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Does University Challenge have a diversity quota?
This year's Balliol College University Challenge team, featuring Times writer John Maier. Credit: BBC
Happening today beneath the surface
This year's Balliol College University Challenge team, featuring Times writer John Maier. Credit: BBC
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SubscribeI’ve been thinking about DEI a lot and what the reasoning behind it could be.
I don’t believe it’s really about lifting up socio-economically deprived minorities from poverty, despite that being the label on the cover.
I think it has to do with pandering to a political elite who view multiculturalism as a more enlightened, global way of coexisting. In that regard local cultures and communities have to be flattened in order to make room for this multicultural utopia. It is an extremely top-down process that allows no room for dissent or protest. Those who resist can conveniently be labelled as an ‘-ist’ of some kind.
This form of multiculturalism is actually not a culture, but a non-culture, much like the one you see in spaces like airports and hotels. We in the West are told to accept everyone regardless of what we may think of them publicly or privately. There is no room for religion, family, love, or any other kind of individual loyalties. Instead we must become non-religious, non-gendered, non-critical consumer-slaves to this parasitical non-culture that is designed to funnel all of our energies to those standing at the commanding heights.
Great post.
This is the key idea in your thesis: “I think it has to do with pandering to a political elite who view multiculturalism as a more enlightened, global way of coexisting.”
The obvious question is why do the so-called elites believe multiculturalism (as you define it in your post, where individualism or even group identity are not allowed) is so good? Is it purely economics? Are they trying to turn the world into one, big, homogenous marketplace that benefits them economically, or is there something else at play?
We are being led by people who view humanity as a machine to be programmed, tweaked, and monitored. The more infantile humans become, the more easily manipulated.
This was written about over a hundred years ago with the rise of mass education:
Occasional Letter Number One, Rockefeller General Education Board (1906).
Much like our ancestors we are shaped by our tools. As machines become more humanlike, so too do humans become more machinelike.
It’s a globalist ethos, combined with Liberal universalism – all the restictive ties that bind people to roots of identity in local cultures and communities must be dissolved, in search of less restricted, and therefore more authentic identities.
The irony is that identity formation and individualism are weakened and made more difficult in this kind of rootless hyper-liberalized anti-culture.
“why do the so-called elites believe multiculturalism ”
They believe nothing, just spout luxury beliefs that give them status among their peers.
Multiculturalism while living in gated white communities, ‘global warming” and multiple flight vacations, “diversity” but not when their chosen groups are overrepresented, “islamophobia” or “racism” but would never stay next to blacks and muslims.
They are hypocrites.
Nicely put. As you say.multi-culturalism delivers non-culturism. I’ve thinking hard about the potential for major international war recently, and wondering how armies will be formed given that we not yet at the drone/robot stage of armament. People will only lay their lives down for something thet feel passionately about. Non-culturalism is the.antithesis of this mindset and I know of no one of any age in my acquaintanceship space who would lay their life down for.the current version of Britain. I am puzzled about how the.globalists think this plays out. It.seems to.me that rather than moving from being somewheres to anywheres the elite have moved from being somewheres to nowheres. Were we to lose.a major international conflict, the latter.may become a bleak reality. Genuinely interested to.know what folk think on this one. What am Imissing?
It’s likely that those within your ‘acquaintanceship space’ (great term) are representative of a fairly well-educated mindset but that there’s another whole set of young people (males) who’d take up the type of training and arms of traditional warfare quite readily, especially in a defensive capacity (in similar vein to Ukraine).
I live in what might be termed a ‘mixed’ community in the North West of England so am familiar with both somewheres and anywheres. The nowheres may think of themselves as being able to plan and manipulate populations (as per the paragraphs from the early 20th century posted by Julian Farrows) but i strongly suspect they have so little insight into the mindset of large swathes of the population that, despite their best subterfuges, they over-estimate their capacities in that respect. One only to has to think of Brexit and those who voted to Leave (red wall seats, etc.) to see they really don’t get the popular mindset.
Conspiratorial ‘woe is me’ stuff IMO.
The phrase ‘multi-culturalism’ is chucked around by both ends of the spectrum in such a loose way as become meaningless.
Now on a positive, spend some time abroad and you realise one thing we still have is considerable ‘soft power’ and it’s not because we have a couple of aircraft carriers in the South China sea! It’s because of our language, arts and culture, media, and, wait for it, British values of respect for the law, moderation and tolerance. In fact folks abroad see our diversity and how we absorb it and see that as a strength (although of course the FBS and MSS will try to sow division).
There are of course a few nutjobs at the either end of the spectrum. But we give them too much weight. If we get out more we find things aren’t defined by loons as much as we might think in cyberspace.
“don’t believe it’s really about lifting up socio-economically deprived minorities”
The fact that they do things like cancel spelling bee for not being “diverse”, are never concerned about “diversity” in football or government / teaching jobs, or club Indians and Asians along with White men in IT as “non diverse”…..
Yes, it’s never about minorities or women on general. It’s tailored to benefit a smug, privileged class comprising upper class women and “victim” ethnicities such as blacks.
Access to cheap, reliable energy is the single biggest factor that influences economic prosperity. If the west continues to knee cap its energy production, it will continue to backslide economically. If we insist on dogmatically pursuing the luxury belief of net zero, we will soon find it unaffordable to chase any of the luxury beliefs so fashionable in political circles these days.
Western govts banked on zero interest rates and.ESG to enable NZ transition whilst building a moat supporting higher taxes (carbon cross border tariffs, etc).
But,.of course, the context has changed. Biden’s inflation reduction act is already running into problems because of respective input costs for reshoring purposes. We allowed our greed and post cold War hubris to lead us into a cul de sac, of de-industrialisation, and it’s by no means clear that we can get out of it, particularly at current interest rates and given sovereign debt levels. It would, in my view, require a wartime-style effort to reverse the current trend. .Sadly, the current geopolitics suggests that one possible outcome is just such ìa war within the foreseeable future.
A few years ago I applied to go on university challenge (and failed). The first round was a written general knowledge quiz. You had to write your name on the test paper, but that was it. The second round was a live team-vs-team quickfire challenge.
I don’t see how the adjudicators could have smuggled DEI screening into the vetting process. Then again, if I’d been bright enough to spot such subtle discrimination, I probably would have been bright enough to make it onto the team. Besides, the selection criteria will change from university to university. Surely the demographic make-up of each team is out of the producers’ hands?
From what I read in the Times article, teams are first and foremost chosen and put together by each individual university’s Students Union. I’m guessing the University Challenge production team send them guidelines as to what makes a team acceptable in the first instance.
Interesting. My only experience was at Manchester University, where one professor was in charge of the whole thing, unbeholden to the SU. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they also have the joint highest amount of wins.