Universities across the U.S. have been resistant to President Trump's order for them to get rid of their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Owen Anderson, a professor at Arizona State, writes in a recent op-ed titled "DEI is dead – Long live DEI" that his university is doubling down on DEI under a different term, "design justice."
It is not presented as an optional framework, but is meant to inform all classes as part of ASU’s mission of "decolonization of design education curriculum and pedagogy by advocating inclusive, ethical, and community-driven design practices, ensuring that marginalized voices are at the center of architectural and design solutions."
"The acronyms may be disappearing, but the ideology remains intact," Anderson writes.
Similarly, Harvard University has changed its DEI office into the Office of Community and Campus Life following the Trump administration's decision to freeze billions in federal funding to the school.
Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow in higher education reform in The Heritage Foundation's Center for Education Policy, explains that DEI teaches that some groups, including racial groups, are ranked above others in society.
"At the federal level, as well as at the state level in some states, there's a lot more attention to discriminatory DEI, the kind of DEI that treats people differently based on their race or their sex or their national origin," he details. "That's illegal and should have stopped years ago."
He notes that the Supreme Court has ruled that ending discrimination means ending all of it, not just in college admissions. But unfortunately, DEI has a way of squirreling in.
At ASU and Harvard, it is ingrained in their ethics and values, so it remains in their behaviors and policies.
"They take the same people, the same money, sometimes the same programs, give them a new name, and hide them," Kissel summarizes.
Many college courses and entire college programs, like social work, teach people to look at others in terms of identity groups rather than as the individuals they are and to think of those in terms of an oppressor group and an oppressed group.
"Students are supposed to know the intersectional identities of all of their different categories of oppressions or being oppressors simply because of their groups, not because of their individual characteristics," says Kissel.
Legally, that has to stop.
Another issue is the push for DEI is "counterproductive" on many campuses by making relations worse.
"And these kinds of programs and degrees don't set up people for a very happy life, either," Kissel says. "They end up having a gender studies degree and working at Starbucks is the joke, but it's not all that much of a joke because it's pretty common.”
