Trump is waging war against DEI in schools. New incidents show why he's right. | Opinion
The innocuous sounding goals of DEI, which higher education has enthusiastically embraced, have in practice had the opposite effect − promoting division and suspicion.
Two incidents last week at elite colleges on opposite ends of the country highlight why President Donald Trump is right to rout diversity, equity and inclusion ideology out of America’s educational institutions.
DEI has become increasingly entrenched in higher education – at a huge administrative cost – while free speech and tolerance for other views have suffered.
That’s not a coincidence.
The alarming antisemitism that raged on U.S. campuses after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel seems to have cooled off this school year. That’s a welcome change, but, unfortunately, anti-Jewish rhetoric is still a problem at universities, as witnessed at Barnard College in New York City.
And at California’s Stanford University, an incident in which protesters disrupted a speaker highlights that free speech is still under attack on campus.
What does this have to do with DEI? The innocuous sounding goals of this ideology, which higher education has enthusiastically embraced, have in practice had the opposite effect − promoting division and suspicion.
That's because the diversity agenda promotes a binary view of the world, one in which everyone is either an oppressor or the oppressed.
This simplistic mindset is antithetical to the point of a university education and has led directly to the shout downs and to support of actual terrorists, in the case of the student protests siding with Hamas over Israel's right to defend itself.
Assault someone? Disrupt a class or event? That isn't free speech.
Let’s take a closer look at the two instances of bad behavior last week.
At Barnard, which is affiliated with Columbia University, dozens of students donning masks and keffiyehs forced their way into a campus building on Wednesday with a goal of “occupying” the space until their demands were met. The purported pro-Palestinian mob was upset that two students who disrupted a class on Israel had been expelled earlier in the year.
During their temper tantrum, the demonstrators injured a Barnard employee, sending the individual to the hospital. And they gleefully debated whether to “allow” a dean to use the bathroom, since they were blocking access to it.
The protesters' behavior is inexcusable, and Barnard must follow through with swift punishment, including expulsion.
As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression noted on social media: “Holding administrators hostage is not free speech. Assault is not free speech. Disrupting classes is not free speech. Barring students from getting to class is not free speech. Any @BarnardCollege agitators who chose force over peaceful protest must be held accountable.”
At Stanford, a class ironically named “Democracy and Disagreement,” in which students learn to “model civil disagreement," got derailed Feb. 25 when hecklers stormed a stage during a discussion about tax policy.
The demonstrators, who were not Stanford students, were protesting a debate on a wealth tax between University of California-Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez and former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Lawrence Summers. Before Summers could speak, activists interrupted the event, decrying the former Clinton administration official as a “capitalist who sold our country out."
They also said Summers, who is hardly a conservative, enabled “corporate oligarchy which has caused the rise of Elon Musk,” according to the Stanford Review.
The activists were originally thought to be students, but the university issued a statement claiming they were not. Stanford administrators said such behavior is not tolerated and that the protesters would be banned from campus.
It’s encouraging that students in attendance could be heard shouting for the rude interlopers to get off the stage and to let the debate continue.
However, other instances at Stanford have shown a similar intolerance for different viewpoints. In 2023, federal Judge Kyle Duncan was shouted down by law students for his conservative views. To make matters worse, Stanford Law’s associate DEI dean Tirien Steinbach participated in the “protest.” She later resigned.
Trump came out swinging against DEI programs. Good.
Some of Trump’s first actions as president were to push back against the growth of DEI programs within the federal government. He also wants an end to diversity efforts at schools that take federal funds.
Trump gave schools two weeks last month to stop these initiatives or face federal investigations.
While some universities are either ignoring the guidance or outright defying it, others are following through. Ohio State’s president, for instance, announced last week that the university would "sunset" its Office of Diversity and Inclusion and cancel some services.
A January report from the Goldwater Institute highlights the savings that could come from doing away with DEI. Taxpayers and students are paying about $2 billion over four years to cover DEI course requirements at public universities, and students waste 40 million hours fulfilling these mandates.
What do taxpayers and students get in return?
“By teaching that modern American society is systemically bigoted against various minority groups, DEI trains Americans to view themselves as victims of a rigged system, telling them that the only way to remedy past discrimination is by discriminating against ‘privileged’ groups today,” Goldwater Institute leaders explain in a statement.
That’s not a good return on investment.
DEI has failed in its mission, and the Trump administration is exactly right to help rid our schools of its dangerous teachings.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at Paste BN. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X, formerly Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques