Bye bye, DEI

By Steve Woodward

When the end is near, when the gig is up, and when the blinding light of truth pierces the darkest recesses, entrenched keepers of the status quo are reduced to tantrums and fear mongering.

Recall combative House Democrats, including unhinged Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), recently showing up at the Department of Education, demanding entry and a meeting with the acting secretary, and becoming agitated when access was flatly denied.

Why did Waters and fellow Democrats march over to the Department of Education? It seems that the Left is really quite concerned about Donald Trump’s pledge to weaken their grip on the Educational Industrial Complex.

At the core of their hysteria is the imminent demise of the ever pervasive phenomenon known as “diversity, equity and inclusion”. While American corporations have begun a rapid phase-out of DEI in their hiring and advertising — acknowledging that promoting unqualified people up the ladder and alienating customers eventually impacts the bottom line (did someone say Bud Light?) — academic institutions in some cases have doubled down on devotion to DEI infiltration.

But then along came the ascendance of Donald Trump and a tsunami of common sense executive orders during the opening hours of his second term as president. He first ordered DEI (and thinly veiled DEI programs with benign sounding names) abolished within all federal agencies, then turned his attention to federally funded institutions, including colleges and universities.

Other than its illegality under the Constitution, DEI is a vestige of affirmative action which has been nullified as a college admissions standard by a Supreme Court decision. A more accurate interpretation of the DEI acronym is: “Destroying Educational Integrity”.

Trump’s executive order laid bare why DEI must be DOA on college campuses: “Illegal DEI and DEIA policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity … undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement … (and promote a) pernicious identity-based spoils system.”

Even before the DEI death knell began to toll, defenders were complaining that “political influences” were becoming too burdensome for college faculty members to bear. A study referenced in a late 2024 article published by the academic journal Nature blamed crackdowns on DEI doctrine as the cause of declining “morale” within faculty lounges at Southern universities. Those darn conservative politicians who think federally funded schools should prioritize academic rigor are, instead, now threats to “academic freedom”.

Moore County’s local and heavily biased newspaper, The Pilot, ever the reliable mouthpiece for Leftist wrist wringing, recently published a letter submitted by a reader who laments that too many professors are being run out of southern schools or quitting academia altogether. The author fears “brain drain”. Yet, it’s unclear if an already damaged organ can be drained.

If so-called political interference is such a deterring force on southern campuses, what explains openly anti-Israel voices among faculty at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack in Israeli soil? Less than a month after the attack killed 1,200 Israelis and others, the Duke Academics and Staff for Justice in Palestine (DASJP) was quickly formed and had launched a web site.

All of the manufactured hysteria about the assault on DEI is merely posturing. What the academic elites really worry about is Trump making good on threats to shut down federal funding spigots and the many grants that coast along on autopilot.

An author who was among the first to expose entrenched woke agendas on college campuses, Christopher Rufo, is pulling for massive reform advanced by Trump’s edicts and under the leadership of his nominee for secretary of the Department of Education, Linda McMahon (whose first act would be to terminate her own department). But Rufo acknowledges it will not be easy to derail $50 billion in federal grants that universities receive annually.

“The Trump administration must renegotiate the deal between the citizens and the universities,” Rufo writes in a February 8, 2025, post at Substack.com (and accessible on X, where he has 782,000 followers), “conditioning federal funding on three popular demands: first, that the schools contribute to solving the student-debt crisis; second, that they adhere to the standard of colorblind equality, under both federal civil rights law and the Constitution; and third, that they pursue knowledge rather than ideological activism.”

The plot became a bit thicker when the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a letter on Valentine’s Day establishing a 14-day compliance deadline and issuing a clear reminder that federally funded institutions must adhere to civil rights laws.

“Under any banner (including DEI),” the letter cautions, “discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is, has been, and will continue to be illegal.”

Has it come to this? The radical Left, always and relentlessly accusing its ideological foes of systemic racism at every turn, facing a deadline to denounce systemic racism?

What a time to be alive.