Sadly, I fear Janice is right about the staying power of DEI. The reality is that the idea of judging people by group membership is very ancient and persists despite the bloodshed of the US Civil War and the wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's Dream of a colorblind society. The reason the Democrat party fell so naturally into this way of thinking is that it was the core that allowed their believe in slavery and Jim Crow to exist. Their dominance in the academic system has doomed academia to be on the wrong side of history as surely as if it was flying the confederate battle flag from every campus. I saw this within my own heavily academic family with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. These good liberal Democrats were practically having a religious experience at the election of a black president, as if it somehow had absolved them of all the sins they perceived they had been carrying. My response that Obama was not the first black candidate I voted for for president and that I had NOT voted for him because his racist ideology and policies were contrary to achieving Dr. King's Dream, was incomprehensible to them. Unlike most of these folks, I had grown up in a biracial and multicultural family and had long discarded the liberal white guilt that the rest of my family desperately sought divine intervention to relieve. Watching them it finally occurred to me that none of them is really about equality or achieving Dr. King's Dream. It's about feeling good about themselves and absolution from their perceived sins. This is why virtue signaling is so important to them...even if it comes at the expense of actually achieving something concrete on the issue in question.

So how does academia recover? Sadly, I think the whole thing may need to burn to the ground and be fully replaced with new institutions with entirely new employees. Certainly there are a small number of competent academics who have stood true to the mission of academia who could be brought into new institutions. The majority, however, are either too tainted to be salvaged or have demonstrated they are too self absorbed, self motivated or just too timid to be given any sort of position in the reformed/new institutions. A big way to accelerate this transition would be to completely defund academia due to its legacy of DEI hiring. That means no more federal or state funds for campuses, loans/financial aid for students or research grants. Reserve those resources fro the new institutions which would have to be built from entirely new hires. Thoughts?