Colleges are learning to rebrand and lie low during the Trump years. Enjoy the sanity while it lasts.
The University of Michigan’s decision last week to close its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is welcome news to anyone who believes that race-based policies are wrong in principle. But it’s still too early to know for certain if DEI advocates are capitulating or simply beating a strategic retreat. Either way, enjoy it while it lasts.
Michigan’s announcement is significant because the school has become a poster child for DEI madness. A lengthy New York Times Magazine exposé in 2024 noted that the school had “poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars” into DEI initiatives since 2016, creating “by far the largest DEI bureaucracy of any large public university.”
The upshot? “Black students today regard the school’s expansive program as a well-meaning failure,” the Times reported. “Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive.” Surveys of students and faculty reveal a “less positive campus climate” and “less of a sense of belonging” than before. “Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics—the exact kind of engagement DEI programs, in theory, are meant to foster.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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