How DEI Conquered the University of Colorado
Trump’s order against the practice is a crucial step in restoring the purpose of higher education.
President Trump’s executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” reaffirms what has been true since the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Discrimination in hiring isn’t allowed. The order will deter universities from violating the law. Its ripple effects could also help reverse a related trend: ideological discrimination, which has reshaped the very meaning of higher education.
At the University of Colorado, Boulder, administrators, department heads and professors worked in tandem to advance racial preferences in hiring, documents acquired through a public-records request reveal. In the process, they recruited faculty who pushed the university’s research agenda in a more ideological direction, often with the aim of better recruiting minorities.
In a hiring proposal that the National Association of Scholars acquired, faculty and staff of the university’s program for writing and rhetoric argued that recruiting a “BIPOC” professor—the acronym stands for “black, indigenous and people of color”—was vital to the department’s “curricular and programmatic goals.” Faculty at the department of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures, proposing to hire a German-studies professor, touted the racial diversity of the department’s preferred candidate and explained how she could revise courses on fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy to incorporate “critical race studies perspectives.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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John D. Sailer is senior fellow and director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on X here. Louis Galarowicz is a research fellow at the National Association of Scholars.
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