DEI Policies are Hindering Student Reporting at Yale and UPenn

DEI Policies are Hindering Student Reporting at Yale and UPenn

This ideology infects everything and it is meant to do that.

From Tablet Magazine:

DEI Squelches Student Reporting at Yale, Penn

The University of Pennsylvania’s oldest independent student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, has a proud history of reportorial excellence, sending its graduates to work at many once-storied American newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. The writer Buzz Bissinger, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for reporting and author of Friday Night Lights, is a Daily alumnus, as is the novelist Erik Larsen. Other alumni include U.S. senators and members of the U.S. Supreme Court.

It is hard to say that fact-based reporting remains the student paper’s main preoccupation, though. In April, The Daily Pennsylvanian “welcomed its third-ever class of DP fellows who bring their unique backgrounds to their work to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion” at the paper. The fellows will enjoy stipends, matched alumni mentors, regular group meetings, and a professional development conference, participating in a program created by the paper to “engage and support students from historically marginalized groups” interested in various relevant fields. DP’s hope is to “create an inclusive culture within the company and in the coverage of the Penn community.”

The Daily Pennsylvanian’s “community guide” has a small section committed to editorial ethics—which makes mention of diverse backgrounds—followed by a much larger section on diversity, equity, and inclusion. The DEI section boasts of a diversity and inclusion coordinator on its board, a diversity committee, affinity groups for Black, LGBTQ+, and multiracial staffers, a regularly published demographic survey, and even a diversity style guide, “which dictates the language we use to refer to marginalized communities.”

The premise of these DEI initiatives is that certain demographic groups have been and continue to be oppressed by societal structures, and inequalities experienced by these groups can be explained by that oppression. This inequality is now embedded within society, and reparatory policies such as affirmative action are necessary for change. Therefore, even campus newspapers must enact reparatory policies themselves, focusing on coverage that favors oppressed groups or a staff makeup that represents oppressed groups rather than focusing on quality or objectivity. This is reflected in the funneling of resources toward initiatives for certain demographic groups or changes in how reporters write about these groups.

Read the whole thing.

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