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One day after assuming office last week, West Virginia’s new governor, Patrick Morrisey, issued an executive order banning DEI in state agencies and all entities receiving state funds, including public educational institutions. “I look at it as an effort to promote or push policies that are trying to benefit specific groups of people, usually on the basis of race or the color of your skin, sex or ethnicity or national origin, and I think that that’s completely inconsistent with the equal protection clause,” Morrisey said in a MetroNews Talkline interview.

On the same day that Morrisey signed his executive order, Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s defense secretary nominee, was answering questions on Capitol Hill in his Senate confirmation hearing.

Hegseth was repeatedly questioned about his stance on DEI in our nation’s armed services. He made clear that those initiatives will not be allowed under his leadership. In fact, he called them “poisonous.” Conservative senators offered similar appraisals at various junctures throughout the hearing.

Like the West Virginia governor’s mischaracterizations, many of Hegseth’s and GOP senators’ critiques about DEI, critical race theory and wokeness in the military were exaggerated and insufficiently substantiated. The bans that these and other lawmakers are committed to implementing will have devastating effects on higher education institutions, including military academies. Such consequential policymaking deserves a much higher threshold of evidence.

“Thank you for your clarity in articulating the vision you have for the Department of Defense restoring a warrior ethos, which is in stark contrast to the ethos we’ve seen in the last four years, which is of weakness and wokeness,” Senator Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, told Hegseth. Schmitt and others failed to furnish any data showing that combat training activities are being severely reduced in exchange for DEI trainings. “In Biden’s first year in office, the Department of Defense spent over five million man hours on ‘counter extremism and diversity training,’ what you and I might call woke training or DEI,” maintained Senator Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana. “The administration has refused to provide more recent data than that first year, but we know that it is exponentially more man hours wasted on DEI over the last four years.”

Banks did not disentangle counterextremism from DEI activities—they are not likely categorically the same. He also neglected to offer examples of what the curriculum included, what the learning goals were or how participants assessed the appropriateness and goodness of those trainings. Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, who serves as ranking member of the armed services committee, later pointed out that the estimated 5.9 million hours devoted to DEI were out of more than two billion hours the Defense Department devoted to all training activities within that same time frame. If Reed and the Military Times source he referenced during the hearing are accurate, that means that less than 0.3 percent of training time was devoted to learning about DEI.

Without supplying any findings from credible research studies showing causation, Schmitt also claimed that DEI is negatively affecting military recruitment. He noted that in 2022, the Army fell short of its recruiting goal by over 1,500 soldiers, and the following year the Navy missed its target by more than 7,000. He did not say whether these shortages were based on analyses of survey results from high-probability prospective recruits who ultimately cited our military’s too-woke culture as a top reason for not ultimately enlisting. Notwithstanding, to address recruiting challenges, Hegseth insisted, “You have to tear out DEI and CRT initiatives—root and branch—out of institutions.” The defense secretary nominee went on to say that he would “send a clear message that this is not a time for equity.”

An Air Force diversity memo was mischaracterized in the hearing. “Our current secretary of the Air Force, in a memo from August of 2022, thought we had too many white officers, advocated for quotas,” Schmitt erroneously asserted. “And if you crunch the numbers, that meant that 5,800 white officers who worked really hard should be fired.”

It says nowhere in Secretary Kendall’s memo that the Air Force and Space Force have too many white officers; it does not call for anyone to be terminated or demoted. Instead, the document acknowledges that the composition of our military does not reflect the diversity of our country and it directs leaders to develop goals to address demographic misalignments. “These goals are aspirational, aligning resources to invest in our long-term objectives and will not be used in any manner that undermines our merit-based processes,” the memo states.

No research-based insights about how military service members evaluate the importance, rigor and usefulness of DEI programs were referenced in the hearing. Relative to their white, male, heterosexual peers, it is plausible that service members who make our military diverse have significantly more positive appraisals of the need for and usefulness of DEI policies and programs. High numbers (maybe even the majority) of straight, white male soldiers and officers might rate those trainings positively, too. What do the disaggregated evaluation results show? Has everything that occurred in the name of DEI over the past four years poisoned our military? Has none of it been good? Specifically regarding trainings, were all or most deemed too woke, divisive and pointless? What were the topics? Who were the presenters? It is possible that Hegseth and DEI opponents do not actually have answers to these questions.

Without experiencing them firsthand or relying on comprehensive syntheses of what occurs in them (as opposed to anecdotes) and trustworthy data about their outcomes, Hegseth and others really ought to stop making baseless generalizations about DEI initiatives. They also should stop taking cheap shots at CRT until they are able to provide proof of the deep, widespread embedding of CRT into military training experiences. An academically complex corpus of legal concepts, frameworks and analytical tools developed more than four decades ago, CRT is barely taught in American law schools (certainly not in K-12 schools, as conservatives deceptively claim). Finding it in classrooms at military academies and in the curriculum of Defense Department DEI trainings would be extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible.

Rigorous, high-quality DEI initiatives could help address the recruitment and retention problems that Hegseth and conservative senators highlighted throughout the hearing. Surely, well-documented racial and gender inequities in officer promotion are not going to magically remediate themselves (nor are inequities in college student outcomes and employee metrics in higher education). Remediation requires data transparency, strategy, professional learning and skill-building activities, key performance indicators, accountability and resources. A series of McKinsey research reports consistently shows that DEI strengthens organizations, including our nation’s military. A corpus of studies has been published that consistently confirms the benefits of DEI in higher education. Before another governor, congressional committee, State Legislature, mayor or state higher education system executive defunds or altogether eliminates DEI programs that will affect educational institutions, they really should collect an abundance of evidence. Taxpayers deserve that.

Shaun Harper is university professor and provost professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership.

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