In the Name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Amen.

Critical Race Theory necessarily insinuates itself into every Jesuit school that incorporates diversity, equity, and inclusion within its educational mission.

Argument: Jesuit provinces in North America have made a serious error by blending Catholic Social Teaching with a postmodern academic culture inimical to Christianity, to liberty, and to justice, an error that undermines its educational mission. 

• We live in an America shaped by the postmodern culture of The Academy’s institutions of higher education, a culture that denies objective Reality, universal Truth, and individual Free Will.
• Postmodernism has given rise to Critical Theory—a brew of theoretical and distinctly ideological studies of the dynamics of power between and among identity groupings within Western society. Emphasizing narrative and lived experiences that form personal truths—rather than rational and scientific approaches toward discovering the truth—critical theorists then work to subvert and dismantle those structures and institutions of power that oppress.
• Throughout this post, the reader encounters key terms employed by Critical theorists. The links provided for the first mention of each term lead you to James Lindsay’s excellent website , New Discourses, dedicated to helping people understand more fully what The Academy has created through Critical Theory.
• Detailed information demonstrating Critical Race Theory’s major role in the radical reshaping of American Culture is provided here and here through Christopher Rufo’s investigations at City Journal.

Part 1: Proceeding Toward the Jesuit Antiracism School

The Jesuit school exalts the trinity of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as essential to the mission of forming “men and women for others, people of competence, conscience, and compassionate commitment.” The culturally-approved DEI triad, sacrosanct in every major secular institution in our country, is now Jesuit Catholic education dogma.

Attention ought be paid.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are euphemisms for the academic discipline known as Critical Race Theory. Parents are often told by public school board members and teacher organizations that Critical Race Theory is not taught in public elementary or secondary schools. This use of “taught” is as good an example as any of the duplicitous postmodern use of language—as an academic discipline CRT is not “taught” K-12, but the basic premises of CRT and the vocabulary that brings them to life, including DEI, are rife throughout all major institutions in this country. So yes, the elements that comprise CRT are embedded in almost all schools, public and private.

This includes Jesuit secondary schools.

The components of Critical Race Theory that have insinuated themselves into the educational mission of your child’s school—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion among others—originate in and emanate from The Academy’s postmodern culture, which has over the decades successfully established in every major American institution what is to be considered acceptable cultural discourse. This Academy culture, its elements shaping the curriculum and instruction of children in all academic settings, rejects the basic tenets of Judeo-Christian (aka Western) Civilization.

The Jesuits ought be well aware that the Critical Theories emerging from the postmodern Academy are hostile to the Modern World. Critical Theories deny the existence of universal Truth and objective Reality; they reject Enlightenment rationalism and the importance of Science and the scientific method; and they scoff at Transcendence and Individual Free Will.

Critical Theorists formulate a theory by asserting the conclusion first (the United States is systemically racist, for example) and then Theorists read that conclusion—a mere assertion—into every situation, formulating a narrative that “proves” the conclusion.

This Critical Academy categorizes human beings into specified identity groups. A human being is not an individual with a soul created in the image of God, not at all; a human being exists within a Venn diagram of socially constructed intersecting identities. The more identities attributable to you, the more marginalized you are and oppressed you are by the one identity that overpowers all others: whiteness.

The Society of Jesus does not reject Critical Race Theory. It has adopted it.

Unlike the various ethnic, tribal, national, and other types of people cultures encountered by Jesuit missionaries as they have raised the banner of Christ over a 500-year existence, the culture of the postmodern Academy is a culture entirely of the mind, a thoroughly humorless intellectualism of theories focused on a single political project, the upending of America’s Founding and, in the end, all of Western Civilization.

The Jesuits, rooted in the idea that they can see God in all things, have of course found God here, in theories that reject the American creed, the creed rooted in the idea that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights.”

Like every secular institution in this country, the Jesuits have conformed to the prevailing Academy Culture.

Your children are the intended beneficiaries.

Part 2: The seminary for Jesuit educators

Prior to Vatican II, Jesuit schools were primarily manned by the priests, brothers, and scholastics of the order. Lay teachers and administrators are, of course, the rule today. Not only are the Jesuits themselves embracing the postmodern Academy, but that Academy is the primary seminary for the formation of the nation’s educators, including the lay educators who must maintain the Jesuit character at every school under the guidance of the Jesuit provinces.

Higher education has been budgeting—for years—millions of dollars annually in the hiring of diversity bureaucrats. At the college level, DEI is everywhere and unassailable, and has been for decades. The results upon the nation writ large tell quite the story: the DEI infrastructure drives decision-making at every major corporation, sports organization, professional association, each branch of the US military, and the organizing bodies of most churches; few official documents can be written within any institution without repeated nods to the DEI trinity; new DEI industries have been created, designed to flood the administrative and personnel zones with training and workshopping of all things DEI-related; “honest” and “uncomfortable” conversations are held in corporate board rooms, faculty meeting rooms, on factory floors, in the classrooms.

Still, the nation remains systemically racist.

Institutional racism, structural racism, economic racism, cultural racism, environmental racism, public health racism: it is everywhere, in everything, endlessly replicating the hegemony of whiteness through the oppression of others, relentlessly pushing out toward the margins its countless victims, consuming all that is healthy and generous and good.

Clearly, the Society of Jesus has heretofore not done enough.

For how many decades upon decades have the Jesuits graduated into American society racists, facilitators of white supremacy, and beneficiaries of systemic power and privilege associated with whiteness? Many of those graduates have children and grandchildren attending a Jesuit school currently: have they raised their children in a household of unmerited privilege and power, a family environment that must be cleansed by an antiracist education? Is that what the Jesuit provinces really believe about the parents whose children their schools educate?

That is certainly what The Academy believes.

And this failure of Jesuit education heretofore to transform injustice into justice is what the Jesuit Schools Network, which supports Jesuit secondary and pre-secondary schools, and the Jesuit Association of Colleges and Universities intend to remedy.

This failure is especially curious because the order, under the leadership of Father General Pedro Arrupe S.J., committed itself in the aftermath of Vatican II to the furthering of justice through a reinvigorated educational mission that forms men and women for others, “who cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of their neighbors….”

Vatican II had set out to rethink and reform the Catholic Church’s relationship to the Modern World. The Church, having a duty to scrutinize “the signs of the times and interpret them in the light of the Gospel,” sought engagement with all that the mathematical and natural sciences, and the technology developed therefrom, offer the world. It sought to value the advances in man’s self-knowledge that biology, psychology, and the social sciences have furthered. It “offered to mankind the honest assistance of the Church in fostering the brotherhood of all men.”

The Modern World that Vatican II sought to engage was, at the 1965 promulgation of Gaudiem et Spes and its other significant documents, already drawing to an end. The Postmodern World, a “rough beast, its hour come round at last,” had overtaken it.

Fr. Arrupe delivered his Men for Others address at a convocation of predominantly male Jesuit high school alumni in 1973.

The speech confesses to a failure of the order, that the order had heretofore “not educated (the students in its schools) for justice,” that Jesuit high school students had not been “trained for the kind of justice and witness to justice that the Church now demands of us.” So began the era of Jesuit schools educating students “that love of God which does not issue in justice for others is a farce.”

Almost 50 years has passed since the Men for Others address.

All Jesuit schools have, therefore, been Men and Women for Others institutions for decades. During this half-century, the Society of Jesus, with its emphasis on serving the poor and the outcast, has been educating students for justice in the rich, God-affirming atmosphere of its secondary schools.

But the order—ever relevant, actively engaged with the Postmodern World as though it were a continuation, rather than a repudiation, of the Modern World—has been incorporating step-by-step particular elements of The Academy culture into Catholic Social Teaching.

Having failed up to the present to transform adequately what The Academy views as the inherent racism within American society, having proven thus far insufficient to dismantle the oppressive structures that continue to marginalize, victimize, and oppress, the Jesuit Schools Network and the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities have dug in even deeper.

Evidently, in the Jesuit tradition of the Magis, more is needed, but without regard to whether the more in question is truly directed toward excellence and the greater glory of God.

Therefore, and especially in response to the death of George Floyd and the 2020 summer of Black Lives Matters, the Jesuit schools have, using the latest Critical terminology, further revised and reformulated its approaches to the order’s Catholic commitment to educate for justice.

Catholic Social Teaching at Jesuit schools now marinates in an intellectual milieu that, although distinctly averse to Christianity, welcomes every tool—including Catholic ones—at its disposal for its political project. The Society of Jesus, which prides itself on its engagement with any culture, sees this blending as a Both/And situation (both traditional Catholic Social Teaching and Critical Race Theory).

We must rest assured that the Jesuits are only employing the good from Critical Theory in its determination to graduate your children dedicated to “doing justice.”

Among the good is the trinity of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Another good is antiracism. And beliefs concerning institutional racism, implicit bias, privilege etc. Yes, there are many goods, according to the Jesuits who incorporate, we can be sure, only the good.

Discovering what the not-so-good might be takes some effort. Since The Academy today has an approved way of looking at the world, those who disagree are—what’s the word?—yes, marginalized from campus discussion and debate and from every “honest” conversation.

You there exhibit white fragility. You, on the other hand, are being inauthentic. Your remark demonstrates internalized dominance, and yours, internalized oppression. When an academic institution is dominated by a single line of thinking, many (most?) who think differently soon learn to sit down and be quiet lest they be cancelled.

Many a Jesuit university or high school website links an interested observer to the resources that signify Good Think. What is absent, you can be sure, is Bad Think.

Here at the website The Jesuit School, Bad Think takes center stage.

The promotion of justice ought itself be just; that is, it ought be guided by reason and what we know objectively to be true. Critical Theories, however, consider reason and objectivity and science itself as merely ways of knowing that serve to maintain white systems of power. Critical Theories prefer other ways of knowing, especially the story-telling, personal narratives, and lived experiences that aim not for the head but the heart.

Furthermore, the promotion of justice must work in the world that we know exists, the world of the Fall, the world of individual men and women each created in God’s image, and not merely in the perceptions of academics and ideologues whose supreme Faith lies in theory.

In that spirit, let’s begin by looking at the good.

Part 3: The Seminarian’s Dictionary

Language is revelatory. And in education, specific words—universal in the jargon of educators and directed toward the radical transformation of society—come directly from that same Academy educating your children’s teachers and administrators. We are in the midst of The Academy’s ongoing frenzy of evisceration, as its Critical Theorists lead the deconstruction of the basic tenets of philosophy and Judeo-Christian moral teaching that have long bound us together as a nation and a civilization.

The Academy rides roughshod over Objective Truth, mocking Natural Law, Human Nature, and the Liberty of the Individual. All knowledge in every discipline is problematic: that is, knowledge is socially constructed to uphold and legitimize dominant (AKA white) systems of power already in place. Traditional knowledge does not lead us to Truth; it maintains oppression.

This Academy sends forth into the world the nation’s educators.

Observe the language used to promote justice. It is hard to imagine words more anodyne than diversity and inclusion. Who could be opposed to such harmless language? If the words evoke the splendid multiplicity of human beings and the toleration of each person’s differences, the words are doing the job intended: creating an illusion.

Under their masks of innocence, Diversity and Inclusion carve up the beauty of God’s whole human creation into distinct identity groupings, identities based upon immutable surface attributes and personal feelings. Diversity and Inclusion does not refer to the inclusion of diverse individual human beings. It refers to the inclusion of diverse identities—each considered as a group—not to distinct human beings created by God.

Why on earth would any truly Catholic institution need proclaim that it is a diverse, inclusive institution?

Catholic means universal: it includes everyone. An institution self-confidently Catholic is by definition diverse and inclusive.

But the Church has a history, the Jesuits are sure to explain by way of justification, its priests and bishops having been sinners, some even complicit in and supportive of evils: racism, acceptance of discriminatory cultural norms, enforced segregation, even slavery.

Yes, and so raising today’s culturally-approved banner is evidence of what exactly? That the Catholic Church is catholic? That the Church—like American Airlines, Google, the Smithsonian, the New York Times, Facebook, and Disney—no longer possess sinners in its organization?

Diversity and Inclusion is a sign asserting All Are Welcome Here. And if a Jesuit institution goes without it, is the implication All Are Not Welcome Here?

Are the Jesuits that weak-kneed that they must neon-sign their Virtue in order to win the trust of parents and children?

The signaling of such “virtue” is ordinary these days. Pretentious, even immodest, it is the equivalent of a lawn sign in the yard of an oh-so-properly-educated upper middle class home: In This House We Believe / Science Is Real / Black Lives Matter / Women’s Rights Are Human Rights / No Person Is Illegal / Love Is Love / Diversity Makes Us Stronger.

Do tell! What such sloganeering reveals is that Pharisees exist in every period of time. Thank God, I am not like those who believe differently is what such signs communicate.

The Diversity and Inclusion pennant is similarly easy virtue, but one with a grave underlying and fundamental premise: When All Are Welcome Here, anything considered “not welcoming”—anything micro-aggressive or triggering, any statement no matter how factually based that has not received the blessing of the DEI orthodoxy, any disagreement with prevailing Academy assumptions—will not be tolerated.

The Christian virtues ought not be determined by the opinions a person holds. But Catholic Social Teaching—the Jesuit version, specifically—in the postmodern age requires Good Think.

Equity is an even more curious word choice in the trinity. The word resonates with “equality,” and doesn’t it mean “fairness”?

It is necessary to keep in mind that word choice in the postmodern world is politically-driven—and designed to soothe the unwary who are too busy raising families to ponder the deceptions of academics.

“Fair is foul and foul is fair,” say the three witches in the opening scene of Macbeth.

The witches were the original Critical Theorists. They know why Equity is included in the DEI trinity.

So why Equity ? Why not Equality? After all, equality reaches back to the language of the Civil Rights era, language intentionally borrowed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights pioneers from the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence.

Americans born in the 20th century know that equality, because it is so fundamental to our Founding, has a certain prestige. It carries weight. It was the crucial term in the vocabulary of the Civil Rights era.

But it has lost its stature in the 21st century: when society becomes saturated with the word equity, when your children hear and see equity emphasized far more than equality, you cannot be blamed for thinking The Academy is up to something.

A fundamental principle of classical liberalism for centuries, equality before the law and equality of opportunity are original American values—imperfectly realized though they are in a Fallen world—and therefore entirely inadequate for postmodern purposes.

Such equality is deeply connected to liberty. But for those intent on achieving equality of results, liberty is hardly the point.

Equity does not require liberty. To be equitable requires compulsion, engineering, or other methods of power to force the desired end.

Equity reaches forward toward something certain: the end of disparities between groups of people, specifically between those groups considered marginalized and the dominant group.

It is because of the successes of the Civil Rights era in the United States, that equality is, in The Academy, now considered passé and counterproductive.

The notion of a color-blind society—one where each person is treated as a God-created individual, where the “content of one’s character” is what really matters—produces the false idea, a false consciousness, that persons are free to make choices that affect their lives. Color-blindness suggests that people have agency over their own lives. Individual autonomy? Self-determination? All such ideas are examples of false consciousness.

Color-blindness is the smiley face that masks white structures of power responsible for society’s racial disparities. What? You thought not giving a rip about a person’s color, that taking the measure of an individual by the person’s character, was the path towards actual equality, true justice?

The Society of Jesus is not so naive.

Diversity and Inclusion requires you to see color: how else can you recognize and reward identities? Only by being color-conscious and identity-conscious can a society distinguish those who require remedies from those who benefit by structures of racism.

By being intentionally diverse and inclusive, and through intentionally discriminating by race, the correct outcome can be engineered—thus, equity, which is central to the trinity, is achieved.

Part 4: The Gospel According to Ibram

Proclaiming your school to be an antiracist school is the latest trend in social justice education. Which parents wouldn’t want their children to graduate as antiracists? Isn’t this the blessed affirmation of a graduate’s commitment to doing justice in this world? Of course, if you think it important not to be a racist, you are not ready to be antiracist; if you think it important not to discriminate based upon race, you are not ready to practice anti-racism; if you think it important to support race-neutral policies, you are complicit in racism, facilitating the structures upholding white supremacy and sustaining your white privilege.

Let’s grapple with the Word: Racism.

According to the apostle Ibram X. Kendi, “racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racist inequities.” `

What is a racist policy? Any “written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people” is a racist policy when it “produces or sustains racial inequities between racial groups.”

What is antiracism? Antiracism is a “powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.”

There is “no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy,” says Kendi. The “most threatening racist movement in the country” is the ”regular American’s drive” for a race-neutral country.

A personal declaration that you are “not a racist” is a mask for your racism, and in the antiracist school you can be assured that mask will be removed. Unless you are proactively committed to the support of practices and policies that are antiracist—and you will be informed as to which policies and practices are antiracist and which ideas you hold are racist—you are a racist.

No need to fret about this: “Racist and antiracist are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based upon what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment,” declares Mr. Kendi, whose testaments are recommended—along with those of other proclaimers—on the websites of a number of Jesuit institutions.

You, he explains to the uninitiated, “unknowingly strive to be a racist…(and must) knowingly strive to be an antiracist,…(which) requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.” Not so much a struggle session—well, not today perhaps—as it is a daily spiritual exercise. An examen, if you will. An antiracist one, to be sure.

In 2015 the Jesuit Schools Network issued Our Way of Proceeding: Standards & Benchmarks for Jesuit Schools in the 21st Century. After the summer of 2020, the Jesuits set about revising Domain 5 of this document. It is worthwhile comparing Domain 5 in the original 2015 document here with the revised Domain 5 in the 2021 revision here.

Faith That Does Justice becomes Faith That Lives Justice in the revised version. The trinity of DEI is specifically honored as the title for the initial standard therein. The words equity, equitable, equitably, and inequities appear over ten times in the revision of that one domain when they appeared not once in the original.

Since the Jesuit school program, according to the improved Domain 5, now includes “anti-racism/anti-bias training for board, faculty and staff, and students”—since a Jesuit school is now an antiracist institution—it ought not be too surprising that Jesuit schools now embrace racial discrimination.

Following the Critical fashions of the Postmodern World, an institution trips, falls, finds itself ensnared.

Racial discrimination, asserts the Apostle Ibram, “is not inherently racist,” for if such “discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.” It is only when such discrimination is “creating inequity” that it is “racist.” There is, he tells us, a “defining question,” and that defining question is “whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity.”

No, that can’t be. The Jesuits would not discriminate, not based on race. Oh?

Equity does not come about by accident. Equity—not referring to equality of opportunity, not ever—demands equality of results. Equity is imposed.

Mr. Kendi is well aware of this. As “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity,” it must be understood that “antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity.”

What’s great for parents of students at Jesuit secondary schools is how this “way of proceeding” profits their children. Their tens of thousands of dollars in annual tuition bring to each family paying the freight a core, distinctly Jesuit privilege.

These children receive at a Jesuit high school the Critical Social Justice orthodoxy of the secular Academy that the family of public school children receive on the taxpayer dime—with this one significant difference: these future antiracist sons and daughters receive this orthodoxy through the imprimatur of the Jesuit school’s inculturation of the secular Academy’s dominant postmodern culture.

The ideas propounded by Critical Race theorists—such as legal scholars Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberle Crenshaw—and its popular disseminators Mr. Kendi, Robin DeAngelo, Bettina Love—among so many others, the saints be praised—appear wrapped in Catholic Social Teaching. An annual $25,000 is mere chump change for this new spiritual awakening of your children, the shredding of their unmerited privilege, their anointing with the oils of victim and victimizer, the cross of guilt they must bear to assuage the suffering of others caused by their existence.

Having taught only in public schools, I do see the humor in the situation: a private school—a Catholic one, a Jesuit one—emulates the public school in matters related to social justice.

The Jesuits, being a missionary order, have always negotiated their profession of the Faith through the realities of differing cultures, but the basically uncritical adoption of the DEI culture of The Academy underscores the difficulties inherent in a conscientious discernment of the spirits: the paths toward finding God in all things cross paths that lead the unsuspecting—or those whose guilt serves as blinders—toward the diabolical, which is in all things, too.

Part 5: The Seminarians at Work in the Fields

Slave holders who were Jesuits were no doubt adapting to the culture in which those Jesuits preached the Gospel. Yes, some Jesuits were indeed slave holders in North America and elsewhere on the globe. These are historical facts, facts which have led the Society of Jesus to commit itself “to a transformative process of truth-telling, reconciliation, and healing.”

That “slavery is evil and slaveholding a sin” and that some members of their order knowingly participated in such human corruption is a weight on the order. This is especially likely for its North American provinces, intimately connected as some Jesuits were to the corruption and imperfections that exist in all human enterprises, including the making of a country. This weight elucidates its present acquiescence to an Academy culture that nurtures feelings of shame and guilt about the past for wholly secular political purposes.

But these are your children. Not the children of the Jesuits.

The Society of Jesus looks back with remorse at a period when, instead of flowing seamlessly with the culture, it would have better served Christ and His Church by countering the culture. Looking forward, the order proclaims its white privilege and makes amends through the education of the students in its charge.

Let’s take a look at what guilt hath wrought.

Upon graduation, your Jesuit-educated children approach adulthood open to growth, intellectually competent, religious, loving, and committed to doing justice.

With this mission in mind, must the order’s fervent desire to graduate your children as men and women for others align so closely and embrace so thoroughly the culture of the postmodern Academy? Apparently so.

With this mission in mind, are the paths toward a more just world solely those advocated by that Academy and its Jesuit allies? Yes.

Venerating the triune—Diversity, Equity and Inclusion—creates “a place where all are welcomed and affirmed as reflections of God, who is in all things.” Indeed.

What students and teachers might fail to learn from immersion in the Word of God—what the Gospels fail to inculcate in the hearts of your children attending Jesuit—is apparently learned more appropriately through an Institutional Commitment to Anti-Racism, where the Spirit of God, we are assured, resides.

This Jesuit school in Cincinnati proclaims Diversity as a “core value,” without which it could not be “excellent in (its) mission” to “prepare young men to be leaders in a diverse world.” The school website includes links to resources it offers to the school community, not of course “to endorse or support, but to enlighten and share.” Within this cornucopia, you will familiarize yourself with Teaching about Race and Racism with the New York Times, a listing of books on race and white privilege recommended by certain black scholars, Catholic resources on racism, Black Lives Matters Resources provided by the National Education Association, and a document “scaffolding anti-racism resources.”

In St. Louis, the high school’s page for its nine-person Equity and Inclusion staff contains a sidebar explaining its pertinent committees and affinity groups, one of which is its Antiracist Coalition. Its Library of Anti-Racism Resources contains subcategories connecting you to Faith-Based Resources, Books, Articles & Podcasts, Movies (which contains a further link to the Howard Zinn Education project), and specific Action Items.

The Office of Diversity and Inclusion at this Detroit high school provides a handsome Parent Resource Guide regarding Race, Diversity, and Inclusion. Located on the Resources page are numerous additional types of information—many with links—for parents, teachers, and children.

Jesuit Detroits’s serious commitment to Diversity and Inclusion is worth a second look: “Diversity in the context of individualism refers to our humanity and our lived experience.” This emphasis on the plural “our,” while referencing “individualism” rather than “the individual,” is reinforced as the school explains that “diversity in group or social norms” refers to “identities.”

What especially catches my eye is this: “Diversity occurs when there is more than one person in the room.” Leaving aside that God is in the room as well, the “core” commitment here is to the idea that students are diverse only when in a group, where they can be appropriately identified, which the school emphasizes when it states that Inclusion is what occurs “when different identities feel valued, welcomed….”

This is what now passes for Catholic Social Teaching in its encounter with The Academy’s Critical Theories.

In Colorado, this Jesuit school, determined to be a “leader in the realm of Diversity and Inclusion in the Jesuit Schools Network,” developed its own five-year Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan, which was ratified in 2016 by its President and Board of Trustees.

Their 2016 strategic plan sought to “design systems, curricula, programs, and admission practices that attract and support a diverse, inclusive student body, not just students but staff as well, with the aim of developing inclusivity and competence in a globally diverse world…[italics mine].” The term diversity, according to the plan’s introduction, “refers to the ways our communities reflect the varied life experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds, including (but not limited to) gender, ethnic, socio-economic, religious, sexual orientation, and learning styles.” The terms underrepresented and underserved “denote diverse populations in terms of race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status.”

The school is currently “utilizing an institution-wide cultural audit instrument,” the Assessment of Inclusivity and Multiculturalism, which will assist the school in planning strategies for DEI during the next five years.

A Center for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Boston’s high school provides, as you scroll through it, a well-organized overview of the trinity, including information about the school’s Diversity Cabinet and Affinity Groups, along with another valuable listing of resources for the community. The Update on DEI leads directly to the 2021 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Progress report for the school. This Jesuit high school, previous host of the National AntiRacism Teach-in, is deeply committed to “building an anti-racism culture, in keeping with its Jesuit mission” with its “courageous conversations” and its ongoing efforts to ensure that “curriculum and pedagogy is representative and inclusive.”

Many of the Jesuit high schools in the West, like the one in Spokane, provide a link to Jesuits West Collaborative Organizing for Racial Equity, which has developed a community organizing toolkit on “work for racial justice,” including a listing of further resources, such as those found at the Ignatian Solidarity Network.

Spokane’s Jesuit school, which “institutionalized its work for diversity” by creating an Office of Equity and Inclusion in 2015, has recently made a firm commitment to antiracism. The school defines antiracism as “the active and reflective process of identifying and challenging racism in attitudes and perspectives in order to change systems, organizational structures, policies, and practices to render them just and equitable for all.”

That definition is firmly rooted in the Apostle Ibram. What “attitudes and perspectives” will escape the ignominious mark of the scarlet R during that withering process of identification remains to be seen. Yes, changing existing systems, structures, policies, and practices to different systems, structures, policies, and practices can render them “equitable.”

Equity and justice, however, are not synonymous.

At the Ignatian Solidarity Network, there are valuable resources for educators and parents. Note this link to the Diversity, Education, Inclusion, and Antiracism Educators Conversations Series, its numerous videos suggesting the breadth and depth of how major voices at Jesuit schools are blending Catholic Social Teaching with the postmodern Academy’s Critical Theories.

Part 6: Conformity, Exclusion, and The Jesuit School

A careful perusal of the resources offered by the Ignatian Solidarity Network and the Jesuit high schools mentioned in this posting indicate that all of the contents align along a specific ideological spectrum. When it comes to the causes of injustice and how best to achieve justice only one point of view makes the cut.

How this lack of diversity squares with the mission of an educational institution—especially one dedicated not only to academic excellence but also to “doing justice”—is left unexplained. Education heretofore has presumed certain givens: among them, the spirit of inquiry, reading in depth across a broad range of perspectives, investigating fully all possibilities, drawing conclusions last.

Those. however, were the educational givens of the Modern era, not the current Postmodern one.

Now, conclusions are made first: Disparities between identity groups exist; racism is to blame. Our country’s institutions are systemically embedded with racism. Racist at its roots, the Foundation itself must, like its monuments, be toppled. That is the desired end.

There is a conformity of thought regarding this nation and the question of justice that is Orwellian.

Question the validity of DEI’s assertions, disagree with its analysis of our country’s social problems, argue against its proposed solutions, point out its contradictions and absurdities, and its proponents will employ other language designed to dismantle not your argument but to dismantle you personally. The matter is settled, didn’t you know?

This is educational nihilism.

Each Jesuit secondary school has, of course, its distinctive features as an institution. Not all Jesuit high schools exhibit a public face that envelops Catholic Social Teaching within the postmodern straitjacket. Parents of current and future students and alums of any Jesuit high school can easily familiarize themselves with how a Jesuit school presents itself to the public through its website here.

The public face of any institution is an advertisement and a bulletin. However, what occurs during classroom instruction in each of the academic disciplines—be they history or literature, science or theology, or any combination of courses in your child’s school year—will always be much more telling as to what degree, if any, individual teachers infuse subject matter with au courant social and political agendas.

Having been an educator myself, I know there are many excellent teachers who understand that their grave responsibility to future generations is to pass along the knowledge that has been acquired by human beings over millennia. That is necessary for nations and civilizations to survive—and excellent teachers appreciate this crucial pedagogic task.

Still, it is very difficult to begin a teaching career that has marinated in The Academy culture of the past few decades and remain immune to Good Think.

Jesuit faculty and staff in many locations are likely to become accustomed to the “honest” and “necessary” and “uncomfortable” and “courageous” conversations that DEI orthodoxy demands. Doubtless some faculty and administrations sincerely believe this immersion in Academy-approved DEI is commendable. But of those who think it unhealthy and misguided or simply wrong—bad seminarians, aren’t they?—are they likely to express their real opinions during these conversations, are they adept enough at speaking the acceptable bromide or slogan to satisfy those in charge, or are they simply tongue-tied?

Parents, in my experience as a teacher, are not normally tongue-tied. Nor should they be.

Your children are ours seems to be a prevalent attitude in certain public school circles: we will transform them to make them better than you ever could or would.

Perhaps the public schools, then, are emulating the Jesuit schools, for Jesuit parents, to be sure, are paying for this type of transformation.

When I was a student of the Jesuits during my high school and university years, I made the decision to become a teacher. It was the late 60s. Those of you who lived through that decade will understand when I say I wanted to become a teacher because I wanted to change the world. To make it better.

The desire to transform the world became a culturally-approved clarion call across the Western world at that time. The folly of Baby Boomer youth in its bloom, perhaps.

Fortunately, once I began teaching, I also began to understand the arrogance of that desire—and how swiftly the impulse of that desire leads us away from the idea that our liberties are unalienable because they come, not from the State, but from God.

Students arrive in a teacher’s classroom knowing little to nothing about the remarkable wonders of civilization. Mathematics, the sciences, art, history, literature, philosophy, theology: for students to graduate, ignorant of the magnificent physical, intellectual, and spiritual achievements of mankind is to leave them bereft of the knowledge and skills that will enable them to act as free individuals who choose, because they love God, to be men and women for others.

How they go about doing that must not be engineered by those who have decided beforehand what they must think and how they must act in order to “live justice.” Such engineering is for the greater glory of those who want power and will tell any lie in order to achieve it. Such engineering at best replaces old structures with new ones, not more just ones. Such engineering is what is being done throughout today’s Academy.

To resolve in any degree any one of our historical problems—including those associated with racism—takes more than a dedication to justice, as important as that surely is to instill within the hearts and minds of human beings.

It takes men and women who are agents of their own destinies, and such agency requires real knowledge, knowledge acquired through the mental strength intellectual discovery enables.

Agency is achieved by the difficult work of learning.

Intellectual discovery is disabled by regarding assertions as fact, including assertions regarding systems and structures of racism. Assertions are the discovery arrived at before the intellectual journey begins. They arise from feelings.

A student’s mental acumen can and ought be nurtured in a Jesuit environment respectful of the Word of God with a heart open to justice at a school whose educators push all of their charges toward academic mastery in every discipline.

One of the purposes of this website The Jesuit School is to challenge the educational and societal validity of DEI, along with all the other works and pomps of Critical Theory.

Its most vocal proponents possess nothing but contempt for the American Founding, for “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” for the unprecedented degree to which capitalism and free markets have raised human beings so speedily out of perpetual poverty, and for the unique character of the American national story. They are not interested in a reasoned understanding of this nation’s history or of Western Civilization.

They do not want reform. They want destruction.

The Jesuit School will showcase for all parents of Jesuit students resources that take an entirely different approach toward the social issues facing this country, an approach that is not culturally-approved and thus is ignored on Jesuit websites that proudly display their committment to DEI+A.

Were Jesuit schools more counter-cultural and less committed to an approved political ideology, they might seek a multiplicity of opinions and approaches and, therefore, might achieve a more universal good, a wider impact, in the laborious lifelong process of overcoming the injustices that exist in a Fallen world.