Thread by @aaronsibarium

Remember Rodney Glasgow, the private school administrator who compared critics of CRT to the Capitol rioters?

His diversity consulting group has penetrated every level of the accreditation bureaucracy, creating a patronage network for woke administrators. freebeacon.com/culture/the-lu…

Every one of the Glasgow Group's consultants has ties to the National Association of Independent Schools, and a few have ties to the association's approved accreditors. That gives the 12-person firm an outsized say in what hundreds of thousands of private school students learn.

As those students' education has been shaped by the Glasgow Group's consultants, diversity professionals have procured more and more power—and more and more money.

Much of that money comes from the "equity audits" schools purchase to comply with woke accreditation standards.

The audits encourage schools to build out their DEI bureaucracy, no matter how large it may already be. LA's Harvard-Westlake, for example, employed five diversity administrators when it brought in the Glasgow Group for an audit. Following its completion, the school hired a 6th.

Families seeking an escape hatch often can't find one, several parents told the Free Beacon last month, because all the best schools are beholden to the same accreditors and use the same consultants. freebeacon.com/culture/why-pr…

Sometimes, they even employ the same administrators.

The Glasgow Group's consultants tend to cycle through a small set of private schools, funneling their colleagues into whatever post they just left. At St. Andrew's Episcopal School, for example, the past two directors of diversity were both members of the Glasgow Group.

Having molded an entire school system in their image, DEI practitioners can move freely within it, profiting at every step of the journey.

The Glasgow Group, which did not respond to a request for comment, shows just how powerful this nepotism can be.

The group exerts much of its influence through the National Association for Independent Schools' various diversity conferences, which set the tone for DEI programming in private schools. Glasgow has long played a pivotal role in organizing these conferences.

The NAIS conferences have enshrined racial sectarianism at the highest level of private school governance. One presentation, delivered by the Glasgow Group's Yvonne Adams and Toni-Graves Williamson, was titled "Black Girl Magic: Working with White Women."

The powerpoint slides quote Robin DiAngelo on "White women's tears" and end by advertising the Glasgow Group's services. pocc.nais.org/PoCC/media/doc…

Race-based affinity groups are a staple of the conferences that Glasgow runs. Among the 10 that will be featured at the 2021 People of Color conference are "Latinx," "Transracially Adopted," and "White, European Awareness & Accountability." pocc.nais.org/Program/Affini…

Such racialism tends to trickle down to the regional accrediting bodies, which are themselves populated by members of the Glasgow Group. John Gentile, whom the group bills as a specialist in "white identity development," sits on the accrediting body for elite NYC prep schools.

Gentile has also served as the chief diversity officer for two of the schools he helps accredit, Horace Mann and Calhoun.

In essence, Gentile is part of every layer of the accreditation bureaucracy simultaneously: the NAIS, its approved accreditors, and the accredited schools.

Other accrediting bodies are represented on the Glasgow Group's advisory board, the webpage for which was made private after the Free Beacon purchased a webinar from the consultancy. Three members of the board have ties to the NAIS accreditors in VA, MD, and New England.

The Glasgow Group is effectively creating demand for its own services. Its consultants are part of the accreditation regime that mandates diversity, equity, and inclusion in private schools—and who better to navigate those mandates than the people who helped craft them?

Compounding the demand for DEI is the sense of grievance the consultants promote. After students at elite private schools began airing anonymous accusations of racism on social media, the Glasgow Group put out a guide for how to handle the posts.

Even "if your school is NOT experiencing social media posts," the guidelines read, it should nonetheless "send out a letter … acknowledging that other schools have received such posts [and] that your school is not exempt from the experiences outlined in those posts.

The letter should also invite "alums as well as current students and families to share their stories proactively." Any solicited stories would reinforce the premise of pervasive racism, justifying continued investment in the consultancy.
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The manufactured demand for DEI has given members of the Glasgow Group a steady source of employment beyond consulting work: Each consultant is also a full-time private school administrator, in some cases at the very schools that are hiring the consultancy.

Yvonne Adams, for example, is the director of Equity and Inclusion at St. Stephen's Episcopal School, which in 2019 brought in the Glasgow Group for a diversity audit.

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This dual employment appears to have created a kind of patronage network around the consultancy, whose members often take jobs at their colleagues' current or former schools. Let's walk through a few examples:

After Glasgow left his post as director of Diversity and Community at Worcester Academy in 2012, the school hired the Glasgow Group's Diane Nichols as its director of Diversity and Student Leadership.

Glasgow would go on to serve as St. Andrew's Episcopal School's chief diversity officer until 2020, when he was succeeded by the Glasgow Group's Lorraine Martinez Hanley.

Hanley in turn had been the director of diversity at Indian Creek School from 2003 to 2017, during which time Indian Creek hired another Glasgow Group consultant, Jamor Gaffney, as a history teacher and diversity practitioner.

And in the last year Rohan Arjun served as an admissions officer at St. Mark's School, Loris Adams became the school's director of Community and Equity Affairs.

All told, half the consultants have at least one point of institutional overlap outside the consultancy.

Glasgow's march through the institutions hasn't just given his colleagues jobs; it's also given him a potent source of recruits. Gentile, the white identity consultant, first met Glasgow as a high school student at a diversity conference Glasgow cochaired. record.horacemann.org/4037/news/glas…

"Now I have been on the SDLC faculty for the past 11 years," Gentile told Horace Mann's student newspaper in 2019. After his own students heard Glasgow speak at the conference, Gentile invited his boss and former mentor to the tony New York school for a diversity assembly.

"I'm here for the revolution," Glasgow told the audience. He received a standing ovation.

This is how woke bureaucracy reproduces itself in America's private schools. Consultants infiltrate the institutions that determine what students learn and from whom they learn it. Shaped by those institutions, students come to admire the consultants—and some may even join them.