The Review

As our Christa Dutton and Jasper Smith report, colleges across the country have been scaling back or eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — even where no state law compels them. Although this movement preceded President Trump’s second term, it has since ramped up. The most obvious reason is that college leaders anticipate that some combination of Trump’s executive orders and future state legislation will ban the programs anyway, so they may as well get ahead of the curve.

Critics of these actions accuse college leaders of craven capitulation. Jeremy C. Young, director of state and higher-education policy at PEN America (and a Chronicle Review contributor), posted on X: “Some higher-ed organizations who are loudly circling the wagons against federal funding cuts were oddly silent or circumspect about the earlier attacks on CRT and DEI. I wish there was a better understanding that these attacks are coming because we failed to repel those.” Had colleges better resisted the conservative legislative assault on DEI that played out during much of President Biden’s term and climaxed with Trump’s executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” the thinking goes, perhaps the sector would be in better shape to repel attacks on federal research funding.

This strikes me as fanciful. There’s no reason to think that any particular attitude toward Trump’s DEI orders would have affected the National Institutes of Health’s attempted 15-percent cap on overhead rates. The budget-slashing chaos machine of Trump’s second term is hardly confined to colleges.

The fact is that colleges couldn’t defend themselves against the assault on DEI because DEI — or at least the cultural hyper-sensitivities, discriminatory distribution of punishments and deserts, and censorial attitudes toward conservative (but only conservative) speech that most of the public understands by that term — is profoundly unpopular. Its unpopularity probably contributed to the broad loss of credibility of the sector and the culture associated with it, not just with conservatives but with, for instance, President Barack Obama (social justice activists are “always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly”), Fareed Zakaria (colleges “have been neglecting a core focus on excellence in order to pursue a variety of agendas, many of them clustered around diversity and inclusion”), and Michelle Goldberg (college punishment of unpopular right-wing speech “threatens to undermine the value of academic freedom”). And this is the loyal criticism.

If Democrats are colleges’ natural political constituency, it was bad that so many of them felt alienated from campus culture. And within colleges, the situation was no better: DEI policies blithely imposed by administrators over the last decade had sown vexing division within the faculty ranks. Mix in the legal exposure triggered by covert affirmative-action programs operating under the banner of DEI; the skeptical journalistic attention not just of conservative outlets like The Washington Free Beacon but of The Atlantic and The New York Times; the paper trails attesting to illegal hiring processes turned up under public-records requests; and, yes, the unerring nose of the Republican party for blood in the water — and the political reality is non-negotiable. A full-throated defense of DEI in the current political climate is not a strategy; it’s a suicide note.

The smart thing for colleges to do now is probably not to defend their past diversity programs but to fight against bigoted overcorrections, like the NIH’s recent annulment of grant applications from underrepresented minorities. As our Maddie Khaw and Megan Zahneis reported, junior researchers seeking NIH funding under a dedicated diversity pathway had their applications summarily tossed. Not only was minority status no longer a plus; it had suddenly, shockingly, become formally disqualifying. (Three days after The Chronicle’s story broke, the NIH reinstated the applications.)

Colleges should also draw a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, DEI used in hiring, promotion, and training and, on the other, curricular and disciplinary offerings like critical race theory or gender studies that are illegitimately conflated with the DEI regime by Republicans — and then use what resources they have to defend the latter. From an academic-freedom perspective, the most chilling potential consequence of the Republican legislative campaign against colleges has always been that it will proscribe some areas of teaching and research on ideological grounds. Although most of the state-level legislation that has passed so far has not impinged on curriculum, the academy is plainly in a uniquely vulnerable period. A defense of disciplinary autonomy will have a better chance of succeeding if it is unhampered by the need to defend a set of administrative DEI imperatives unconnected to the curriculum.

In two statements from last year, “On Eliminating Discrimination and Achieving Equality in Higher Education” and “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation,” the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure has taken a different tack. The first statement, issued some months after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action, reasserts the organization’s 1973 endorsement of affirmative action — and then enlarges it. The current moment “demands not only rededication to the principles of equal justice espoused by the AAUP a half century ago but also a more expansive and profound understanding of those principles. Today we must acknowledge the complex nature of systemic inequality and the need for institutional change and affirmative measures designed to eliminate discrimination and advance both formal and substantive equality.” In the past, the statement says, the AAUP itself was too narrowly focused on “incidents and practices that were demonstrably illegal"; it should have also been concerned, as it now is, with a more diffuse range of threats, such as “unconscious bias.”

The second statement defends the use of diversity criteria in hiring and promotion when approved by “an appropriate larger group, such as a faculty senate or a department.” Blanket prohibitions on such criteria, the AAUP says, amount to a violation of academic freedom.

By yoking academic freedom to DEI, and by endorsing affirmative-action policies that are in fact illegal, these two statements suggest that the AAUP has not taken the measure of the political moment. The point is tactical. If academic freedom is to survive this very dangerous period, it will need defenders who can define it in terms that are convincing to a large and politically diverse public. Entangling academic freedom and DEI will probably not do that — especially since, as Dutton and Smith write, in the past year the anti-DEI movement has “increasingly transcended party lines.”

Recommended

• “Even the most cursory immersion in these extraordinary texts makes one thing immediately clear. They are a major literary achievement in themselves, related to her poems and perhaps exceeding them in experimental energy. And yet, we don’t know how to read them.” In The New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey writes about Emily Dickinson’s letters, by way of a new edition edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell.
• “Conveying the experience of living under communism is a challenging task. There was a guardedness in everyday life that is hard to get across to those who have not lived in a police state.” Also in The New York Review of Books, Irina Dumitrescu reviews Lea Ypi’s memoir about growing up in communist Albania.
• “What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?” In Politico, Eugene Ludwig suggests that official metrics for measuring economic health may not work very well.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin