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The most active thread yesterday was the Gaza war thread which is back on top after interest in the war was renewed due to Israel's repeated drone strikes on a convoy of World Central Kitchen aid workers, killing seven. Since I have already discussed that thread, I will move on to the next which was titled "UT Austin lays off DEI employees" and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. The original poster linked to an article in "The Hill" saying that in order to comply with a Texas law that bans Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives at public universities, the University of Texas at Austin has laid off 60 employees that were involved with DEI. The original poster, who is a proponent of DEI programs, asks if anyone is removing the university from their list of colleges to pursue. DEI is the lastest in a series of right-wing bugaboos following affirmative action and critical race theory (CRT) that have been hijacked by right-wingers to promote the idea that White people are the true victims of racism. There is a well-funded political infrastructure devoted to "exposing" DEI and generating opposition to it. That effort seems to have had considerable success in convincing White people, and to an extent Asians, that they are being discriminated against in favor of less qualified minorities. As such, a number of those responding express happiness that the DEI program is being eliminated and claim that they will move UT higher on their lists. To be sure, many DEI efforts are deserving of criticism. In many cases, especially in the corporate world, such programs are little more than window dressing that have no real impact other than to create frustration. Such programs are seen as a waste of money, which is one of the primary criticisms voiced in this thread. Similarly, many DEI programs are so poorly implemented that they have little positive impact. However, proponents argue that the response to poor DEI programs should be better DEI programs rather than the elimination of them. Moreover, because of the constant politically-motivated attacks on such programs, they are often misunderstood. As the original poster of the thread writes in a follow-up post, "Funny how the people so against DEI don’t seem to have an elementary understanding of the concepts." One of the most common complaints about DEI is about the large budgets often devoted to it. In addition, despite the often lucrative funding, the programs are not seen as contributing to the schools' academic mission. As a poster who is a college professor writes, "They hire consultants, have their own staff, host expensive events, and get paid probably twice what I get paid as a tenured professor." Ironically, even the successes of DEI programs are often used to disparage them. For instance, if a DEI program succeeds in increasing the percentage of minority students at a university, many will claim that these students are unqualified and that they took places from more deserving White students, regardless of whether that is true or not.