Have You Heard of Chris Rufo and Read Any of His Work?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have been much in the news in recent months and even years because DEI “has infested American businesses, colleges, and even our government,” according to Rob Bluey at The Daily Signal. Chris Rufo’s Quest to Abolish DEI (dailysignal.com)

Bluey has two articles from an interview he had with Chris Rufo who has been “reporting on NPR and the plagiarism plague at America’s leading universities.” Rufo also discussed “his campaign to abolish DEI….” This post will come from Bluey’s first article today with a possible second one coming from his second article. Bluey asked Rufo to give the backstory about NPR.

A month or two ago now, Bari Weiss’s outfit, The Free Press, had this great story from a longtime NPR editor who basically confirmed what conservatives have known all along: NPR has drifted very far to the Left. There’s no ideological balance. It doesn’t represent the public, and it’s run by people who are committed activists and ideologues who don’t care about the news. They care about pushing a propaganda line.

Anyone who’s really been thinking about it could see that, but hearing it from the insider caused something of a stir. And then on the back of that reporting, I did some other reporting on NPR’s new CEO, a woman named Katherine Maher, who is just like a caricature of a kind of far-left managerial leader.

I exposed some of her tweets, which were almost like parodies, left-wing haikus. They were really kind of poetic in their own way. And then I really dug into her background as a left-wing operator, regime-change activist overseas, and then turned the screws on NPR, which if it would hope to actually be public radio representing the public, really can’t have someone who is such a kind of left-wing ideologue in charge.

At a minimum, let’s be clear, the public should not be paying a cent for NPR, and I think that we’ve shifted public opinion on this in recent months in the right direction.

Rufo bluntly shared his thought that NPR should not receive any taxpayer funds because it is strictly leftist propaganda. He then took a leap into plagiarism at “America’s highest profile university leaders.”

Is it possible to reform NPR? Is it possible to reform Harvard? Is it possible to wholesale reform the federal government in the immediate term? No, that is a generational project. But what I’ve tried to do is demonstrate that at least tactically we can score victories.

As I’m thinking about different activist campaigns, I’m always thinking about three points of leverage. How can we find a target that has a kind of opening where we could do some good reporting, good investigation, good agitation, so to speak, and then how can we take away their money? How can we take away their power? How can we take away their prestige?

Ideally, two of those, of course, three of those [are] great. I’ve found that as a rule of thumb, you need to hit an institution along two of those axes in order to really be successful at changing policy, changing staffing, changing kind of programming, changing the ideological balance. Whatever your specific kind of reform is, it takes an enormous amount of pressure.

And so one of the things that I’ve been trying to study as I’ve been working on this in practice is how does that work? How does pressure work? How do institutions work? How does money, finances, [and/or] budget work? And then trying to figure out how, through storytelling, through reporting, through more direct activism, how can you start to shift those conditions?

The theory is that over time, if we can do this enough, if we can do this successfully, if we can demonstrate how to wield power in a meaningful way and in a way that makes things better, you could have more significant reforms building up over time.

Rufo and Bluey discussed Rufo’s book “America’s Cultural Revolution” a bit. Then Bluey asked Rufo about higher education. “How big of a problem is the plagiarism scandal?”

You’re kind of limited by time resources, but certainly when we broke the story that the president of Harvard was a plagiarist, she had plagiarized a large number of passages in her doctoral thesis. Then there was some additional reporting from Aaron Sibarium at the Washington Free Beacon. And then some follow-up reporting from me that showed she had plagiarized the majority of all of her academic papers. She was the president of the most prestigious university in the world. That’s untenable.

Of course, as we started to look elsewhere, we’re finding plagiarism everywhere. We’re finding particularly extreme high rates of plagiarism among DEI administrators. It seems like DEI administrators at universities have a hard time completing doctoral thesis without plagiarizing material. And we found them even in some of the more left-wing ideological academic departments. We’re uncovering plagiarism, but discovering it is somewhat tedious, time-consuming work.

After explaining the difficulty of uncovering plagiarism, Rufo stated that “plagiarism is very much a real problem.” In addition, the work being done by the plagiarists is “actually awful as a matter of quality … the papers are [not] good. These papers are awful [and void of substance.” The bottom line is that the papers do not “create new knowledge or suggest ways to improve our societies.” He ended this part of the discussion by stating that it is the fraudulence that “gets people’s attention.” He concluded by saying that he considers the plagiarism campaign to be “quite fun,” and promising that more stories will be produced in the future.

The discussion then switched to critical race theory or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Bluey suggested that these “policies have diminished the importance of merit” and asked if there was “any hope” for change or if change is already taking place. Rufo gave Bluey hope.

It’s already changing in many places.

One good example is that many universities after COVID scrapped the requirements for SAT scores for college admissions. And the reason was, I think, twofold. One is that they were correctly sensing that affirmative action, which is nice euphemism for racial discrimination, was going to be correctly deemed unconstitutional by the courts, which has happened. And they also, in a deeper way, they’ve been grappling with what are very real racial disparities for a variety of complex social scientific reasons.

All of the educational interventions, hundreds of billions of dollars, have not been sufficient in closing what’s called the achievement gap and, therefore, closing a disparity in college readiness. So rather than comply with the law, and rather than be honest about disparities, college administrators said, “If it’s going to be illegal and if we’re giving up on closing disparities, we should just scrap the requirement for test scores.”

The theory did not work, just as many people could see. If we want “the best universities … the best students … a fair and equal process,” doing away with requirements does not work. Rufo indicated that some universities are pulling back and reinstituting SAT requirements. Some of them have done away with “their DEI statements voluntarily.” Seven red states have “abolished the DEI bureaucracies,” and “upwards of 20 states” are expected to follow them.

“Public opinion has also shifted,” and people are recognizing that things do not work according to their theory. However, Rufo admitted that the fight is just beginning even though conservatives are now in a better position for fighting the battles.

Bluey asked for practical advice for students about the worth of attending colleges and universities. Is education worth the cost? Rufo answered that it was a “hard question” as well as “a very personal question” that each family must answer for themselves. However, he gave “two components to the right answer.

The first is that there is a popular line or meme in some conservative circles: Don’t go to college, go to trade school, drop out of college. College is not a good investment. College is indoctrination center. College is not the right way.

Frankly, some of the trades are very lucrative, and the highest paying trades are probably more lucrative than the lowest paying college majors. But still, in general, there is a return on a college education. Politically speaking, a good functioning and successful conservative political movement has to have college graduates and elite college graduates. That’s a fact.

[Rufo emphasized that the Founding Fathers were college graduates – “lawyers, large landowners, physicians, scientists, merchants. Those are high prestige, high education, high intelligence kinds of fields.”]

Given that we’re now 250 years later in a more complex economy with higher levels of general education with larger post-secondary institutions, the idea that we could have a successful political movement without a large number of very smart, very educated people, I think is misguided. It’s actually a completely wrong position.

The second part of the answer is then, therefore, what do you do as an individual? Then it becomes a little more complex. But what I would say is that if you are a child or if you’re a young person, if you have intellectual gifts, you should absolutely go to college, and you should absolutely go to the best college that you can get into for your desired field of study for whatever personal calculations you have to make.

If you have your head on straight, if you’re independent-minded, if you can connect with the right people, it’s still a worthwhile endeavor and we should not give up on universities. We should fight to make universities better. That’s my view.

The discussion went on to cover K-12 public schools with Bluey asking if there is any hope for reform in public schools. Rufo explained that parents are looking at their alternatives and options. Parents are also “demanding an education that reflects their values, not the values of university humanities departments.” Rufo indicated that we are seeing some changes.

Parents have more options for educating their children now than at any previous time in America. The public schools must be reformed, according to Rufo, because they are not going away. However, states are beginning to allow “parents to take their education dollars anywhere to any school of their choice. That is a game changer. It changes the whole system.” Rufo continued, “it makes public schools better and more competitive, and it gives parents this great resource where they can take typically between $7,000 and $8,000 per year per child to any institution of their choice. That’s going to, over the long term, create better options.”

Bluey told Rufo that his “investigative reporting and activism” led to the changes. Rufo then admitted, “It’s still hard as a parent. The policy fight is much easier, but the fight still “requires a huge effort” that must be adapted to “your kids’ personalities and whatever struggles and challenges they’re facing.” Rufo advised parents to “Do the best that you can, except that no school and no system is going to be perfect,” just try to do the best that your means can do.

I encourage you to stay tuned because I may have more information from Rufo in the following days.