The Pendulum Has Swung Away From Social Justice

Back in the mid-1960s to the 1970s, institutions of higher education were dragged — sometimes willingly, more often not — into the unfinished project of removing the structural barriers keeping Black and other minority students off their campuses and out of their classrooms. It was a time of student protests, rhythmic chants, impassioned denouncements of administrators, and the sound of feet marching toward a transformed future they were determined to bring into being.

The federal government embraced the zeitgeist, flexing its power to broaden inclusion in classrooms through new efforts such as affirmative-action policies; federal work-study programs to make sure that lower-income children could work their way through college; and Pell Grants to provide assistance to the most economically vulnerable children in the nation who dreamed of attending college.

During that 10-year period, the federal government removed barriers to college access, shored up civil-rights laws, empowered the Justice Department to safeguard the rights of children who had not always had such powerful champions, and threatened to withhold federal funding from educational institutions that continued to make college attainment difficult, if not impossible, for those who were qualified but fell outside the systems of access, wealth, and status that comprised the upper echelons of national and global societies. Debates over free speech, federal spending and policy, and the most appropriate avenues for expanding democratic participation in the nation reshaped campus life. Beneath it all was a clear understanding, sometimes spoken aloud, sometimes not. Higher education had to fling wide its doors, not just admit more women, Black people, and other students of color but fundamentally change the reality of who could dream of attending an institution of higher education.

The payoff was impressive. In 1965, Black students made up less than 1 percent of students at most Ivy League and elite private universities. By 1975, that figure had increased to between 7 and 10 percent. At Yale University, the Black student population grew from 14 students in 1964 to more than 50 by 1972. The impact for women was even more significant, rising from nearly zero in 1965 to over 30 percent by 1975.

This progress did not just happen on its own. President Lyndon B. Johnson began the forward momentum by using every tool available to him at the time — federal funding, new civil-rights laws, the Justice Department — to urge, if not force, schools to broaden and enhance their efforts to desegregate in both K-12 public education and at the collegiate level. He tied institutions’ ability to receive federal education dollars to compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in any program receiving federal funds. At the K-12 level, public-school districts that refuse to desegregate were threatened with losing money for teacher salaries, textbooks, school lunches, and more. The Higher Education Act of 1965 — one of Johnson’s cornerstone Great Society programs — channeled unprecedented levels of resources into education, but only for colleges willing to broaden their desegregation efforts and welcome students who were women, poor, or of color. In short, Johnson made it expensive to segregate and profitable to integrate.

This convergence of protest, new civil-rights policies and their enforcement, and the availability of vast amounts of federal dollars remade colleges. At least for a time, many campuses embraced change. The goal wasn’t cosmetic. It was more than a handful of glossy, carefully curated publicity photos representing a diverse student body. The goal was structural and rooted in support of the government’s new role and responsibility to use its might to support, protect, and help fund college access for the most vulnerable, the most often overlooked, the most in need. The point was to ensure that, however an institution showed up in photographs, it was broadly representative of the nation.

This is the 10-year period that gave us disciplines like Black studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies. It also created new pipelines and opportunities for students, staff, and faculty of color.

Fast forward 50 years and those same forces — law, culture wars, protest, federal funding — are still reshaping the university. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, once used to dismantle segregation, opened investigations into colleges suspected of discriminating against white and Asian applicants through affirmative-action policies. The Department of Education rescinded Obama-era guidance encouraging colleges to pursue diversity in admissions. Title VI, once a tool to wedge open doors, is now a weapon formed to challenge diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as discriminatory and unlawful. Funding threats have also been retooled: President Trump signed an executive order banning diversity training in federally funded programs, and some states followed his lead by threatening to cut funding to institutions that teach about systemic racism or maintain DEI offices.

This isn’t just a backlash. It is an attempt by the federal government to roll back the clock to a time when segregated institutions were the preferred preserve of the most wealthy and privileged. The change in the understanding of the Brown v. Board of Education decision is instructive. In 1954, it was the legal linchpin of desegregation efforts, ensuring Black children could access white schools from which they were barred. By 2023, Brown v. Board of Education was cited by the Supreme Court to justify the end of affirmative-action policies that benefited Black children, saying such policies were both illegal and harmed white and Asian students.

In White Money/Black Power, a book I wrote almost 20 years ago, I told the story of how Black studies entered the academy. It was not just another intellectual discipline; it was a product of the era. Students demanded it. Faculty fought for it. Foundations funded it. What I did not imagine was a world where the very tools that made Black studies possible are being wielded to attack the programs and people invited onto campus in the heyday of the expansion of educational access. Likewise, Title VI — originally designed to force segregated schools to change — is now a mechanism for eliminating programs designed to diversify campuses. Now, the Trump administration believes DEI offices and policies themselves are a form of discrimination.

To be clear, DEI programs were never perfect solutions. The individual words making up the term carry within them a certain vagueness. What, exactly, is the endpoint of diversity? How do we measure equity? Who defines inclusion? How do we know when enough people have been included, or included well enough? Instead of grappling directly with systemic disparities in hiring, curriculum, and access to power, on some campuses DEI offices too often drift into emotional terrain: How do people feel on campus? Do they feel welcome? Do they feel like they belong? These are, of course, important questions. But they are not substitutes for civil rights.

The problem with rooting institutional justice in feelings of inclusion is that it makes the more challenging work too easy to sidestep. It can let colleges off the hook for not hiring Latino faculty members, for failing to retain students of color, for refusing to fund Indigenous studies — so long as they host workshops and put up signs that say, “You belong here.” The shift from policy to sentiment — from redress to reassurance — has made DEI an easy target precisely because it too often lacks the teeth, metrics, and legal grounding that earlier civil-rights gains required in order to force meaningful change.

There are also real questions about how uniformly impactful such offices are. After nearly four decades of DEI offices and policies on college campuses, Black students continue to feel unwelcome and disconnected from their institutions. A 2023 Gallup survey revealed that more than one in five Black college students reported feeling discriminated against on campus, and one in four at the least-diverse colleges report feeling psychologically or physically unsafe. These persistent feelings of exclusion have led many students to seek smaller affinity groups and communities, especially when celebrating significant milestones like graduation. Despite institutional DEI efforts, the need for separate cultural celebrations and support networks underscores the limitations of current policies and academic cultures in fostering genuine integration and inclusivity.

And. But. Still. At least it was something. Even those often-imperfect efforts are becoming relics. What we’re seeing is not just budget cuts or administrative reshuffling. We are watching the active cultural and political effort to erase the “why” behind programs like DEI. We are losing both the programs and the memory of the harm they were built to address.

Today, we are watching, in real time, the deliberate dismantling of this fragile legacy. Most of these antisegregation programs were built on the assumption that colleges were willing to change their campus climate. That assumption was always provisional. Today, it’s being tested like never before. We are watching public institutions compete to prove how aggressively they can root out DEI. Faculty face threats for teaching about race. Administrators are rewriting policy not to protect marginalized students but to insulate themselves from the political cost of protecting them.

Some say this moment will pass. That we’ll swing back. But pendulums don’t swing on their own. They must be pushed. This dismantling is coordinated, well-funded, and legally sanctioned. If there is to be an inclusive nudge in the other direction, we will need clarity, community, commitment, and courage. Integration is not peripheral to the mission of higher education. It is the mission — if we understand education as something more than credentialing, more than job prep, more than tradition. What’s under threat now is not a program. It’s a principle: that education, at its best, is inseparable from justice.