The Guerrilla
Don't count DEI out yet.
Dozens of Universities Rebranded DEI Offices After Trump Administration Crackdown
The Administration may have claimed the win, but it will be more difficult to root out DEI programs than they may understand.
Call this the guerrilla phase of the social justice warrior.
‘Over 300 DEI offices and programs are active across 253 higher education institutions in the United States, according to a new report by the organization Defending Education.
‘Out of the 253 colleges and universities examined in the report, 16 institutions have removed DEI webpages or shut down a DEI office, while 26 higher education institutions have simply rebranded their DEI offices. The report, released Wednesday morning, found that 237 universities still have institution-wide DEI offices and/or programs in operation.’
The Little-Known Bureaucrats Tearing Through American Universities
The universities opened a door by failing to control the chaotic pro-Palestinian demonstrations and attendant exuberant antisemitism. Now the Administration is using this as a beachhead for more pervasive reforms.
‘Called the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, the group’s stated goal is to “root out antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” a mission that emerged from pro-Palestinian protests that disrupted campuses last year. But along the way, the task force is taking on university culture more broadly in ways that echo the MAGA dreams for remaking higher education—including ending racial preferences in admissions and hiring.
‘The task-force leaders have unprecedented leverage, thanks to a financial assault on higher education by the Trump administration that has no equal since the federal government began pumping money into research at universities during World War II. The Trump administration has pulled or frozen more than $11 billion in funding from at least seven universities. The tactics and agencies have varied but the top-line intent, Trump said on the campaign trail, is to wrest control of universities from the far left.
‘“We are going to choke off the money to schools that aid the Marxist assault on our American heritage and on Western civilization itself,” Trump said at a 2023 event. “The days of subsidizing communist indoctrination in our colleges will soon be over.”‘
Donald Trump Tries to Run Harvard
The operating hypothesis appears to be that the Ivy League institutions suffer from poor governance and act in ways that contradict some of the federal titles binding upon them as a consequence of their acceptance of federal funding.
The Administration has motive and the protests gave them opportunity.
Why didn’t Harvard anticipate this as a risk?
‘Stipulate that the feds have a duty to enforce civil-rights laws, and Harvard failed to protect Jewish students during anti-Israel protests. But the university agreed to strengthen protections for Jewish students in a legal settlement with Students Against Antisemitism, which praised it for “implementing effective long-term changes.”
‘The Trump Administration nonetheless demanded last week that Harvard accede to what is effectively a federal receivership under threat of losing $9 billion. Some of the demands are within the government’s civil-rights purview, such as requiring Harvard to discipline students who violate its discrimination policies. It also wants Harvard to “shutter all diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, under “whatever name,” that violate federal law.
‘But the Administration runs off the legal rails by ordering Harvard to reduce “governance bloat, duplication, or decentralization.” It also orders the school to review “all existing and prospective faculty . . . for plagiarism” and ensure “viewpoint diversity” in “each department, field, or teaching unit.”’
More on the Administration’s thinking about the Ivy League universities.
They aren’t going after public schools in the Midwest.
‘A colossally disingenuous response from @Harvard. In fact, the leftist ideological capture of the federal bureaucracies over the last several decades has had _enormous_ influence on 'what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue'. The DEI funding initiatives promoted by Democratic politicians and sympathetic federal administrators have thoroughly warped every aspect of American academia. Research, teaching, service, and hiring that is aligned with woke Democratic gets rewarded. Any that isn't aligned, doesn't. Everyone knows this. It's retarded for Harvard admins to pretend that they don't understand what's happening -- that Trump is trying to correct decades of ideological over-reach by the Left, and is trying to neutralize the 'long march through the institutions' that the Left has pursued ever since 1968.’