The time has come that many have feared but many will celebrate: DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion) is effectively gone from campuses by federal order.
Inside Higher Ed reports; click headline to read:
An excerpt:
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights declared all race-conscious student programming, resources and financial aid illegal over the weekend and threatened to investigate and rescind federal funding for any institution that does not comply within 14 days.
In a Dear Colleague letter [JAC: see below] published late Friday night, acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor outlined a sweeping interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck down affirmative action. While the decision applied specifically to admissions, the Trump administration believes it extends to all race-conscious spending, activities and programming at colleges.
. . . . .The letter mentions a wide range of university programs and policies that could be subject to an OCR investigation, including “hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”
“Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” Trainor writes.
Backlash to the letter came swiftly on Saturday from Democratic lawmakers, student advocates and academic freedom organizations.
“This threat to rip away the federal funding our public K-12 schools and colleges receive flies in the face of the law,” Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, wrote in a statement Saturday. “While it’s anyone’s guess what falls under the Trump administration’s definition of ‘DEI,’ there is simply no authority or basis for Trump to impose such a mandate.”
But most college leaders have, so far, remained silent.
Since virtually every institution of higher learning depends on some federal funding, this gives colleges the choices of abandoning DEI or abandoning federal money. You know which they’ll prefer. The former, of course, but they’ll try to have both, sometimes by duplicitous practices.
Since the Supreme Court has declared that universities can’t use race as a basis for admitting students, but will allow them to identify their race in essays (this is a backdoor many colleges use to promote affirmative action), the letter also deals with that:
The Dear Colleague letter also seeks to close multiple exceptions and potential gaps left open by the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action and to lay the groundwork for investigating programs that “may appear neutral on their face” but that “a closer look reveals … are, in fact, motivated by racial considerations.”
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that colleges could legally consider a student’s racial identity as part of their experience as described in personal essays, but the OCR letter rejects that.
“A school may not use students’ personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues as a means of determining or predicting a student’s race and favoring or disfavoring such students,” Trainor wrote.
It would be hard to determine, though, whether colleges are actually doing this. Essays and the like aren’t banned—only their use for race-based admissions, and that would be a lot harder to prove than what Harvard did, which was give Asian applicants lower “personality scores” in a way that could be statistically affirmed. Further, the elimination of standardized tests as a requirement for application—another backdoor approach to promoting affirmative action—is also now banned:
Going even further beyond the scope of the SFFA decision, the letter forbids any race-neutral university policy that could conceivably be a proxy for racial consideration, including eliminating standardized test score requirements.
The department has never revoked a college or state higher education agency’s federal funding over Title VI violations. If the OCR follows through on its promises, it would be an unprecedented exercise of federal influence over university activities.
The letter is likely to be challenged in court, but in the meantime it could have a ripple effect on colleges’ willingness to continue funding diversity programs and resources for underrepresented students.
On top of that, there will be no more race or gender-based graduation ceremonies (Harvard had at least ten “affinity graduations”), no more ethnically-segregated dormitories, no more segregation of any type. As the letter notes (my emphasis):
Although SFFA addressed admissions decisions, the Supreme Court’s holding applies more broadly. At its core, the test is simple: If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law. Federal law thus prohibits covered entities from using 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. Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race
Of course this will be challenged in court, though I don’t see a clear reason why the executive branch can’t make such a policy since the Supreme Court has disallowed race-based admissions. In the meantime, you can find the whole letter at this site (this one was sent to Harvard, but they’re all the same), or click on the screenshots below, where I’ve given just a short excerpt. Colleges will be poring over the whole four-page letter.
My Chicago colleague Dorian Abbot, who’s opposed to DEI, wrote a short piece about this on Heterodox Substack with this information about how to report violations:
If you want to report something but are concerned about potential retaliation, Jonathan Mitchel at Faculty, Alumni, & Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP) has offered to file the complaints with OCR. You can give information anonymously at the FASORP website, including any documents, websites, or other relevant information. The website does not track IP addresses and you can use a VPN before navigating to it if you want to be extra safe.
If you have any information about ongoing illegal discrimination, it is essential to report it as soon as possible. General Council at every educational institution needs to quickly understand and advise their administration that discrimination really is illegal and must stop immediately.
As for me, I have mixed feelings, and have gone back and forth on this issue in the past few years. On the one hand, I’m strongly opposed to requiring DEI statements for hiring or promotion. This is illegal compelled speech and, in fact, is banned by the University of Chicago’s 1970 Shils Report. Nor do I think that there should be preferential admission on the basis of race, nor the elimination of standardized tests as a sneaky way to increase “diversity”, though I have suggested that when two candidates are equally qualified, the minority candidate might be favored.
The fact is that, historically, minorities have been disadvantaged by bias in a way that has affected them over the long term. In my view, the way to remedy this is not through “equity”—a misguided claim that groups should be represented in all institutions in the same proportion as in the general population. The proper remedy is equal opportunity, but of course that is a much harder remedy than simply forcing equity on institutions through preferential treatment. But equal opportunity from birth is the only way to guarantee that groups are truly treated equally now, and seems the fairest solution.
Besides the possibility of preferential admission when students have equal records (this is of course illegal under the present “Dear Colleague” letter), the only DEI that I think colleges and universities need is a small office—or even just a procedure—for dealing with reported instances of bias against students or university members, and those reports cannot be anonymous. In the meantime, DEI should consist of promulgating these two statements:
1.) All students should be treated equally regardless of ethnicity, religion, disability, ideology, and so on
2.) Any instances of bias or harassment of students can be reported here (give link or location).
It will be interesting to see what happens in the next three years, but we can be sure that once the Democrats re-assume power, all of the above will be deep-sixed.
This will turn into “Revenge of the Asians”. If allowed to stand even for a few years, elite schools will all go majority Asian. As far back as 1988, before I even applied to college, Harvard’s internal analysis found it was discriminating against Asian students in admissions. But Harvard justified it and kept on doing it. I’m sure they will keep on trying to do it using duplicitous means. And yet Asians keep on voting overwhelmingly Democrat…
Yes.
Most of the US/western discussion about race etc. is about under-performing minorities, be they locals or immigrant groups, and the many tensions about how the white majority should or should not treat them. Almost everything DEI is about this discussion.
What happens when there are significant over-performing minorities is perhaps even trickier. This is a common pattern in many poorer countries, and often creates serious tensions. Let me strongly recommend that many of you read “World on Fire” by Amy Chua, which is about this pattern. (Published 20 years ago but feels current.)
Our legal system tends to lump these together. E.g. the SFFA decision was about “Asian” admission, but points out that counting race positively or negatively in admissions decisions are equally illegal under civil right law. But the debate is bigger than what present laws say. And for most of it, it’s important to think about both kinds of minority.
I read “World on Fire” by Amy Chua. I concur.
Yup. The biggest contradiction in woke ideology. Academics, like all institutions, are apparently set up to benefit whites over “people of color”, but Asians dominate academics and they are people of color.
The Woke solution, rather than reject their flawed ideology, was to redefine “Asians” as white, using the term “white-adjacent”. And then pretend that nobody notices.
I wholeheartedly welcome a tsunami of Asians into these institutions, literally drowning DEI and washing away the filth of identity politics.
I agree about the contradictions of the woke.
But I predict that this “tsunami of Asians” will engender new, and possibly much uglier, forms of identity politics. From one side, if you think large numbers of Indians want meritocracy and queensberry rules, then I think you will be surprised by the depth of racial nepotism & exclusion. From the other, a world in which “Whites” is a proudly capitalised identity group fighting for a share of the spoils is not good.
Arguing about how many token blacks should sit on the supreme court (and about whether they are tokens) is one thing, a minor distraction. Arguing about whether a court which is “majority foreign” is legitimate at all is deadly serious. It is a miracle that the court being majority-catholic now is barely an issue, the miracle of 20th century integration. Many, many forces push against that miracle being repeated in the 21st century. (High rates of white-asian intermarriage are one positive force here.)
As we’ve learned so often, it can take more than a ruling or a law to actually change things. Let’s see what happens when some schools actually lose funding.
Maybe I’m not in touch with the correct outlets, but I’m not seeing impassioned pleas that say we must continue funding and training DEI or civilization as we know it will collapse. As someone who is happy to see it go away, I would be interested in a steel-manned argument as to why it should stay.
It’s as if no one had the guts to call it out as BS before now because of peer or political pressure and now that it’s going away everyone is breathing a quiet sigh of relief. I do wonder what all of these “__ Studies” grads are going to do for a job now though.
As one of my coworkers asked the trainer during a 4 hour DEI training session (1 of a series of 6 last year): “What’s wrong with just saying ‘treat everyone with respect or we’ll fire you’ and calling it a day?”
I appreciate your request to steelman the opposing arguments.
I think DEI is simply the ongoing debate of how to best solve racial inequity. Simply declaring “don’t discriminate” as this letter/policy does doesn’t solve the problem. Will you be surprised when next year, even after these letters “end” racial discrimination at schools, that black students are still underrepresented? No, the problem is harder than that. So what should we do?
If these letters make higher ed perfectly non-discriminatory, there will still be too few applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds to create a representative class. And down the chain… Too few representative high schoolers due to disadvantaged primary schools. So it really is a systemic problem. We need systemic solutions. DEI is about trying to figure that out.
I think DEI proponents would answer your question about what’s wrong with treating everyone with respect is that while it may work on the micro level, it does little to reverse the systemic situation we’ve gotten ourselves into. And they’ll ask how long are you willing to wait while your fellow Americans remain disadvantaged until the system somehow rebalances?
Btw, Another argument for diversity, even if artificial, in higher education is to give a better education through exposure to more viewpoints. I wouldn’t particularly care to attend a university that is somehow racially balanced. Much more educational to interact with people from all classes and backgrounds.
The right has succeeded in characterizing the debate into two clear sides: us common sense non-racists vs them looney racist discriminating social engineers. I don’t think that helps us work together toward a solution.
Except that study after study has shown that what makes the difference between a high-performing school and a low-performing school is 90% about the intake of kids. It’s not the funding levels or the quality of the teachers (these are not generally worse in low-performing schools, indeed the funding is often higher).
And nor is it parental socio-economic status: First that’s an easy thing to control for, and it does little to explain racial gaps, and anyhow we know from twin studies that “shared environment” (including parenting and schools) is way less important than commonly supposed.
The idea that disparities in group-mean outcomes are primarily about some groups being “disadvantaged” (that is, that society is treating them unfairly) runs counter to the actual evidence.
A good-faith alternative view:
Indigenous people make up ~6% of British Columbians but only ~2.5% of undergrads at my university. No bigotry or discrimination: underrepresentation is caused by history & economics. We scour the province to find every indigenous applicant who can do university-level work, and we admit all of those folks. As a consequence the indigenous students do well and are fun to teach because (like the rest of the students) they’re capable.
We’ve tried & failed to get to 6%. Direct outreach to First Nations leads to handfuls of applicants. Bridge programs nurture high schoolers in pre-university courses but have high dropout rates. We hired lots of indigenous professors in race-based hiring of professors (yes really) but many of them have left the university and they haven’t helped much in recruiting indigenous students.
Should we admit indigenous students with lower GPAs who are less well prepared & less capable? That doesn’t address the economics or history. It risks creating failure (among the DEI admissions) and resentment (among others, including the indigenous students who were admitted on merit). That all seems bad and I don’t think we should do it. At the level of the university itself, this is an insoluble problem as Leslie calls it down thread. All the drawbacks seem worse than the benefits.
Too much alcoholism amongst the natives. Probably biological based on their (biologically) recent exposure to alcohol.
You see this effect in Europe. Northern Europeans are more prone to alcoholism than those in the south. Drunk Irish & Scots are subjects of jokes. It’s rampant in Russia.
NYS (New York State) and NYC (New York City) spend far more money than Utah (the ratio is at least 3:1). Guess what? They get lower test scores. Of course, DC spends even more money per-student and has abysmal results to show for it. Some number of years ago, Scientific American (of all journals) wrote about this. See “Indochinese Refugee Families and Academic Achievement
The children of Southeast Asian boat people excel in the American school system. A review of the factors underlying this achievement suggests that the U.S. educational crisis is more social than academic”
Even 33 years ago, Asian students were high achievers in the very same schools where other students were failing.
The special high schools in NYC provide another data point. They are overwhelmingly Asian (one or two generations ago, they were overwhelmingly Jewish). The parents are generally poor. The vast majority of students qualify for subsidized lunches.
Permit me to try to rust the steel man.
The result of the “don’t discriminate” rule will absolutely be that blacks will become more under-represented. This was surely predicted. How could it be otherwise? Racial inequity is not a problem that deserves solving. If, under colour- and race- blindness, blacks will all but disappear from college classes, that is not a steel-man of DEI, rather it’s the very argument for eliminating it. It counts as success, not just an unfortunate consequence, because in a zero-sum game it creates room for academically better qualified students to enrol. Unless you argue that colleges are just expensive clubs that produce nothing of economic value, DEI makes us all poorer.
DEI never struck me as a way to “figure out” a solution but rather was a prescription activists have imposed to as the solution. Observe the bitterness with which they are defending it.
As a foreigner, I don’t criticize America for having a largely black underclass that seems to be mired forever at the bottom, and I don’t think you should beat yourselves up about it either. (Many of my insecure countrymen, ignoring our own smaller but even more dysfunctional indigenous underclass, do love to look down their noses at you for it — it’s kind of all we have as a national glue now — but I don’t.) It’s not as if you haven’t tried. Academia can’t entirely ignore a dangerous underclass but once you’ve made the effort to recognize anyone who wants to self-improve out of it, which you do, you’ve done your bit.
“Racial inequity is not a problem that deserves solving.”
I think this deserves to be engraved in gold.
Racial preferences in the US (now copied in Canada too) have been in place for decades. Any benefit they have had is surely been expressed and no further benefits can be expected.
DrGary, you write:
“If these letters make higher ed perfectly non-discriminatory, there will still be too few applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds to create a representative class. And down the chain… Too few representative high schoolers due to disadvantaged primary schools. So it really is a systemic problem. We need systemic solutions. DEI is about trying to figure that out.”
It seems to me the trouble is that DEI is not a systemic solution, but one that attempts to fix the problem at the end of the pipeline (universities) by, essentially, faking the results, i.e. doing all the re-balancing at the end to make up for shortfalls earlier on, and pretending that the only problems this creates are caused by the majority’s racism.
A truly systemic solution, which has consistently been advocated by our host whenever this is discussed, is to make sure everyone has a genuine equality of opportunity right from the start — or at least, equal opportunity at quite a high level rather than the theoretical and minimal equal opportunity that is now available. What that requires involves profound changes that would massively increase school funding overall to ensure a high-quality primary and secondary education for all, across the country; a sea change in social attitudes towards education so that there is a genuinely broad aspiration to excel at it across all social classes and ethnic groups; greater security of employment to make it easier for lower-paid parents to support their children’s education, etc. etc. And of course all that would require federal control of the education system, to ensure uniformity of provision, and a significant increase in taxation in order to reduce social inequality. And that, in turn, would require a change of mindset in American culture that has never happened before and, to be frank, I don’t see coming anywhere down the line. But it’s the only way the problem the DEI folks dimly perceive will actually be addressed. Their pathetic band-aid, applied at too late a stage and causing more problems than it solves, really does nothing to address the issue. But it does explain why a class-based analysis is so conspicuously missing from their thinking.
The “throw money at the problem” approach has been tried for decades and US schools are not underfunded! For example, Baltimore City schools are spending $22,400 per year per child, and yet getting very poor results.
(In comparison, Utah spends $9,500 per year per child and yet gets way better results than Baltimore City; the explanation for that is all about demographics.)
There’s a lazy assumption that if outcomes are not good then it must be the schools, teachers, funding levels, etc, that are at fault and need fixing. Yet, plenty of studies show that school quality makes little difference (in the sense that nearly all schools are plenty good enough) and that just about everything that gets attributed to schools being “good” versus “bad” is actually about the intake of kids.
Consider a thought experiment of taking the best-performing and worst-performing schools and swapping the cohorts of kids around, while keeping everything else the same. What then happens? The near-automatic assumption among many is that it’s the school that matters, so the “high performing” school would continue to be high performing with the swapped cohort; the actual evidence says the opposite.
Previously DEI and —Studies grads could get jobs in, well, the DEI industry. It is huge.
But perhaps, mercifully, not for much longer.
Trump etc. (and I think his name is Ronnie Starbuck, a young activist working for about a year now lobbying large companies) have solved a huge collective action problem.
With colleges the mechanism can be legal given their federal funding but in the private sector, where these grads go, DEI and all its versions are very much in decline. Solving the problem in the corporate sphere is the dam finally breaking of companies all being ABLE to abandon DEI without enormous blowback from the public, shareholders and younger employees. You can just say “No” now without consequence. Dare I say the “vibes”?
Excellent.
D.A.
NYC
Very difficult, but I do agree with the move in general.
Just finished Thomas Sowell’s latest book, Social Justice Fallacies. It’s brilliant, but it does highlight how hard it will be to attain equal opportunity for all. For example the huge number of black children raised in single parent households. They’re at such a disadvantage, but how do we solve that one? My guess is it’ll take generations, but is society willing to wait? Can it wait?
No easy answers I fear.
Maybe the “problem” has no solution, not one that people outside the culture can create and impose, in the manner of colonialism and assimilation. (“Fixing” a dysfunctional culture that wanted things it could not produce was one of the motivations of later colonialism.) A problem that has no solution is not a problem to be solved, it’s just a fact of life to be managed. To say that the larger society “can’t wait” and must do something, anything, about it NOW seems perverse.
I know I’m going to die someday. If I had needed to solve that problem else my widow and orphans would starve would have caused me to waste all my assets in the search for the Fountain of Youth. Better I manage that fact of life by providing for them with insurance and savings. There are other ways to manage dysfunctional black (and aboriginal) culture that don’t require successfully fixing it for them.
This is a good analogy.
I want the guys in charge of the pension fund be pessimistic, to assume that problems will not be solved. Likewise anyone planning education (and criminal justice). They don’t need answers about why to plan around how things are.
Of course we should also fund longevity research, and wild ideas about how to improve education (or rehabilitate prisoners). Of course much of this work will be done by enthusiasts who think big progress is possible. Just don’t let them anywhere near the serious people making sure that life can go on with or without success.
Thanks for the elaboration, which fits nicely. 🎯
I should credit my philosopher friend, Paul Viminitz, with the idea of insoluble problems not being problems. He was speaking about collective action problems specifically, but I think the idea has legs.
“A problem is something you can do something about. If you can’t do something about it, then it’s not a problem. It’s a predicament.”
— John C Maxwell
A signature DEI practice in academia is the program of anonymous “bias
reporting” complaints, which can embroil a victim of any frivolous complaint in
tiresome struggle sessions with educrats. Delicious that Dorian Abbot’s Hx letter mentions an anonymous method to grass one’s uni to OCR when it tries to
sneak around the new dispensation, as many will.
Many will, judging by past behavior. Referenda (like California’s Prop 209) flatly
rejected race-based reverse discrimination long ago, yet many unis keep using word games to maintain the practice. It should be no surprise that decades of such word games has elicited the blunt, angry response of Trump’s new Education Department.
Whatever the other faults of the Trump presidency, his Ed. Dept’s change of policy has popular support outside the educracy.
Agree about the need for equal opportunity in general. Everything else is an attempt at reparations. I thought this was a clear explanation why Jerry is right (sorry for the extended quotations):
“[G]overnment has no role in directly and individually addressing the harms of the past, with maybe special exceptions for very clear, direct, unambiguous, quantifiable, verifiable cases of direct harm…[A]ttempts to do otherwise are completely unworkable and result inevitably in unfairness to people living today whose involvement in the wrongs of the past do not meet that standard…You don’t need to waste your time explaining to me that there exist persistent economic disparities that [equal opportunity today] does nothing to address. That’s correct…[but] there is no magical solution. People in the past suffered for all kinds of reasons and nobody born today started at exactly the same position as anybody else. [Paying them back is] not a project we can undertake, it’s not a project we should attempt to undertake, and we should not make a special exception for racialized harms.”
x.com/wanyeburkett/status/1891247916121202737
Wrt equal opportunity and reparations in academia in particular, this essay by the social psychologist Lee Jussim has a good historical accounting of what led to this moment.
“Why are [Trump & Musk] doing this?…1. Academia became a club for those on the political left…2. Many academics embraced and advanced the politicization of academia…3. Academics are on the left to far left, and many on the left/far left hate Republicans and especially Trump…4. Trump and the Republicans know this…and they are ready, willing, and able to wage relentless political war to crush the far left activist wing of academia.”
unsafescience.substack.com/p/we-tried-to-warn-you
I’ve got to believe that some of this is also due to Trump knowing that if takes minor action, as he did during his first term, that the media and those with TDS will howl as if it’s the end of the world and call him the N-word (N_z_). So what’s the difference if he goes big or goes small? Nothing, so he might as well go big. I don’t think it’s so much war as it is pushing their agenda through, complaints be damned.
I also agree with your points about academia, and this has fed into the current state.
Steve Martin made me chuckle when he noted that he was SNL’s most recent diversity hire.
An administration run by a career criminal cannot say what is legal and what is not. Just say D.E.I. is banned.
Do not tell me what to say, please.
I just read the letter, which is a strong statement indeed. Part of its value lies in its clarity. We’ll see how this plays out in the courts.
The tragic irony to me is that DEI became the very thing it set out to end. Ok, that is sadly common. From what I saw it started as a desire to insure all were given a fair go and a few a-holes spoke out, it went back and forth and ended up as it is.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
— Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time
Yeah. Sad and ironic.
The way I see it is a few jerks took issue with those who are pushed aside being properly checked out and complained and/or others misinterpreted it as quotas or the like.
They swung back and forth, and it became the monster they thought it was.
Comment/discussion #6 reminds me how obsessed “Progressives” are with the PAST, way beyond their campaigns for present discrimination to reverse or compensate for past discrimination. The overtly named “1619 project” is a virtually clinical example of this focus. There is also the woke obsession with European colonialism, which was abandoned almost entirely 60-70 years ago; the obsession with Eugenics, which had a limited vogue a century ago; the related obsession with 19th century statements that violate 21st century decorum, with retroactive cancelling of offenders (Galton, Pearson, etc.). From a psychoanalytic point of view, this obsession with temps perdu might be diagnosed as a variant of the Oedipus Complex, or what is nowadays called “daddy issues” .
For clarity, I agree that some small office may exist to handle 1.) and 2.), but it should not be called DEI. (I am not saying that this is what Jerry suggested.) Or, even better, these matters should be handled by HR.