Another mandatory DEI training season is set to begin at the world’s leading STEM university. Graduate students, staff, and faculty are once again queueing up to fulfill the online course requirements dictated by the Committee on Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response (CSMPR). Here’s the latest bill of fare:
- Option A: LBGTQ+ 101: Education, Allyship, and Self-Advocacy
- Option B: Responding to Disclosures at MIT
- Option C: Power Dynamics
The last annual CSMPR report makes it clear that the 31 members of the permanent committee have been busy holding meetings, hiring more staffers, ensuring LGBTQ+ issues get inserted into wider swaths of MIT’s curriculum, advocating for all-gender bathrooms, creating more LGBTQ+ community spaces, working with hiring managers to increase the number of LGBTQ+ hires, and demanding preferred pronoun use.
Has any of this actually reduced sexual misconduct on campus? It’s important to never know. If these training programs eliminate sexual misconduct, staffers could lose their jobs! And if these training programs don’t eliminate sexual misconduct, staffers should lose their jobs.
To guard against attempts to measure the objective results of this and other DEI programs it is also critical to keep moving the goal posts by expanding the definition of sexual misconduct. This now includes misgendering a colleague, refusing to use preferred pronouns, rolling your eyes when you’re forced to take mandatory training classes, and harboring hidden biases against men who wear skirts and want to get naked in the girl’s locker room.