This is CBS. I on the world. I'm John Batchel. I welcome my colleague Tal Fortgang.

He's the Manhattan Institute, but he's writing for Civitas Outlook, part of Civitas Institute,

the University of Texas. About DEI. Those of you who've just arrived from another planet, DEI, has dominated the conversation for several years now, so much so that by going to a result of DEI, I have an opportunity to review how we got here.

The Center for Student Belonging at American University, the Center for Student Belonging.

Okay, what does that mean?

Tell a very good evening to you.

Do the interpretation for us.

What is a Center for Student Belonging?

Because my memories of university extended the fact that I didn't belong anywhere.

Why am I here, but I went to class

anyway? What is student belonging? Good evening to you. Good evening, John, and thanks for the

opportunity to talk about this issue and this piece. I think student belonging can have multiple

meanings on multiple different levels. At one level, it can mean making university students feel more comfortable managing their workload and the normal social pressures of university life.

And perhaps that's a little bit too therapeutic for our young adults, but there's nothing nefarious going on. Beneath the surface, however,

as with many of these diversity, equity, and inclusion adjacent buzzwords and topics,

there could be a more worrisome meaning to belonging, which is the idea that a university has

certain assumptions that form its expectations of its students, of what it considers good

behavior, what it considers good academic performance.

And the idea behind an equity-informed kind of belonging is that the university needs to work

internally to change its own expectations and assumptions to adjust to different student backgrounds so that they can

belong. So the most extreme example of this way of thinking is a graphic that was pretty

prominent in DEI programming.

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