How Will College Presidents Deal With Trump’s DEI Order?

Students sit on the steps at Columbia University in Manhattan on May 10, 2021. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Commentary

The executive order from President Donald Trump bearing on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities has sent college administrators into a muted panic.

For the first time ever, institutions that have embraced practices such as the requirement that faculty job candidates submit diversity statements as part of their application packet have reason to fear the executive branch. Previously, they worried only about the lower and higher courts striking down speech codes, affirmative action, and so forth. The Supreme Court ended racial preferences in 2023, but DEI practices have continued. Not anymore, however: not without fear of punishment. The White House appears determined to make any university or college that flouts the anti-DEI order pay and pay dearly.

The problem for the institutions is that they are led by presidents, provosts, and deans who have climbed the administrative ladder by supporting precisely what Trump has outlawed. They have done so openly and vocally, proudly and boastfully.

In the past 30 years, academics have gotten ahead and gained position by assuring the identitarian forces on campus of their fidelity to the movement, to politically correct values. These forces include professors in “studies” departments, social sciences, humanities, and schools of education; activist student groups and student government; staff at student newspapers, whose stories are taken seriously by the leadership; and leftist administrators already in place. Education journalists have remained steady allies of these groups, too, ever ready to back their grievances with sympathetic portrayals. College leaders hate and fear bad publicity.

Those forces are daunting. They set and sustain the ideology of the campus. Candidates for high positions have other talents, of course, such as fundraising and public speaking, but fidelity to identitarian ways is a simple baseline marker of fitness. It’s like a union card, a first qualification. If you don’t have one, you don’t work. Just show you are on board with the mission, signal your obedience, use the language of “inclusion” well, add a few snide remarks about opponents of it, and you have qualified for advancement.

What now, though? What to do in the wake of the election of Trump and this DEI order? If a college leader tells the denizens of his campus that methods and mores must change, he infuriates or dismays the majority of profs, students, and fellow administrators. He may be doing what the general counsel has told him he must do, but that doesn’t make the critics any less bitter and disappointed. They want to revive what we heard after November 2016: “RESIST!” They don’t care about points of law. They’ve been on campus all their lives, where politics have always gone their way. The president who obeys the order has betrayed them.

If, however, the president locks arms with campus resisters and pledges to keep the DEI system in place and protect the personnel, he opens the campus to another kind of bad publicity: an investigation by federal agents, cuts in federal funding (as has happened to Columbia), and the necessity of defending DEI philosophy and practice that are generally unpopular off-campus—all of it reported in the press.

The reporters may side with the college president, but readers and viewers of the stories likely won’t. The risk of material loss for the institution is high, as is a loss of prestige. Recent congressional hearings involving leaders from Ivy League universities left many Americans questioning their direction and priorities. Whether today’s academic leadership can handle that challenge more successfully remains to be seen. My guess is that they will follow a familiar three-step process:

• One, do the bare minimum that the anti-DEI order requires, while giving off signals of compliance.
• Two, maintain any practices and people that they can hide from prying conservative and investigative eyes (for instance, by changing “inclusion” to “belonging” and “diversity” to “outreach”).
• Three, apologize to local critics and activists, then apologize again and again.

I can hear it, the script is set.

“I’m sorry,” the president will say. “I’m very sorry—I didn’t want to do it; they made me do it. I hate it as much as you do. I’m upset, too. We have no choice, but together we shall overcome.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.