The End of DEI’s Legitimacy
Much has been made of how a federal judge last week struck down the Education Department’s guidance advising schools to dismantle their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives or risk losing federal funding. Supporters of DEI have seized on the ruling as proof that their cause is resilient.
It began when institutions abandoned intellectual diversity, punished dissent, and elevated ideology over education.
But the larger picture tells a different story. Whatever its legal status, DEI has already lost cultural legitimacy — on campus, among students, and even within the academic left itself.
Consider the academic climate at one elite institution, which was captured in an interview of a highly-regarded professor, Jill Lepore. She has taught at Harvard since 2003 and no one would identify her as a conservative.
She was asked by the New York Times if woke culture was a “real problem” and not just a “problem that the right has managed to … weaponize.” She replied that, “it just surprises me to no end when people are like: Well, there was really never a problem on campuses. I don’t know what college campus they’re talking about…. I just think the left has to admit that it has done a lot to make a lot of Americans feel like they do not belong.”
When even a Harvard professor complains about the left creating a hostile environment on campus, and alienating a lot of Americans, you know you’re on the wrong side of history.
Consider one such problem: the lack of ideological diversity among college professors. A self-reported survey of the political affiliation of more than 1,100 tenure track faculty in 2020 revealed a sharp preference for Democrats. Among sociologists, 86 percent identified as Democrats; less than 2 percent identified as Republicans. The numbers were similar among anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, and economists.
Another survey, also from 2020, looked at political contributions made by more than 12,000 university professors and broke them out by their discipline. The numbers were striking. For every contribution an English professor made to a Republican candidate, there were 244 contributions to a Democrat. The ratios were similar even in fields that would seem to have nothing to do with politics: chemistry (113-1), math (118-1), biology (149-1), and psychology (184-1).
In such a homogenous climate, it’s hardly a surprise that students would become radicalized and agitate against even the most basic protections for free speech, which has been persuasively documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
It was this environment in which the DEI mindset was allowed to run rampant across college campuses. The Trump administration has done yeoman’s work in cracking down on the DEI ecosystem, which was all about creating a culture of victimhood and rewarding people who trafficked in identity politics. How big was that ecosystem? The University of Michigan spent about $250 million on DEI initiatives from 2016-2024, according to a devastating article in the New York Times.
The author of the article pointed out that while the school is “largely left-leaning … the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.” Students “rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.”
Why wouldn’t anyone do anything to roll back this failed system? Because a culture of fear was pervasive on campus. One former dean at the school — herself a woman of color — was quoted in the article saying, “no one can criticize the D.E.&I. program — not its scale, its dominance.”
Higher education has brought these problems on itself, and its public standing has declined. In 2015, 57 percent of those surveyed by Gallup said they had confidence in higher ed. By 2024, just 36 percent did — and only 15 percent of Republicans.
Higher education is just one part of the broader American culture that is out of step with the views of millions of people. Another is the entertainment sector, which routinely peddles storylines that are hostile to the 37 percent of Americans who identify as “conservative” or “very conservative.”
There’s a battle underway right now that will determine who will have the biggest platform for the distribution of movies in the United States. Netflix is the leading candidate to acquire Warner Brothers, though President Trump shared an article on Truth Social recently charging that the Netflix bid “is an attempt to consolidate unprecedented cultural power inside one of America’s most ideologically aggressive corporations.” The article’s author said Netflix “has repeatedly used its global platform to elevate progressive narratives while suppressing dissenting viewpoints,” and Congress — responding to constituent pressures — is aggressively challenging the merger.
Which brings us back to last week’s court ruling. While DEI’s defenders may celebrate a legal reprieve, judicial decisions and federal guidance cannot restore credibility to an ideology that has already alienated students, faculty, and the public. DEI’s unraveling did not begin in a courtroom, and it will not end in one.
It began when institutions abandoned intellectual diversity, punished dissent, and elevated ideology over education. Institutions that refuse to confront those failures should not be surprised when reform no longer comes from within, but from outside political forces willing to challenge the monoculture they allowed to take hold.
READ MORE:
Administering Colleges: 1960s and Today
The Spectacle Ep. 318: DEI Ruined Universities. Conservatives Need to Save Them.
Herzog is a freelance writer for the Heartland Institute.