The University of Michigan’s leadership could potentially impose significant checks on the school’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program.
The university’s board of regents will hold its next meeting on Thursday. The regents have been saying that the board will likely curb DEI at the school, including by restricting the use of DEI criteria in considering new employees and by diverting money earmarked for DEI into other initiatives, according to a Wednesday article by Nicholas Confessore in The New York Times.
The potential changes have outraged many pro-DEI activists at the university, including one student who insisted that “without those [DEI] initiatives, this university would be a worse place yet,” the Times wrote.
Republican regent Sarah Hubbard said that asking for DEI statements in hiring has caused ideological homogeneity among the faculty, and emphasized the importance of intellectual diversity: “We must do better in hiring a wide variety of voices in our faculty so that they’re teaching a wide variety of opinions to our students,” the Times reported.
The potential end of DEI at the school caused the Faculty Senate chair to warn that “the Regents may announce or vote to implement the plan as early as December 5th,” and criticized a previous Times article that exposed significant flaws in the University of Michigan’s DEI program.
That article, published on Oct. 16 by Confessore, revealed that the University of Michigan had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on DEI. Despite this massive outlay, the school saw a worsening of strife and paranoia instead of the healing that DEI is supposed to bring.
[RELATED: 500 activists rally to defend DEI at University of Michigan Faculty Senate-led protest]
The university’s faculty members, besides just the Faculty Senate chair, have attacked the Times article, with one saying it is “sexist” and another stating that “using Black students to criticize and ultimately undermine DEI efforts is operating in bad faith.”
Campus Reform has reached out to the University of Michigan Board of Regents for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
