.

I will comment, though, that DEI is a particularly toxic form of affirmative action because of its relentless focus on grievance ideology. The effects were especially pernicious in 2020 during the George Floyd hysteria and the BLM grift, but the toxicity continues even now in the form of anti-racism.

Oddly enough, though, I do agree that we are plagued by systemic, that is, institutionalized racism — and sexism. It’s called DEI. It is the only systemic racism that has persisted at this university, or, for that matter, throughout most of American society.

Setting aside the many harmful effects of DEI, let me now focus on the legal, or I should say, illegal aspects of some of the programs.

As a reminder, the voters of this state declared loudly and unmistakably in 2006: Thou shalt not discriminate. Period.

Yet this public university has resumed doing so under the umbrella of DEI. Two blatant examples are the Presidential and Collegiate Fellows programs, which now distort faculty hiring in my own college. One merely has to peruse the web sites listing the names and photos of the fellowship recipients to understand that these programs have been designed and implemented to discriminate against white and Asian males. That is their purpose. Any reasonable standard of disparate impact makes that clear.

While it’s true that occasionally a white or Asian male will actually win one of these diversity “contests,” based on a record of previous DEI activism, it is fundamentally a rigged competition.

I call out these two programs reluctantly because I personally know several of the Fellows who work in fields close to my own. I like and respect them all, and some of them have now earned tenure in the hard sciences, validating their excellence as scholars. My beef is not with them at all; it is with a hiring process that is inherently corrupt and should be ended, along with all other DEI programs that discriminate on the basis of race or gender.

This university is one lawsuit away from another humiliating trip to the U.S. or perhaps Michigan Supreme Court. All it would take is one disappointed, disillusioned postdoc who no longer cares about being blackballed in academia — to bring it all down — the house of cards. All it takes is one person with legal standing, and I suspect there are several hundred, if not thousands, who have that legal standing.

Now these faculty fellowship programs are manifestly discriminatory in design and implementation, but there are other U-M programs that are prone to the same tendency.

Now I think that most of my colleagues go along with all of this because they sincerely hope they are doing good. Others go along because that’s a shrewd path to advancement in academia. Still others go along because resistance seems futile — and risky to one’s reputation. One might get called a racist or a sexist or some other “ist,” perhaps not in front of one’s face, but behind one’s back, leading to pariahship.

One of the reasons, though, that we faculty can earn tenure is to give us the freedom to speak our minds honestly, including to the powerful. With that in mind, let me point out your own culpability.

You signed off on these programs, including the $15 million-plus per year that is squandered on salaries for DEI administrators who have collectively done more harm than good.

Fortunately, it is not too late for you to reverse course. I urge you to do so.

I appreciate your giving me this opportunity to speak. If I had more than five minutes, I could elaborate on how DEI actually works at this university at the ground level. If any of you would like to know more, you know how to reach me. Thank you.

MORE: UMich ends required DEI statements in hiring — but stops short of cutting funds to DEI programs

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