University of Florida Sets Precedent For Broad Rollback of DEI, Says Expert

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks about legislation he's proposing to combat homelessness during a press conference in Miami Beach, Fla., on Feb. 5, 2024. Courtesy of the Office of the Florida Governor

The University of Florida’s scrapping of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and initiatives at the beginning of March has fueled a national controversy and led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to urge prospective students not to attend public universities in the state.

Despite the controversy, DEI programs involving bias training—and the hiring and promotion of minority instructors, executives, and staff—are still big business, not just in the United States but around the world.

According to a new Global Industry Analysts report, the fast-growing industry had a $9.4 billion valuation in 2022 and is expected to hit $24.4 billion by 2030.

In the United States, its valuation will hit $17.2 billion by 2027 if current trends hold.

Yet DEI programs are highly unpopular in some quarters and even liberal organizations and journals are beginning to question the effects on the culture of educational institutions.

Hence University of Florida’s move may well turn out to be less an isolated and defiant gesture than the signal of a growing backlash against DEI throughout the country.

That’s the view of Stanley Ridgley, a professor of management at the LeBow College of Business at Drexel University in Philadelphia and an author who writes frequently on DEI policies and their effects on colleges and universities.

Though advocates of DEI may frame their arguments in terms of lofty principles, the practical consequences of their agenda are turning off growing numbers of people, Mr. Ridgley said he believed.

“Any time the agenda is exposed—when people actually understand the coercive psychological abuse it involves and its fraudulent academic foundation—we see the kind of reform that is taking place in Florida,” Mr. Ridgley told The Epoch Times.

“We are indeed witnessing a sea change in public perception of DEI, which will result in its rollback in state after state,” he said.

Fuel to the Fire

Following a law that Florida governor and former 2024 presidential aspirant Ron DeSantis pushed last year, the board overseeing Florida’s 12 publicly funded universities voted against any further use of state or federal funds to support DEI positions, policies, initiatives, and contracts.

Consequently, the University of Florida-Gainesville earlier this month eliminated the position of chief diversity officer and subordinate positions and said it would no longer enter into contracts with vendors emphasizing DEI.

Altogether, the university removed 13 jobs and ended 15 DEI-related administrative roles for faculty.

The reaction has been swift and fierce.

In a letter on March 11 addressed to National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) President Charlie Baker and to prospective members of the organization, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson rebuked Mr. DeSantis for opposing DEI and charged that he had “made no effort to conceal his administration’s devaluation of black America.”

Mr. Johnson alleged that the new law against DEI is part of Mr. DeSantis’s policies and stances that have harmed the interests of minorities in Florida and beyond.

“From racist voting policies to unraveling reproductive freedom and attempting to rewrite black history, DeSantis has waged war on black America,” Mr. Johnson stated.

As a result of the shift in policy, Mr. Johnson urged young African Americans not to enroll in public universities that he deemed insufficiently diverse.

“To all current and prospective college student-athletes—the NAACP urges you to reconsider any potential decision to attend and compete at a predominantly white institution in the state of Florida,” Mr. Johnson wrote.

An NCAA logo is seen in a game between the Northwestern Wildcats and the Vanderbilt Commodores on March 16, 2017, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Mr. Johnson acknowledged that following his advice and avoiding prestigious universities that no longer pursue DEI goals may hurt rather than help the prospective students whose interests he said he has at heart.

“We also recognize that protest can come at a price. The sad reality is, for many black student-athletes, collegiate sports may be their sole opportunity at achieving the upward mobility necessary to propel them into their rightful places in society,” he stated.

Nowhere does Mr. Johnson’s letter acknowledge the documented adverse effects that DEI has had on morale and cohesion.

While DEI continues to have passionate advocates—including some who make a case that enhanced diversity results in higher rates of employee retention—the concept and implementation of DEI at universities and workplaces have come in for heavy criticism even from non-partisan sources.

In 2022, the Harvard Business Review published a detailed critique of the failure of DEI programs to influence behavior or outcomes in a positive way and their tendency to provoke backlashes among those subjected to bias training and efforts to promote diversity.

Many people have come to view such programs as a domain of bureaucrats seeking to exploit guilt over a perceived lack of diversity and enrich themselves, said Mr. Ridgley.

“Too many universities have created lucrative sinecures for DEI bureaucrats to peddle this extremist nonsense,” he stated.

Gov. Ron DeSantis addresses the media in Palm Beach, Fla., on Feb. 29, 2024. (T.J. Muscaro/The Epoch Times).

A Long Battle

Given the prevalence of such programs and the unwillingness of those who profit from them to abandon them, DEI is heavily entrenched, and reversing it is likely to take many years, he reflected.

But with its ideological underpinnings of DEI increasingly evident and its practical consequences increasingly scrutinized in nonpartisan sources, Mr. Ridgley did not expect substantive arguments over the merits of such policies and programs to continue indefinitely.

“While DEI is advertised as ‘teaching about race,’ it actually perpetuates an ideology of victims and villains borrowed from Karl Marx, Paulo Freire, and Frantz Fanon. This is clear in [DEI advocates’] articles, books, and conferences, but they mask their ideology for public consumption,” Mr. Ridgley stated.

“But, as more people understand this fraud, we will see increasing rejection of it and a wholesale expunging of it from the higher education bureaucracies.

“As Florida’s example illustrates, many in the academy are hopeful for a restoration of enlightenment principles of logic, reason, and scientific method as well as merit, fairness, and equality as our guiding principles,” he added.

The University of Florida administration did not reply by press time to a request for comment.