Zachary Marschall of Campus Reform reports that the University of Michigan School of Nursing has replaced its web page dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) with a page on "Community Culture" that maintains the core ideas the president wants to shut down.
He has signed an executive order to end illegal discrimination and restore merit-based opportunity.
"This is another example of a trend we're seeing in the last half year or so that universities are not necessarily eliminating their DEI programming offices or curriculum; they are hiding it behind other names and rebrands," Marschall relays. "Sometimes that looks like the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and they take out the 'equity.' Other times they create new terms that involve the words 'belonging' or 'community.'"
The new page highlights the nursing school's "commitment to addressing health disparities and making sure that equity and inclusion are integrated into every aspect of our work, from our classrooms to our clinical environments." That is not much different from the old position that "we are not excellent if we do not reflect diversity, equity and inclusion in all aspects of our community."
Campus Reform reports the University of Michigan itself has spent around a quarter of a billion dollars on DEI initiatives since 2016, and it is not the only institution to do so. It is also not the only university to defy the president and continue those efforts.
"This is something that conservative activists and lawmakers need to recognize. This is universities resisting not only the Trump executive order that bans DEI, but it's also, in some cases, going against where states have banned DEI in taxpayer-funded schools, the public universities," Marschall explains.
As the Department of Education begins looking into DEI practices in higher education, he hopes they look beyond the titles. DEI does not need to have that acronym to have the same toxicity and the same negative impacts on students, he says.
