HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: No, Vanderbilt Isn’t Governed By “Principled Neutrality:” The university’s actions give the lie to its professed stance.

But other universities won’t be following Vanderbilt’s example. And they won’t be following it for the same reason that Vanderbilt won’t be following it. American higher education is now honeycombed with sacrosanct warrens of administrative offices whose political activism makes a mockery of any claim to “principled neutrality.” As long as these offices remain on campus, the political indoctrination of students at the hands of the institution will continue unabated.

Take Vanderbilt’s office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) for example. To be sure, the EDI mission statement claims to promote only what is good and true: a “sense of belonging”; environments where “equity, diversity and inclusion are inseparable from institutional excellence”; “human potential and growth”; and “practices that respect the humanity of all.” The office even lists more than two dozen “trainings,” a term that suggests objective instruction on settled subjects.

But whereas Vanderbilt’s Medical Center offers training in CPR, and its cybersecurity office offers training in data privacy, the EDI office promotes training in—to take just one example—“Countering Colorblind Ideologies,” a course administered by Vanderbilt’s “Student Center for Social Justice and Identity.” Quite apart from the misuse of “ideologies” here (routine among administrators), Vanderbilt evidently considers disregarding skin color—yes, disregarding skin color—to be the equivalent of respiratory failure and malware: a recognizable evil that right-thinking people will naturally oppose. The only question is how to oppose it, which is what the “training” is for. So much for President Diermeier’s commitment to “thoughtful debate.”

Once students have been trained to oppose “colorblind ideologies”—that is, once they’ve been taught to reject Martin Luther King’s dream of judging people according to character rather than color—they’ll be better equipped to appreciate the color-conscious approaches to racism that Vanderbilt endorses. “White women … have a history of upholding white supremacy,” writes Elly Belle in her essay “White People Can Hold Each Other Accountable to Stop Institutional Racism.” Lincoln Anthony Blades makes the same point more emphatically in his article “11 Things You Can Do To Help Black Lives Matter End Police Violence.” Vanderbilt’s EDI office recommends both essays—published in Teen Vogue—on its “Anti-Racism Resources” page. Is this what Chancellor Diermeier means when he claims the university is fighting “moral tribalism”?

It’s unclear that higher education can be saved. From itself.