Given the dearth of replies by either phone or email, it became necessary to look through Twitter feeds, event schedules, and recent announcements on the universities’ DEI pages in order to ascertain their level of activity in response to the worst crisis Jewish college students have faced lately. On Oct. 18, the Twitter feed of the Rutgers University Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Community posted a pair of graphics about “meeting the moment with humanity.” In one of them, the #RUWorkforinclusion hashtag appeared below a quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was once one of the world’s leading opponents of the existence of the State of Israel. The office did not put out any statement in the immediate wake of the October 7 assault, although it did host a webinar on “micro-inequities” on Oct. 17. Presumably, even according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the mass slaughter of Israelis might qualify at least as a “micro-inequity.” However there was no sign Jewish students were particularly encouraged to attend that or any other Rutgers DEI event.

Not to be outdone by its less rarefied rival to the north, the University of Virginia’s Division for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion held events on microaggressions on both Oct. 17 and Oct. 18. Those who missed “I Felt That: Intro Microaggressions” must have been a little lost at “I Felt That: Microaggressions—The Remix (Intermediate)” the following night. The idea that the survivors of the Hamas massacre and their fellow Jews on campus might have also felt something worth recognizing was nowhere in evidence.

The University of North Carolina saw a faceoff between mourners and celebrants of the Hamas attack that nearly turned violent. Jewish students and their campus allies—assuming they have any—might have looked at the resistance enthusiasts in their midst and wondered in horror at exactly who they’d been going to school with. If they’d looked at the University Office for Diversity and Inclusion’s web page, they’d have found an infographic about “inclusive excellence.”

Nobody picked up the phone when I called Michigan State University’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, whose website includes handy and potentially disgrace-preventing instructions on how not to botch a land acknowledgement ritual. “Although land acknowledgements are powerful statements,” the guide reads in boldface type, “they are only meaningful when they are coupled with authentic and sustained relationships with Indigenous communities and community-informed actions.” Those of a Talmudic cast will be intrigued to learn that there is both an official land acknowledgement for Michigan State University and a shortened land acknowledgement for Michigan State University that satisfies the rigors of equity Halacha. No one at the school’s DEI office seems to be acknowledging the turmoil of the university’s Jewish students, though.

For the past two weeks, DEI offices have had a chance to show they can be responsive to the real-life needs of young people facing a scary and unfamiliar crisis. But these offices clearly do not exist to serve Jews, or wish to recognize Jews might be capable of feeling pain, even when their friends and co-religionists have been slaughtered en masse. That’s because DEI bureaucracies don’t exist to serve actually existing people of any background. The purpose they serve is a theological one, and dogma enforcement is a big part of what universities do these days. The aforementioned Heritage study found that in the aggregate, there were 1.4 times as many DEI staff as history professors across the 65 institutions surveyed. “Promoting DEI has become a primary function of higher education,” the report observed.

An equity office’s job is to engineer the values of the rising elite so that DEI and the wider ideological edifice it serves will remain powerful, protected, and even feared. These bureaucracies are not burning through institutional capital in order to salve the anxieties of Jewish students, because helping students was never the point. Their ambitions are of a different order: DEI embodies the moral authority of a larger system for distributing status and power. It doesn’t care about actual human beings—and as we’ve learned since the massacre of October 7, it especially doesn’t care about Jews.