Eliminating DEI from Higher Education

President Trump’s executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” puts colleges and universities on notice. If you judge people by race and sex when making hiring decisions, awarding grants and fellowships, and doing admissions, the federal funding you receive may stop. The language is blunt and threatening: DEI practices are “unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious.” Pro-DEI orders issued by Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden are terminated immediately. “Within 120 days,” the attorney general and secretary of education will issue guidance to institutions of higher education as to how they must comply with the recent Supreme Court decision that outlawed affirmative action. 

“As the DEI Crackdown Escalates, Faculty Choose between Silence and Resistance,” read one story at Inside Higher Ed. The head of National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education warned, “In issuing these far-reaching executive orders, the Trump Administration has created an environment of fear and uncertainty.” AP News worried that “Trump’s DEI order leaves academic researchers fearful of political influence over grants.” 

Fear, confusion, uncertainty—that’s the emotional tenor of responses on campus, though I know that very many moderate liberals on the faculty and in administration are happy to see DEI on the defensive. (They’ll never say so.) They’ve been bullied and guilt-tripped for years by local identity politicians, and they’ve seen DEI power expand prodigiously since the Obama years. DEI champions are not the victims they would have you believe they are, not even now with a hostile warrior in the White House. The fact is that “diversity” has grown from a point made by Justice Powell in the Bakke decision of 1978 nearly a half-century ago into a veritable academic industrial complex.

A recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal with the heading “How DEI Conquered the University of Colorado” gives one example of how aggressive and binding DEI hiring has become. For years, CU Boulder administrators pushed a “Faculty Diversity Action Plan,” which, the Journal says, “brazenly prompted departments to select faculty based on race.” Departments readily complied, openly declaring their insistence on BIPOC candidates alone.

The Colorado example is remarkable only in that it is so commonplace. All of the universities do it. A recent story in New York Times Magazine reported that $250 million was spent on DEI efforts at the University of Michigan. Schools across the country include a diversity course in their general education requirements. Diversity statements, too, are demanded of job aspirants even in fields that have no connection to social affairs. For example, applicants for the position of professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado must submit a “Contributions to Diversity and Inclusion Statement.” 

What this means is that the Trump executive orders against DEI in higher education are just a first step in eliminating this insidious practice. Discrimination by identity is deeply embedded in academic decision-making. Preferences are longstanding and habitual, the bureaucracy that enforces them both powerful and punitive. Lots of people owe their livelihoods to DEI, and many more maintain their careers and reputations by bowing to it. The general counsels of universities will tell the presidents, “You better get rid of this stuff—or hide it very well—or D.C. is going to come after you.” But the professors, activist students of color, and DEI mouthpieces in the press and at the head of organizations will push against it: “If you give in to Trump, we’ll make sure your career is dead.”

My prediction: Only an authentic withholding of a significant amount of federal money from one or two campuses that flout the new restrictions will finish the task the Trump 47 administration has set. This will not be a matter of principle or law, only of cash.