The partial death of DEI

Every Fortune 500 business, starting with Bud Light and Cracker Barrel, has learned to live by the simple maxim: “Go woke and go broke.” For institutions of higher education, the corollary is equally obvious: Stay woke and get sued.

Last September, PBS NewsHour reported that 400 colleges and universities nationwide had dropped their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Last week, the conservative advocacy group Defending Education (run by my friend Nikki Niely) released a report showing that 400 colleges and universities still run DEI programs. Though conservatives have made significant progress on this issue, there is still a long way to go, and we should not be surprised that higher education is a tougher nut to crack than corporations.

The positive change we’ve seen so far is the result of three trends happening simultaneously. The first was the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023. The Court had battled for decades with college affirmative action, charting a confused course across multiple decision from Bakke to Grutter. The uncertainty came to a definitive conclusion in SFFA, when the Court put an end to the nation’s longstanding flirtation with race-based preferences in higher education.

That said, all the Court did was hold that race-based preferences in college admissions were not legal. The Court did not say, “DEI is illegal.” Far from it. Conservative activists have done an excellent job maximizing the impact of the decision, giving it far greater legal and political import than the specific holding from the majority opinion itself.

The left has been excellent at this for years, with no better example than Griswold v. Connecticut. That decision, holding that the state could not ban contraceptives for married couples, led to Roe v. Wade with its right to abortion. That spawned numerous decisions pushing out the scope of the abortion right, to the point where the Supreme Court held that sidewalks outside of abortion clinics are a special “free speech free” zone where localities could regulate pro-life sidewalk counselors even though sidewalks are usually highly protected for leafletting and protesting.

Conservatives are achieving something similar with SFFA, making the decision’s practical impact felt across many sectors beyond just higher education. That’s a credit primarily to the second important factor: President Trump. The president issued a new executive order late last month targeting the federal funding of colleges and universities that continue to practice DEI. Colleges, especially top-tier institutions, are heavily dependent on federal dollars for their advanced research programs in medicine, physics, defense, and other science fields. If they stand to lose federal funding, they are likely to quickly adjust their policies to meet the president’s standards.

Third and finally, the deep rot within the universities was exposed by the campus protests in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on Israel. The campus takeovers brought to light the radicalization and anti-Semitism present at many major universities. The American people saw live on the nightly news the consequences of coddling by university bureaucrats fearful of their own students and compromised by their own liberal ideology.

Though the majority of the American people are fed up with DEI, a sentiment reflected in President Trump’s strong opposition to it, there remain final outposts in both higher and K-12 education. We must be vigilant as well when DEI ideology remains without the label, or travels under different terminology with the same effect. A few years ago, “CRT” was usually heard to mean “critical race theory.” Then “CRT” became “culturally responsive teaching.” The underlying substance stayed the same. We need to be clear: It’s not that “DEI” is illegal—it’s that treating students, employees, or citizens differently based on race is illegal, whatever title it travels under.

All of which is to say, much has been accomplished and much remains to be done. As people of faith, we recognize the inherent dignity of every individual human person as the unique and wonderful creation of a loving heavenly father. As conservatives, we see the colorblind principle embedded in our Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, the result of a Civil War to vindicate the equal treatment of all Americans. We measure and appreciate the progress, and we fight on.