NOTE: This article originally appeared in the March 11, 2025 edition of Inside Higher Ed.
In recent weeks, President Trump has moved aggressively to make good on a campaign promise to eradicate support for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in every facet of American life, especially on college campuses.
Trump and his allies have blamed DEI for everything from the Los Angeles wildfires to the horrific crash of a jetliner and helicopter over the Potomac River. His administration has vowed to end “radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing,” eliminated initiatives for minority-serving institutions and fired huge portions of the federal workforce, including employees with DEI responsibilities. They now seek to abolish the Department of Education and, in sweeping guidance, have declared it illegal for colleges to use “race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”
Without doubt, the president’s rhetoric is mean-spirited, and his all-out assault on DEI and higher education overreaching, but this crisis did not begin with Trump. It has been brewing for years, and the preparation and response from higher ed so far has largely involved ignoring the criticism and doubling down on questionable policies and practices.
While The Chronicle of Higher Education’s DEI Legislation Tracker ticks away like some kind of cultural doomsday clock and higher ed conferences around the country are featuring panel presentations aimed at preserving DEI as we know it, there has been remarkably little introspection about what went wrong or what needs to change.
If we take a moment to be honest with ourselves, we might recognize, as a growing number of Americans now seem to agree, that what began as a well-intentioned, principled movement toward equal rights for all more than half a century ago, one that I and other “privileged” liberals my age have considered ourselves allies to for most of our lives, has devolved into a dogmatic, antidemocratic, anti-intellectual power struggle that is causing tremendous damage to the reputations, enrollments, academic integrity and, quite possibly, futures of American higher education institutions.
DEI, as practiced by most colleges and universities, has faults that higher ed leaders need to acknowledge and move swiftly to address, and they include:
DEI is Censorious
The anxiousness felt by many students and employees on college campuses, and not just those who may be politically conservative, that the “language police” are everywhere just waiting to pounce, is not unfounded.
Spurious accusations of “cultural appropriation,” efforts to “cancel” someone with different viewpoints, the sorting of everyone into either oppressor or oppressed categories and, perhaps most notably, hyperattention to “microaggressions” and the words used to describe people are all real and, to the general public, baffling features of DEI in higher ed.
Prescriptive language guides insist on using “asset-based language” when describing populations of people considered marginalized or oppressed, while DEI practitioners frequently toss around pejoratives like “white fragility” and “toxic masculinity” to stereotype whole categories of people.
Meanwhile, attempts to question or deviate from these generally accepted practices on many campuses are often met with outright hostility, including efforts to restrict free speech that can harm careers.
DEI is Performative
The best features of America’s decades-long civil rights journey have led to significant, demonstrable gains in college enrollment and degree attainment for female, Black, Hispanic and other historically marginalized students, as well as improved professional representation in classrooms, C-suites and boardrooms.
Some of the most recognizable features of DEI practiced on college campuses today though—like land acknowledgments, social media statements disconnected from action, an obsession with “centering” racial identity in every conversation or decision, and “decolonizing” the curriculum—seem more focused on form than substance, and it is far from clear whether they lead to any tangible accomplishments.
DEI is Ineffective
Perhaps most importantly, a lot of traditional DEI, as practiced on many college campuses, is proving to be ineffective.
A recent investigation by The New York Times led to the conclusion that the University of Michigan had spent 10 years and $250 million developing one of the most comprehensive DEI bureaucracies in all of higher education, but the result has been a diminished sense of belonging among minority students, increased racial tensions and even more social fragmentation: Students report being even “less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics.”
These effects are not limited to Michigan’s flagship university, and to most of America, this news is not revelatory. For quite some time now, numerous studies have shown that traditional anti-bias diversity training has limited or even counterproductive effects and often leads to unintended consequences (like increased racial tensions in the Michigan dining halls).
In short: People are people, and very few of us like being told how to feel and act.
And yet, much of higher ed still seeks to double down on a failing ideology.
Regardless of whether President Trump succeeds in purging DEI from American government and institutions, it is time for higher ed leaders to leave behind the rigid ideology, identitarian politics and divisive rhetoric that have alienated so many would-be supporters and apply the same critical thinking and scholarly rigor to diversity, equity and inclusion practices on our campuses that we expect from our students in the classroom. It is time to objectively assess what is working and what is not and develop new strategies for regaining public support and, most importantly, achieving a more equitable society.
New models are emerging.
Lily Zheng, a business strategist and author of the forthcoming Fixing Fairness: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash Into Progress for All, recommends the FAIR (fairness, access, inclusion and representation) framework for overcoming DEI’s “outdated tactics like blame and shame.”
Writing for Forbes, Susan Harmeling thinks “DEI 2.0” could be a “sensible, practical, and pluralist approach rooted in pragmatism and evidence-based research, built on heartfelt communication, grace, and unity of purpose. Rejecting rigid extremism, this ‘third way’ aims to dig out from destructive defaults and stop sabotaging the cause.”
Inside Higher Ed commentator Steven Mintz suggests “a more holistic approach that embraces the full spectrum of human identity, including often-overlooked dimensions such as religion, geography and veteran status, alongside race, gender, disability and sexuality.”
And New York Times columnist David Brooks emphasizes the importance of pluralism for the future of DEI because, after all, “Pluralists seek to replace the demonizing, demeaning and dividing ethos with one that encourages respect, relationships and cooperation. Pluralists believe that people’s identities are complex and shifting, that most human beings shouldn’t be divided into good/evil categories, that we become wise as we enter into many different points of view.”
Whichever form we choose, it is time to turn the page on DEI and begin the next important chapter in America’s long civil rights march, before the very real benefits achieved by the best of what the movement has to offer are irretrievably lost.
