Unwinding DEI: Part I
Years before Trump’s recent flurry of anti-DEI actions, state lawmakers were busy tearing it out from the roots on college campuses.

In this episode
During his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump has waged war on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. But the effort to stamp out DEI on college campuses has been years in the making across state legislatures. How did DEI take hold in higher education? And what does it really mean to “ban” this kind of work?
Related Reading:
- DEI Legislation Tracker
- Tracking Higher Ed’s Dismantling of DEI
- A Slap in the Face: How UT-Austin Axed a DEI Division
- Behind the Lines of Texas A&M’s Diversity War (Washington Post)
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In this episode
During his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump has waged war on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. But the effort to stamp out DEI on college campuses has been years in the making across state legislatures. How did DEI take hold in higher education? And what does it really mean to “ban” this kind of work?
Related Reading:
- DEI Legislation Tracker
- Tracking Higher Ed’s Dismantling of DEI
- A Slap in the Face: How UT-Austin Axed a DEI Division
- Behind the Lines of Texas A&M’s Diversity War (Washington Post)
Guest: Daarel Burnette II, senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Transcript
This transcript was produced using a speech recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.
Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.
Daarel Burnette On paper, America thinks racism is wrong, but in reality, the work that it requires to root out racism, to root out homophobia, a lot of people are not willing to put in the type of resources and work that that requires.
Jack Stripling In the politics of higher education, few issues have inspired more debate in recent years than how colleges promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Often abbreviated as DEI, Diversity, Equity and inclusion programs were designed to serve and recruit increasingly diverse students and employees on college campuses. But they’ve drawn ire from conservatives who see the growing DEI industrial complex as a mechanism for instituting liberal groupthink and a source of discrimination in job searches. On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end DEI programs across the federal government. At the state level, the DEI backlash has been particularly notable. Over the past couple of years, a dozen states have passed new anti-DEI laws, which have had sweeping effects on colleges. Banning DEI can mean a lot of things, from eliminating jobs to closing campus spaces beloved by students. We’ve been tracking these changes closely and trying to make sense of them. Today, in the first of two episodes on DEI, we’ll talk with Daarel Burnette, a senior editor at The Chronicle, about how DEI offices are being dismantled and what that means for students, faculty and the ever brewing culture wars. And next week, we’ll hear from Nicholas Confessore, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, whose recent coverage of the University of Michigan’s DEI program has stirred a lot of conversation and some controversy. Daarel, thanks so much for coming to the show.
Daarel Burnette I’m glad to be here, Jack. Thanks for having me.
Jack Stripling So, Daarel, we know that DEI offices are under fire right now. Let’s start with the basics: What are DEI offices and what do they do?
Daarel Burnette So, DEI offices have come to mean all kinds of things. And these people who are oftentimes the only people on their campus, they do a whole variety of things. It can be anything from evaluating data to understand where disparities exist, how they can improve outcomes for first-generation students, Black students, LGBTQ students, etc. They might be operating programs on campus, such as mentorship programs, peer programs. But ultimately, these are folks who are oftentimes burdened with trying to eradicate discrimination on campuses, to try to make sure their outcomes are equitable, and their burden varies. And oftentimes the types of issues that they are dealing with on campus can be anything from trying to rename buildings, trying to swat away at the reputation that the college has that it’s a racist institution, that it’s a discriminatory institution, to making students feel like they belong, which is a very kind of arbitrary task. But these folks, they have told us over and over again that they are underfunded and overwhelmed and oftentimes tasked with almost impossible tasks.
Jack Stripling You said that the burden varies in terms of what diversity officers do. How many DEI officers do most colleges have?
Daarel Burnette Now, there are some colleges that have dozens of DEI officers, but typically it’s just 1 to 5.
Jack Stripling The scope of that you’re describing sounds massive to me. On one hand, this is sort of a data job. They’re looking at things like outcomes and graduation rates across things like race, gender, and ethnicity, that sort of thing. But then there’s this whole other squishier thing, which is about campus culture and whether the people on campus feel welcome, whether a first-generation student feels supported. So it’s both hard science and sort of soft science. What types of people are qualified to do both?
Daarel Burnette Yeah, I’m increasingly intrigued by the people who are attracted to this profession. We found DEI officers who come from the legal profession, from human resources, from student affairs. Some people are actually operating as DEI officers on a volunteer basis. There are two other things that I’m really intrigued by. One is that more than half of DEI officers are Black and nearly two thirds are women. So this is typically people who have either experience with discrimination or just a real innate passion for fighting discrimination. And the last thing I’m really intrigued by is just the high, high turnover rate of these officers. Typically, it’s really hard to recruit and retain these people, and they oftentimes complain about sort of the overwhelming nature of this job and the lack of resources and power to actually do the things that they’re being tasked with doing.
Jack Stripling So Daarel you mentioned that more than half of these DEI officers are Black, nearly two thirds are women. Do you have a sense of what draws that particular demographic to this type of job?
Daarel Burnette A lot of these people feel as if they have a moral obligation to right past wrongs. So they will talk about their own experiences and the lack of support they got when they were at these universities. And oftentimes these are their alma maters. The type of discrimination they faced in classrooms amongst their peers, etc. And they talk about how they wished they had a support group, how they wished they had adults in the room to advocate for them, how they wish that administrators had a modicum of understanding of what it was like to be the only one on these massive campuses, etc. The other thing I would say, too, is that for a lot of colleges, they have actually created VP’s of DEI and for a lot of college campuses this is the first time that a lot of Black administrators are actually allowed into the cabinet position or into President cabinets. So these are, a lot of people feel as if this is an opportunity to make real influence on how universities are reaching out to underserved students and underserved staff members.
Jack Stripling So you’re describing a lot of people who came to DEI with a personal stake in these issues. They’re providing services that probably weren’t available to them in college. That tells us about the individuals, but what about the offices? What prompted the creation of so many DEI offices in higher education?
Daarel Burnette Sure. There are a couple of things that have happened. First off, since the 1970s, when a lot of colleges were integrated, there’s been this push and pull over how best to serve students of color. So this isn’t a new phenomenon. We might probably remember Equal Opportunity offices, for example. That said, a lot of DEI offices have been established over the last couple of decades in response to racist incidents on college campuses. These incidents have generated bad publicity for universities, and they’ve fed perceptions that this college is a racist institution. We’ve seen things like nooses hung on college campuses, cotton balls being dropped in front of Black student unions. And we’ve seen debates over Confederate monuments, for example. But then on top of that, we had the George Floyd protests in 2020. And that put a lot of pressure on college presidents to address some of the things that the students were complaining about. A very easy thing for a college president to do is say, hey, we’re going to employ a DEI officer to serve as sort of an internal ombudsman when it comes to these issues. It’s a signal, if nothing else, that they’re trying to do something.
Jack Stripling So it sounds like there are things happening both at the national level and then specific to campuses that are prompting, in some cases, the formation of these offices. Because it’s a diagnosis of a problem, right? This is happening here in part because we don’t have our act together on these issues. Could you talk a little bit about any specific campus incidents that maybe led to the formation of a DEI office or the elevation of a VP?
Daarel Burnette Sure. You have Oklahoma. I’m sure a lot of people remember the University of Oklahoma, the fraternity chant in which they had a racist fraternity chant on the bus. It was sort of a viral moment for the campus. And that president at the time in response set up a VP of DEI. They also had a Blackface incident in 2019, and a professor who was using racial slurs in the classroom. A lot of the things that they did then were mandatory diversity training for students. Diversity training for faculty. They had forums for talking about race, etc. That’s one example. But you also have the Mizzou protests in 2015. There were hunger strikes after students had dropped cotton balls on the Black Student Union. And that was a similar incident in which Mizzou basically hired a whole office that focused strictly on how to build and improve campus culture around building a diverse student body.
Jack Stripling So you have these incidents, and there’s two ways of looking at this, it seems to me. One is that the college and its administration understands we have a problem here that we need to approach with greater seriousness and we need to build an infrastructure around approaching it with greater seriousness. Another way of looking at it is we have a PR problem and we really need to project that we’re doing something whether it’s effective or not. Have you heard both of those things about the formation of DEI offices?
Daarel Burnette Yes. And you’re actually forgetting one reason, and that’s financial. Black and Latino students generate a whole lot of tuition revenue for some of these colleges. So having a culturally inept campus can actually affect graduation rates. A student might say, you know what, this is an intolerable environment. I’m going to get up and leave. And that can affect the bottom line. So back in the day, a college might have been able to look at diversity as a nice thing to have or as a publicity stunt. So now it’s a do or die issue in terms of their viability.
Jack Stripling So at some point along the line, there is a massive political backlash against DEI. Talk to me about how that happened.
Daarel Burnette What college campuses have been saying — this was their model — was that we have a discriminatory past and we have historically been exclusively white, exclusively male. Our job is to better understand where inequities exist and right size those inequities. So if that means redistributing resources, if that means deploying DEI officers, etc., so be it. And in addition, we have to be identity conscious in that effort. What Republicans have been saying in state legislatures is that that is effectively illegal, it is ineffective, and it creates unfair advantages to minorities effectively.
Jack Stripling You can’t say because of the fact that we have different outcomes between Black and white students, we’re going to push more resources to exclusively Black students, for example.
Daarel Burnette Exactly.
Jack Stripling Part of what we’ve been talking about is that colleges are accepting as fact that they’ve had racism in their history, that they’ve had inequity in their history, and that that continues in some way, and that it’s their job to continue to examine how that history is playing out in the present tense. I think what you hear from Donald Trump and other critics of DEI is that that casts the country as irredeemably racist, that we are living in a present tense that is, you know, not unlike the Jim Crow era. And that’s an extreme, you know, interpretation of this. But I think those are the political poles here. And I wonder what kind of difficulty does it present for colleges to say at once, we’re serious about this, we want to confront systemic racism to the extent it exists within our institutions, and we want to analyze it. But at the same time, we really don’t want to tick off Republican lawmakers, conservatives and others who think that we’re sending a message that’s harmful, inaccurate, etc. Talk to me about kind of the position that puts the colleges in.
Daarel Burnette I think it’s hard to overstate how difficult it is to root out racism. Why inequities exist is a whole social field. People study this stuff for their entire lives. How to fix those disparities is another whole field of study. And a lot of this stuff is experimental. A lot of this stuff is icky. A lot of this stuff is cringe worthy. Ultimately, what ends up happening, what a lot of these DEI officers have gotten into a lot of trouble for is that they are pointing their finger and say, there is where the racism exists. It’s that person, it’s that policy, is that thing. It’s that professor. It’s that student. And once this happens, folks are offended. Folks become defensive. They lash out. The model legislation actually says in order for these folks to keep their jobs, they just go around looking for racist people, basically.
Jack Stripling You mentioned model legislation, and I just want to clarify for listeners what we’re talking about. In 2023, two conservative-leaning think tanks, The Manhattan and Goldwater Institutes, introduced model legislation for dismantling DEI programs on college campuses. And this became kind of the blueprint for anti-DEI laws that were then passed across multiple states. Proponents of these laws say that they’re concerned in part about DEI officers functioning kind of like the racism police, and people get very defensive about that.
Daarel Burnette Yeah. Nobody wants to be called racist. It’s easier to just say, oh it’s systemic, it’s in the air. But for people of color, we all know, oh no, I can tell you exactly when I experienced racism. I know who the person is. I can name the person. You asked me what my college experience was like. And I will say, oh this professor said this thing in class, which made me feel like I don’t belong. And that’s what ended up happening, is that once you start having reporting mechanisms on campus, once you start having advocates on campus, once you start putting people in the cabinet who are actually pointing out, hey, the way that you are distributing money, the way you’re distributing faculty, the way that you’re distributing student service, where you are placing students in the dorm, is actually exacerbating inequities on campus. People feel very, very seen and get very, very offended. So I actually think — we’ve reported this so I don’t have to say I think — a lot of the friction was already happening on college campuses before this was a political movement. So the way that this industry has collapsed so fast, I think the tinder was there.
Jack Stripling You talked about people being very defensive about this. When DEI officers come in and say, “I know where the racism is and in fact, it’s embodied in this particular person or this particular policy.” That leads to defensiveness and in some cases leads to outrage. And I think that’s part of what made DEI a politically toxic term in our culture. And I wonder if you can talk about that. How have you seen that play out in our politics, in our national discussions?
Daarel Burnette We have historically seen racism as a stain on the heart. It’s a personality trait. It’s an identity trait rather than a series of ideas, a series of actions. And when people are in institutions are accused of being racist, they lash out. The CRT debate and the DEI debate just shows how, on paper, America thinks racism is wrong. But in reality, the work that it requires to root out racism, to root out homophobia, etc., a lot of people are not willing to put in the type of resources and work that that requires. It is ugly and messy, etc. I mean, I can refer back to bussing, reconstruction. I mean, there are several eras in our history in which we have made sort of start and stop attempts at eradicating this messy part of our history.
Jack Stripling Yeah. And I think the other part of the conversation around DEI is the criticism that this is somehow conveying unfair advantage upon underrepresented groups. And I thought it was quite remarkable that no sooner did Kamala Harris announce that she was campaigning for president after Joe Biden stepped down that someone labeled her a DEI candidate. What did you think about that?
Daarel Burnette Yeah. I can speak personally here. This is just something that Black professionals have constantly grappled with. We’re always assumed to be underqualified, given a, quote unquote, unfair advantage based off of our skin color. I think the one thing that Black folks want the most is to be seen as individuals. We don’t want to be seen by the color of our skin, but that is how we are treated in America. That is what people think the minute that we walk into the room, etc. And as my mother told me all the time growing up, you have to be twice as good because of that. And I think Kamala Harris is an extreme example of somebody who has a ton of credentials and is still seen as being given a leg up because she’s a Black woman. But that is just something that people of color, women, LGBTQ people, that’s just a fact of life for us. And it’s a concept that I think is… I shouldn’t put an “and”. That’s it. It’s a fact of life for us, yeah.
Jack Stripling Well, and you’re describing to me, you know, the experience of walking into a room professionally — and I assume this would be the case for a student, too — and having assumptions made based on skin color. DEI offices in some ways were designed to at least recognize that if not remedy that. Is that how you see it?
Daarel Burnette Yes. You can see how stereotypes can become a problem in an academic setting, considering that so much of our racist past was rooted in delegitimizing Black intellect. So, my mother was one of the first Black women to attend Ohio State’s engineering program, and that was back in 1979. That was an isolating time to be a Black person on a big college campus. In some ways, it still is. Today, Ohio State has 66,000 students and just 8 percent of those students are Black. So we recently profiled a woman there who said she wanted to go to an HBCU, but Ohio State was offering her a full ride in the program that she wanted. She would describe to us days on end in which she would never see a Black person. In the classroom, people would move away from her, and she described like a real sense of isolation. DEI offices are designed to help a student like that succeed. We know from research that college students who feel welcome on their campus generally have better grades, better persistence through college and better mental health. And that’s what Ohio State was doing through creating these sorts of communities. But in the political debate over DEI, targeting services in this way toward students based on their race is being seen as giving them an unfair advantage.
Jack Stripling So when you talk about convening students of color in a healthy environment, you’re talking specifically about what?
Daarel Burnette Study groups. We profiled a woman at University of Texas at Austin who would bring the Black women together, and they would go on hikes, peer-to-peer mentoring. There’s a Black male initiative at University of Texas at Austin in which they pair them with professionals in the area. It can be anything from, Hey, we’re getting together, we’re talking about skin care or hair care, to we have a Black student union here, and here’s a time for you to just relax. So I went to a historically Black college. I didn’t experience this, but I have friends who went to majority institutions and they describe actual physical exhaustion of being the only Black person on campus. It wears on them physically, mentally, emotionally. A lot of folks drop out because they are constantly being asked about their Blackness. They are seen as “the Black person”. They are not seen by who they are. And the only time that they get a break from that is when they’re around other Black students. So that’s where universities feel it’s our obligation to create that space.
Jack Stripling So what do these anti-DEI laws mean for programs like the one in Texas that you mentioned? Are universities being told they can’t have a Black male initiative or a group for Black women?
Daarel Burnette That’s exactly what they’re being told. Oftentimes these groups will say, oh anybody is welcomed, and we’ve had white students participate in the past. But after these laws are passed, what we’re seeing is that the university will come in and say this group cannot be university sponsored. It cannot use university funds. And if one of their advisers or program managers are actually employed by the university, oftentimes they will be laid off or outright fired. So ultimately, this means that they’re doing away with people, jobs and ultimately communities.
Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.
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Jack Stripling: It’s interesting with the larger context that you’re providing, going back to your mother’s experience is very different than reading a description of what a DEI office does. When this issue has been politicized and even demagogued, I find that often what happens is some conservative think tank will go and pluck a few lines out of a description of a campus program and say, look, they are organizing these students based around race. They are siphoning off all of the Black students and putting them in one spot. This is reinforcing segregation within the realm of the academy, ostensibly for a warm and fuzzy reason. And as you describe it, it is a lot more complicated and nuanced than that, it sounds to me.
Daarel Burnette It is more complicated and nuanced. And I cannot speak for all Black people. There are a lot of Black people who don’t necessarily want to be seen as a “Black student”. I think, Jack, I think you wrote the story actually about Texas A&M, there’s a girl in that story, who is quoted as saying, I just want to be seen as an Aggie. So oftentimes, college campus culture is very, very intense. And there is a big identity with being part of this big movement, part of this culture in which we are all for the sports team. We’re all here to engage academically. We’re all here to suck up all the resources that this university has to grow, etc. And there are a lot of Black students who just want to be left alone. They don’t want the administration telling them where to go, what to do after class, where to live. A lot of the campuses have Black dorms, for example. A lot of Black students don’t actually want that. There is also an idea, and this is sometimes real, that within these groups, all the students talk about is how crazy white people are. That is also not healthy. And if you don’t have professionals who are there, who are creating healthy conversations, who are taking them on the hikes, who are trying to pair them with mentors who have figured out how to navigate white America, it can turn into somewhat of a toxic culture.
Jack Stripling We should say that DEI offices include services for LGBTQ students and Latino students, and Black students are often mentioned as part of that mission. But it’s broader than that, right? We’re talking about veterans. We’re talking about first-generation students, young parents who are trying to go to college. DEI offices are serving that broader swath. Even though in the political context, I think we tend to focus mostly on race and sexual orientation when we’re talking about DEI.
Daarel Burnette Yes. And race and sexual orientation is what people are upset about. Some of these laws have workarounds for veterans or students on Pell Grants, for example. And lawmakers don’t want to say to colleges, you can’t have a special program for students who served in the military or students who are low income. But when you start firing DEI officers, you risk getting rid of people who helped these populations. What that means for campus to campus will depend, though. There are more than 3,000 colleges. So what DEI looks like on a college campus, it just varies dramatically.
Jack Stripling You can’t make a generalized statement about what a DEI office does. But something we have been doing is trying to make sense of this political attack on diversity, equity and inclusion. Part of this has to do with our tracking of legislation aimed at it. What have we learned over the last two years trying to pay attention to this and grapple with it?
Daarel Burnette Sure. So since this model legislation was proposed in 2023, there have been, 14 laws have been passed in 12 states that ban some version of DEI, whether it be diversity training, diversity statements, DEI positions, and identity-based admissions and hiring. We’ve also been tracking how colleges are interpreting these laws and responding to the political backlash against DEI. And that part is way, way more messy. We’re seeing colleges rename multicultural centers and also fire staff. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, fired all 49 DEI staff members while some of their neighboring institutions would just move these folks to other departments and change their titles. So interpretations vary broadly about what you can and can’t have on campus under these laws.
Jack Stripling Can you explain what’s behind the renaming of campus programs or campus buildings?
Daarel Burnette Sure. So some colleges have tried to skirt these laws by removing the identity based element of the name. So a Latino cultural center, for example, will become something like the Student Success Center. And this act has been met with very intense protests from students.
Jack Stripling Do we have a sense of the larger picture? I mean, do we know how many DEI offices have been closed because of this type of legislation?
Daarel Burnette Yeah. So you have the 12 states in which the public colleges in those states are forced to, quote unquote, eradicate DEI. But what we have tracked over 200 colleges in 30 states that have gone about getting rid of, quote unquote, DEI efforts. And I’m saying, quote unquote, because this varies from the language that they use, to the people that they hire, to the types of groups that do and do not get student funding, to the type of administrators that are promoted. Another thing that we’ve written about is that a lot of Black administrators or Latino administrators, they are now seen as DEI people, and so they are ignored on campus. They are forced out of meetings. They are, in effect, being seen as almost like toxic on campus because in the past they have done things to advocate for students to look like them.
Jack Stripling What do you mean for students to look like them?
Daarel Burnette So we profiled a nursing professor at Texas A&M whose research was around discrimination against Black people within the nursing profession. And then, on campus, she was advocating for a more robust Black history program. But she was identified by a conservative outlet as being a pro-DEI foot soldier and was effectively forced out of her job.
Jack Stripling So this is a smear that has been attached to some people who work in higher education. It’s made their employment tenuous it sounds like.
Daarel Burnette You say some people, Black people. So — and I just want to point out again that a large portion of DEI officers are women and Black. So it’s just the type of people who are attracted to this profession in general, and then the type of people who are attracted to this work. So you have the type of people who are attracted to the profession and then the people who do that sort of legwork on top of that, everything from advocating to advising, to reaching out to students, to mentoring up-and-coming tenure track professors, etc., they tend to be people of color. Again, like we tend to have the conviction that I’m going to open the door for somebody to come behind me. And that sort of work, which was lauded in 2020, is now being demonized and is now a fireable offense.
Jack Stripling Can you talk specifically about some of the things DEI offices do that have come under attack?
Daarel Burnette The two things that I think have been most volatile for DEI efforts are diversity training and diversity statements. These are two areas, [where] the research is very dicey. But colleges have done both as part of their overall diversity efforts. And it’s a thing that a lot of presidents and lawyers will do as a defense mechanism to say, hey, we care about this thing and we’re not a discriminatory place.
Jack Stripling Let’s talk about each one. Tell me about training.
Daarel Burnette Sure. So a lot of colleges have said we are now going to put everybody in, we had this racist incident happen. We had this discriminatory incident happen. So in order to prevent this from happening again, we are now going to force everybody to go into training. Now, what happens in these trainings, everything from forcing white people to confess that they are racist, to saying that Black people like to be said hello to in the hallway, so make sure you say hi to them when you pass them in the hallway, is very, very icky, and could actually make discrimination worse because now all of a sudden you are amplifying stereotypes. You are accusing people of being racist, which forces people to be defensive, which does not allow for this sort of internal introspective sort of work that a lot of people do to make sure that they are navigating the world in a nondiscriminatory way.
Jack Stripling And some of the things you pointed out from those trainings are things, again, that get plucked out by critics of DEI as infantilizing or as reinforcing the notion that everybody you work around is racist and that sort of thing. I know that those have been attacked a lot, but you mentioned research as well. What does the research tell us about the effectiveness of diversity training?
Daarel Burnette It’s inconclusive. And again, just, diversity training is similar to diversity offices where the range of what’s being practiced within diversity trainings, who is conducting it, how universities justify it, the environment that they do the diversity training in, it varies dramatically. But there are some troubling outcomes, such as mandatory diversity training and implicit bias training, which can actually make conditions worse for people, the people that diversity training is intended to help.
Jack Stripling If you drag somebody into a diversity training under duress, they may not come out and feel good about it, right?
Daarel Burnette Yeah. Black people included. It’s not fun. It’s awkward, it’s icky. It makes people feel very vulnerable in a workplace environment. Again, I just cannot emphasize enough that all these efforts are definitely less than 60 years old. I mean, all this started in the 1970s and they’ve accelerated in the last 10 or 15 years. And it is just very, very experimental. They are very much in the startup phase.
Jack Stripling You know, you’ve used the word “icky” a couple times. I think when you and I talked offline, you mentioned the word “cringy.” What do you mean by that?
Daarel Burnette I just can’t emphasize enough just how race in America just makes people feel so, so, so uncomfortable. And when you are trying to address our racist past, things that universities have done in the past — I mean, they literally enslaved people. The things that they did to justify being exclusively white, both upending that history, talking about that history, and then talking about the reality now as to how people navigate race and identity. It’s so much easier to — if I were white — stay amongst white folks. We know that’s not what America is going to look like. And what colleges have been saying is that we want to prepare our graduates for a diverse world. It is embarrassing for colleges to graduate people who have never interacted with a person of color, knowing that America is becoming way more diverse, knowing that the world is becoming way more flat. We’re going to have to work not only with people of different races here in America, but with people internationally. And for people who break down when they meet a person of color, colleges will say that these are not the types of students that we want to graduate. This is not the type of work environment that we want to have for our employees. But again, I just cannot emphasize enough that trying to fix that behavior, trying to fix the sort of cringy things that people do when they see people of color — such as touching their hair, such as confusing them for the last Black guy they saw — trying to fix that behavior is just really, really cringy. It’s really uncomfortable. Some people say it’s inappropriate. It’s not an administrator’s job to fix that behavior. And it should just be left alone. It’s so much easier to ignore. But I just think that where society is right now, where you look at demographic changes, where you look at what graduates are walking into, etc., I just don’t know, necessarily know, if colleges’ ability to ignore that behavior is tolerable anymore.
Jack Stripling And DEI offices are taking that incredibly icky conversation and putting it center stage, right, in a lot of cases.
Daarel Burnette Yeah, not only that, but they are forcing colleges to redistribute resources. And whenever you start cutting up the pie and giving pie slices to somebody else, somebody is going to lose a slice of pie. And that makes people very, very defensive. It makes people very, very territorial. It makes people go back into their corners. And this is a sort of messy process that a lot of experts will say is necessary. But a lot of white men are saying is actually reverse discrimination — that that, in effect, is discriminatory. It redefines what merit is. It redefines who qualifies. It redefines who belongs. And this work is very, very, very, very messy. And oftentimes when it gets messy, people tend to retreat. And that’s what we’re seeing now is a retreating process.
Jack Stripling You’ve said a couple of things there that I want to hear more about. You said that DEI work often involves a redistribution of resources. And you said it can redefine what merit is. Can you give some examples of both?
Daarel Burnette Sure. So a college, for example, might want to invest in remedial services because their Black students, for example, went to high schools that didn’t offer advanced math courses. That money has to come from somewhere and it may come from another existing program. As for redefining merit, a college might reassess research requirements and publications for their faculty members to be promoted to get tenure. Or they might make licensing requirements for some administrators more flexible. This is sometimes done with the idea of broadening their recruitment pool and recruiting more employees of color.
Jack Stripling So what are our diversity statements and why have they become controversial?
Daarel Burnette Sure. So diversity statements are colleges asking faculty both in the tenure review process and the hiring process, how they contribute to the university’s diversity goals. Now, how this has been interpreted is that colleges are basically saying, are you a person of color? And how people have answered is actually addressing that question. I am a minority because of this, and this is what my experience has been. What they are effectively asking, what colleges will say is what they’re asking is, what are some ways in which you have served historically marginalized students? That could be through your research, that could be through your teaching methods, that can be through a mentoring process, etc. But these diversity statements have been seen as you have to sign on to a litmus test effectively, that you have to give the right answer as to how to fix inequities, which again, there is no right answer for this world. But people say that they are scrambling to give the right answer. Oftentimes they are saying that this is a way to only hire liberal professors, to only hire people of color.
Jack Stripling Because the people who are going to answer that well are folks who take this sort of thing seriously.
Daarel Burnette Exactly. Exactly.
Jack Stripling Yeah. I mean, I was really struck, I was doing some reading before we talked today. And Randall Kennedy, the law professor at Harvard, had a piece in the Harvard Crimson, I think, this past spring talking about how, you know, I’m sort of a liberal scholar, but these diversity statements are a problem to me. They seem to exert pressure on people toward leftist conformity, as he put it. He said it was the equivalent of asking a new hire to talk about how they might support capitalism or patriotism. I wonder what you think of that critique.
Daarel Burnette Yeah, I have a lot of Black friends who are professors. They hate it, too. So like I said before, it’s messy. It’s — people answer using AI. People lie. It’s not, even some of the — we’ve written, we’ve talked to some of the people who have written some of the first diversity statements, and they just talk exhaustively about how this method is abused by universities. It’s not a way to actually vet how professors really do diversity work. I mean, trying to get non-racist professors in the classroom, it requires money, resources. It requires research. It requires time. And I think the cynicism is that colleges are not willing to put in that effort. And diversity statements is one of those things that my friends who are Black professors will point to as this is just a lazy effort to say, sure, these professors aren’t racist.
Jack Stripling This is a blunt instrument to try to get a quick answer as to whether you’re on board with the larger goal of creating an equitable and welcoming environment for all students.
Daarel Burnette Yeah, exactly.
Jack Stripling Yeah. So, Darrell, we’ve talked about affinity groups in particular and spaces where students who have been historically marginalized in higher education can come together. What does it mean specifically for those to go away or to be under threat in some way?
Daarel Burnette Yeah, I can speak to the biggest difference between my generation and the incoming generation. So when I was going to college, a lot of my experience in college was attempting to erase and hide my Black identity. Everything from, when we can and cannot wear do-rags, to how we cut our hair, to what we wear, how we sag our pants, etc. Today’s generation, they are unashamedly Black. They wear dreadlocks. They are proud of Black music. They’re proud of Black culture. And on a lot of these college campuses, Greek life, Black student unions…
Jack Stripling Those are places where students can come together.
Daarel Burnette Yeah.
Jack Stripling This is a political conversation. It is an education conversation. But it is, at its heart, a human conversation. I worry we can lose track of that in a discussion about acronyms, right? This can seem like an inaccessible, sort of bureaucratic topic. The type of thing that people talk about at conferences. But it’s not. And you’re a treasured colleague of mine and you’ve covered this as well and as often as anybody in the country. And that doesn’t make it any easier to have the conversation.
Daarel Burnette No, there are real life human effects to this. But I will say that, and again, I’m speaking for Black America, but I think for a lot of communities, they will say this. Education has always been a political movement. We were politically cut out of education. There were anti-literacy laws that we fought politically. We fought for the establishment of Black colleges, for the establishment of Black schools. This has always been a political battle. So I don’t mind this being a political debate, but I think our job here at The Chronicle is to humanize and to show the ramifications of this on college campuses. And yes, I do think that this is what’s being lost. But I do think that the human element is what’s being lost in the political debate. A lot of the rhetoric is oversimplified. It’s flattened because being equitably served or being fairly served at universities has historically, for the last 200 years, been a fight for the Black community. How colleges address our needs, how colleges treat us is also a political debate, and I do think that we should have a debate over how colleges serve us and I don’t necessarily know if DEI was the right answer or not.
Jack Stripling One of the things we’ve kind of gotten at in this conversation is that DEI in some ways grew out of real incidents that did real harm. I mean, you mentioned the Oklahoma case. I remember that story very well, an SAE on a bus engaged in an incredibly racist chant and that mortified the country and it mortified higher education. It created an environment in which it seemed like action was not optional. And we’re not that far removed from that case. I think that, you know, going forward, having this conversation with you, continuing to monitor what happens has to happen on a lot of different fronts. I think it has to happen on a DEI tracker that we engage with dispassionately as we track the legislation that’s moving through the country and explore this issue with all of its complexity. But I think the human conversations that you and my other colleagues who are reporting day to day on these campuses are really at the heart of what we should be doing. And I’m just so glad to be doing it with you, Daarel.
Daarel Burnette Oh, I appreciate you, Jack. I think The Chronicle‘s well positioned to cover this with rigor. So I’m looking forward to the coming stories too.
Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.