The University of Delaware and New York’s Binghamton University are launching year-long “anti-racism talent management audit[s]” to evaluate issues of “equity and injustice” in the university’s library systems, according to a press release from Ithaka S+R and reported by the Daily Wire.
Ithaka S+R is a consulting firm that conducts inclusion audits and trainings to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion. The press release by the firm states the audit will analyze policies, practices, and outcomes related to recruitment, employment, promotion, and retention patterns in libraries.
“Across organizations and sectors, systemic racism and resulting inequities have had a disproportionate impact on black staff members, and given this, the audit will maintain a strong emphasis on organizational culture and climate issues affecting black employees in particular,” the press release reads.
As noted by the Daily Wire, Ithaka S+R makes a living for itself by feasting on strained race relations worsened by its own agenda of focusing on divisive issues. The organization supports and promotes racial reparations and calls on universities, already bastions of leftist thought, to examine how they have allowed “slavery and systemic racism” to shape and impact their institutions.
“Ithaka S+R has an agenda in calling on ‘accountability and reconciliation’ from universities that they believe perpetuate racism,” the Daily Wire writes. “The same universities that they slander as racist proceed to hire them to fix their racism.”
For its part, Binghamton University has already acknowledged its “responsibility as representatives of a predominantly white institution (PWI) to repair the effects of institutionalized racism and advance anti-racist practices,” the school stated in its 2020 “Anti-Racism Statement.” In its statement, the university had vowed to conduct an anti-racism audit of its libraries “to understand the ways racism permeates” the organization and “identify actionable reforms.”
And while most universities have not pursued “anti-racist audits” of their libraries just yet, a cursory Internet search of “anti-racist universities” yields quite a large number of results, as university officials are falling over themselves to prove they are among the most “woke.”
For example, Colgate University’s website touts itself as “committed to becoming an anti-racist institution.” New York University’s Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation is providing guidance to students and staff to engage in “anti-racism work, education, and dialogue.” University of Dayton officials wrote an open letter to the community outlining the steps it is taking to become “an anti-racist university.”
Clearly, there is a pattern. “Anti-racist” is this decade’s “green” — only on serious steroids.
Unfortunately, anti-racism audits are not reserved solely for colleges and universities. The Daily Wire reports a $450,000 “anti-racist” audit was commissioned for the Montgomery County Public School District in Maryland.
“We have heard from our students over time about how Social Studies is taught and negates a full picture of the context that addresses African American history and many of the contributions made by African Americans,” the Montgomery County Public School District posted on its website regarding the audit. “We had students sit at this table and speak to us about Columbus Day. We also know that the impact of racism on mental health has been deemed a public health crisis so we need to analyze how we are strategically educating our students around this issue.”
The school district states it has developed a team focused on a “long-term plan to transform curriculum and develop interconnected and interdisciplinary learning experiences for students, PreK-12 that strengthens students’ sense of racial, ethnic, and tribal identities, helps students understand and resist systems of oppression, and empowers students to see themselves as change agents.”
Meanwhile, Ithaka S+R plans to share its wisdom and the progress of the audits during this year’s Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) conference, to be held in April. Descriptions for the programs at the 2021 ACRL conference all seem to have similar keywords: equity, diversity, inclusion, social justice, and — you guessed it — anti-racism.
