America’s colleges and universities are at the forefront of the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion. And the obsession with diversity doesn’t just take place in the classroom or during extracurricular activities. Even faculty and staff can find themselves dealing with the diversity push.
Take Princeton University, for example. The Ivy League school has added new search options to its portal that staff members use to search for vendors and suppliers. The new options allow staff to search for businesses based on race or other criteria like women ownership, veteran ownership, and (of course) LGBT ownership.
Princeton has created a supplier diversity report, where you can search for suppliers by ethnicity or sexual proclivity. So if you're looking for a gay "Asian Pacific American" to cater your campus event, you're in luck. pic.twitter.com/9nMZu4oiae
— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) August 8, 2022
“The school announced in May that it had hired Michelle Thomas—formerly a contract officer at the Federal Bureau of Prisons—to be its ‘associate director for supplier diversity,'” reports the Washington Free Beacon. “Thomas oversees the implementation of the procurement plan, which calls for Princeton to ‘engage a diversity advisory firm to assess program effectiveness.’ Success will be gauged, according to the plan, by the ‘proportion of total purchases that are made from certified diverse businesses,’ meaning businesses ‘at least 51 percent owned and operated by minorities, women, veterans, or members of the LGBTQ community.'”
So now if you work for Princeton and you’re looking for a vendor, you can search for a caterer who is “Hispanic American” who owns a “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Business Enterprise” or a “Veteran Business Enterprise.” Or you can choose any combination from the options at your fingertips.
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It would be easy to assume that these tools put companies that don’t meet these criteria at a disadvantage, but don’t worry: the wokes always have a way to make sure less diverse companies can do their intersectional penance.
The Free Beacon reassures us that “Firms ‘that are not certified as diverse’ can still demonstrate their ‘commitment to diversity’—and thus increase their odds of a contract—by adopting ‘diversity best practices,’ the plan suggests.”
We can be sure of this much: Princeton employees would never see options to choose a pro-life business or a Christian business. It’s all about ethnicity, sex, and gender — with the admirable exception of the option to choose a veteran-owned business.
There’s another thing you can be sure of: the wokes are going to clean up in consultant fees with this diversity program. Princeton’s diversity plan encourages companies who want to do business with the university to hire consultants to help them stay current.
“Many diversity consultancies market themselves as the experts on such practices: Crossroads, for example, explicitly tells organizations that they are powerless to solve racism without the help of outside consultants,” the Free Beacon reports.
Another word pops up often in the diversity plan: “equity.” It’s all about giving favored demographic groups an advantage at the expense of other groups. But Princeton concedes that its plan is doomed to fail, confessing that “even under optimal circumstances, firms that are not certified diverse will continue to comprise the majority of University suppliers.”
At the end of the day, woke diversity efforts are all about keeping up appearances, and it doesn’t matter whether these initiatives achieve anything.
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