DEI Exposed — But Exposed to Whom?
Updated: 23 hours ago
I recently came across an author named Stanley K. Ridgley, who has written a 458-page indictment of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in higher education. His title does not leave much room for ambiguity: DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education.
I was intrigued.
Another white man with an opinion.
And yes, some might identify that as my bias talking.
I caught myself, boiled some tea, and got into it.
The book is not a mild critique. Ridgley frames DEI as a confidence scheme, using the vocabulary of grifting deliberately — dubious credentials, cult-conversion tactics used on students, a network of campus informants cultivated to instill fear, lavishly paid bureaucrats, and lawsuits that he argues expose DEI's underlying racialism. He borrows the formula of the con from an old text called Road Hustler and applies it, chapter by chapter, to university diversity offices. It is a serious, specific argument, not just a title.
It is an argument worth examining.
But I have a question.
If DEI was such a powerful force inside universities, why were so many Black people still fighting the university? Not fighting to get into a diversity workshop. Not fighting to learn the correct terminology. Fighting to be heard. To be retained. To be respected. To have racism acknowledged, their scholarship taken seriously, their accommodation granted. Sometimes fighting simply to remain in spaces that had already congratulated themselves for becoming diverse.
That is where my problem with the conversation begins. There are at least two different ways to argue that DEI failed. One says DEI became too powerful. The other asks: powerful for whom?
The DEI Office and the Black Person Are Not the Same Thing
One of the strangest developments in the current debate is the way DEI bureaucracies and racialized people have been collapsed into a single thing. They are not.
A university can have a DEI vice-president, a diversity statement, an equity office, mandatory training, several committees and a webpage full of smiling Black students. None of that tells us what happens when an actual Black student walks into a supervisor's office and says something is wrong. None of it tells us whose complaint is believed, whose scholarship is considered rigorous, whose anger becomes threatening, whose confidence becomes arrogance, whose difference is celebrated in the brochure but becomes inconvenient in the room.
Research on faculty experience has been asking versions of these questions for years. A 2009 study by Jayakumar, Howard, Allen and Han, drawing on a national sample of over 37,000 faculty, found that campus racial climate was a key factor shaping retention and satisfaction, and that a hostile racial climate affected Black and Latino faculty far more negatively than it affected other groups — while a positive climate was associated with greater retention, an advantage disproportionately enjoyed by white faculty. A 2017 qualitative case study by Turner Kelly, Gaston Gayles and Williams, published in the Journal of Negro Education, coined a phrase that has since entered the literature: “recruitment without retention.” Drawing on Black faculty’s own accounts at a predominantly white institution, the study traced how racism and a hostile campus culture can produce exactly the kind of unrest that precedes public protest — even, and sometimes especially, at institutions that had already built the diversity apparatus.
So perhaps the existence of DEI and the experience of inclusion have never been interchangeable. That distinction matters.
What If the Bureaucracy Grew While the Protection Did Not?
This is where Ridgley's critique becomes genuinely interesting to me — because I don't have to defend the DEI industry to disagree with what he concludes about racial inequality.
Take his sharpest claims seriously for a moment. Suppose it's true that some DEI credentials were thin, that some administrators were extraordinarily well paid, that some training used tactics closer to indoctrination than education, that some universities built an entire apparatus of monitoring and reporting among students. Grant all of it. None of that proves that Black people acquired corresponding institutional power. A university can waste money on a bad consultant and still fail to protect the Black professor down the hall from a hostile department chair. Both things can be true at once — and Ridgley's evidence, read carefully, is largely about the bureaucracy's failures and abuses, not about what happened to the people it claimed to serve. The Turner Kelly study found that formal DEI structures at the research university it examined had not explicitly addressed the challenges Black full-time faculty were experiencing, nor explicitly supported their retention.
Read that again. There can be a diversity apparatus and still be Black people inside the institution asking where it is when they actually need it.
That may be the more uncomfortable DEI story. Not that universities talked too much about race, but that they became extraordinarily skilled at talking about race without redistributing much institutional power at all — which would mean Ridgley and I are describing the same failure from opposite ends. He sees a bureaucracy that grew too large. I see a bureaucracy that grew large and left the people underneath it exposed. A grift and a betrayal are not mutually exclusive.
Representation Is Not Protection
We have made this mistake before. We count bodies — more Black students, more Black faculty, more women, more disabled people — and announce progress. But inclusion cannot simply mean getting someone through the door. The harder questions begin afterward.
Can they disagree? Complain? Fail without confirming a stereotype, or succeed without becoming a threat? Can they identify racism without becoming the problem, or challenge someone above them without discovering that hierarchy outranks equity? Can they need accommodation without having their competence quietly reconsidered? Can they tell the truth about the institution and remain welcome inside it?
Those questions rarely make it into an annual diversity report, because the report measures who is present, not who is protected. And that gap between visibility and power is where the research keeps pointing. A 2022 study by Settles, Jones, Buchanan and Brassel, drawing on 1,341 tenure-track faculty at a research-intensive university, found that women and underrepresented faculty of color reported significantly higher levels of “scholarly devaluation” — their work taken less seriously — and that this devaluation predicted lower job satisfaction and higher intent to leave. A 2023 Science Advances study, using a census of 245,270 tenure-track and tenured professors and a large-scale survey of the same faculty population, similarly found that women were more likely to feel pushed from their jobs and to leave or consider leaving because of workplace climate more often than work-life balance.
Universities are exceptionally good at visible reform: statements, committees, reports, training, strategic plans, heritage months, land acknowledgements. What is much harder to see is power — who hires, who supervises, who evaluates, who decides whether a complaint has merit, who gets called collegial and who gets called difficult. Too much DEI discourse concentrated on the visible half. Representation without power can become decoration. Representation without protection can become recruitment into harm.
That is also the shape of “recruitment without retention” as a pattern rather than a phrase: universities got very good at bringing people in, and never quite matched that effort with the harder, less photogenic work of making the institution survivable once they arrived. There is something close to cruelty in that gap — inviting people in under the banner of inclusion, then treating their difficulty surviving the place as an individual failure. Not resilient enough. Not collegial enough. Not grateful enough. Perhaps. Or perhaps the institution changed its demographics faster than it changed its culture.
So Was DEI a Con?
Maybe that depends on who you believe was conned.
Ridgley argues that universities were conned by DEI advocates and an expanding ideological bureaucracy — that administrators and consultants ran a version of the classic con, dressed in academic language, on people who should have known better. It's a real argument and it deserves a real hearing, especially where he has receipts: specific consultants, specific salaries, specific lawsuits.
But there is another interpretation sitting right next to his. What if Black students were told an institution valued equity and discovered that equity had limits? What if Black faculty were recruited under diversity initiatives and learned that diversity became less appealing the moment they exercised authority? What if disabled students encountered accessibility statements that grew considerably more complicated the moment accommodation required inconvenience? What if racialized scholars discovered that institutions were comfortable discussing systemic racism right up until someone identified where the system was located?
Then perhaps the more useful question isn't whether DEI was a con. It's who exactly was left holding nothing when the money, the offices and the goodwill ran out.
The Anti-DEI Argument May Be Asking the Wrong Question
There are legitimate questions to ask about DEI. Did every program work? Obviously not. Was every consultant useful? Surely not. Did institutions substitute slogans for serious thinking, sometimes? Almost certainly. Universities should be able to withstand those questions.
But dismantling DEI bureaucracy does not automatically dismantle racism. Removing diversity statements does not make bias disappear. Eliminating an equity office does not produce meritocracy by default, and declaring everyone equal does not make everyone equally powerful. This is where the current anti-DEI conversation can become dangerously simplistic — moving from “the fire department failed” to “there was never a fire.”
If a fire department fails to extinguish a fire, we investigate the department: its management, its budget, its methods, its leadership. It would be strange to conclude from the department's failure that the fire never existed. It would be stranger still to conclude that the people still standing in the smoke were, all along, the ones with the power.
Perhaps We Need to Expose Something Else
Maybe DEI does need exposing. But let's expose all of it.
Expose the money, the consultants, the bad scholarship, the ideological conformity, the performative statements, the meaningless committees, the universities that discovered diversity right when diversity became marketable. Ridgley has done real work on that half of the story, and it shouldn't be dismissed because of who is cheering for it.
Then keep going. Expose the Black professor recruited and not retained. Expose the student who learned an equity policy couldn't protect them from institutional hierarchy. Expose the scholar whose knowledge became valuable while their presence remained inconvenient. Expose the disabled student whose accommodation existed beautifully on paper. Expose the difference between being represented by an institution and being protected within one.
And expose the possibility that DEI's greatest failure was never that it gave marginalized people too much power. Its greatest failure may be that institutions learned how to look transformed without surrendering very much power at all — and that both the people who built the DEI bureaucracy and the people who are now dismantling it have largely agreed, without saying so, not to ask who actually held power the whole time.
That's the DEI conversation I want to have. Not was DEI too powerful — but, after all those offices, policies, committees, statements and promises, how many of the people DEI was supposedly created for gained enough power to challenge the institution itself when it mattered? What would it actually look like if they had — a Black faculty member's complaint outweighing a chair's reputation, an equity office with the authority to overrule a dean, an accommodation granted before it was contested? We haven't seriously asked that question. Both sides of this argument, so far, have found it easier not to.
Sources & Further Reading
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