The University of Michigan’s recent about-face on DEI is both encouraging and instructive. Yes, even high-profile institutions with long records of supporting racial favoritism and radical ideological movements can show common sense—but sometimes it takes public humiliation in the media and losses in courtrooms to get them to budge.
After last month’s first set of executive orders from President Donald Trump, other schools would do well to drop DEI before experiencing the embarrassment that rattled Ann Arbor.
In December, UMichigan officials announced that they would no longer ask job applicants to submit “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) statements as part of their applications.
This announcement was significant because the school had a longstanding commitment to DEI, having spent some $250 million on DEI operations over the last eight years. Indeed, reporter Nicholas Confessore described Michigan’s original DEI program as part of the vanguard in the higher-education DEI revolution. Similarly, Heritage Foundation researcher Jay Greene found that the Wolverines had more DEI employees than any other university in a Power 5 athletic conference. Even today, according to just-released research, the school’s DEI payroll contains more than 1,100 names.
Other schools would do well to drop DEI before experiencing the embarrassment that rattled Ann Arbor.
Yet, in 2019, the school settled a lawsuit filed by the free-speech-advocacy organization Speech First against the school’s bias-response team (BRT). BRTs and DEI offices are linked because DEI offices often oversee or otherwise support such activities at colleges. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a statement of interest in Speech First’s claims regarding UMichigan’s BRT, describing the team as one that had “chill[ed] … protected speech.”
As the court case was underway in 2018-19, state lawmakers were adopting provisions that banned BRTs and other forms of censorship such as free-speech zones. (Such zones create the impression or reality that free speech isn’t permitted elsewhere.) Lawmakers in Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, and other states adopted policies expanding free speech on campus. The Wisconsin State University governing board adopted a policy protecting expression on campus that included consequences for students who performed “shout downs” (mob attempts to prevent speakers from delivering remarks).
More people are willing to say, out loud, that DEI is discrimination by another name.
Then administrators at schools such as Arizona State University began ditching diversity statements (though school officials have yet to fully disband the practice). Harvard and MIT have done so, too. President Donald Trump’s first administration blocked DEI trainings in the federal workforce, and, as of this writing, he has now issued an executive order terminating DEI in the federal government and deterring it in the private sector and on campus.
Taken together, these events and others are signals of a cultural shift. More people are willing to say, out loud, that DEI is discrimination by another name. Recognizing speech codes on college campuses and racial quotas in enrollment and hiring as part of DEI’s social blueprints, more Americans understand that DEI depends on censorship. DEI advocates do not win arguments because they refuse to engage in them.
A growing segment of the postsecondary community has had enough. The Times’s Confessore said in his exposé (written some five years after UMichigan settled with Speech First) that “the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.” Two months after Confessore’s October 2024 article, university officials would rescind their policy requiring DEI statements.
Nationally, DEI’s weak foundation—built on perpetuating racist stereotypes—continues to crumble.
Today, state lawmakers around the country are prohibiting the use of taxpayer spending on DEI offices. Florida and Texas were among the first to do so, and now policymakers across a dozen states have adopted such prohibitions. Wisconsin lawmakers have approved a proposal eliminating DEI from the university system. In November 2024, the governing board at the University of Georgia adopted a policy rejecting the use of DEI statements for admissions and university hiring. Most recently, the new governors in Indiana and West Virginia issued orders prohibiting DEI shortly after their inaugurations.
Policymakers’ heightened attention to DEI has exposed the movement as little more than a “School of Resentment,” as literary critic Harold Bloom dubbed “multicultural” movements 30 years ago. In the December announcement from UMichigan officials about their policy change, school officials may have admitted as much, noting that DEI is a threat to the pursuit of truth.
A faculty working group that reviewed the school’s DEI policies said “the statements … have been criticized for their potential to limit freedom of expression and diversity of thought on campus.” Similarly, a faculty survey found that “most responding faculty agreed that diversity statements put pressure on faculty to express specific positions on moral, political or social issues.”
Now, Michigan has joined the ranks of competitive, high-profile institutions that are moving away from DEI, at least in part.
There are still more to make the switch, though. Of U.S. News’s top 10 colleges, all but Harvard and MIT still require DEI statements. Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech, Johns Hopkins, and Northwestern even provide sample essays or classes on how to write a DEI statement for job applications.
Evidence from inside and outside the academy demonstrates that DEI is on the wane.
Still, evidence from inside and outside the academy demonstrates that DEI is on the wane.
Some of the world’s largest companies are closing DEI programs. In my research on Fortune 500 companies and DEI statements, the number holding on to such racist commitments is falling. Walmart, ranked first on the Fortune 500 list, disbanded DEI activities in November. In January 2025, McDonald’s did the same. Activist and documentarian Robby Starbuck has led pressure campaigns on social media prompting the likes of Tractor Supply, John Deere, and several other large corporations to end their DEI programs. Now, he only has to announce on X (formerly Twitter) that he has obtained copies of a business’s DEI material, and C-suite executives begin a drawback.
Even some within the DEI movement express skepticism of its alleged benefits.
Where are DEI’s supporters? Even some within the DEI movement express skepticism of its alleged benefits.
One DEI advocate, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, wrote in Forbes last summer that “the move to eliminate DEI statements and the overall scrutiny of DEI is devastating to higher education,” before allowing that “the continued practice of asking applicants to regurgitate the buzzwords of the day [through DEI statements] was doing more harm than good.”
DEI manages to create converts against itself because so-called anti-bias programs frequently target their own.
One widely covered story is that of Tabia Lee, who served as director of the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at a California community college before the school turned on her when she wanted to practice more authentic, diverse discussions than DEI allowed. Villanova professor Vincent Lloyd gave a similar testimony in Compact magazine in 2023.
Few are willing to vouch for DEI because its fundamental concepts are ambiguous, and the associated training programs accomplish little, if any, changes in attitudes and behavior.
In some form or another, corporations and schools have used diversity training for many years, dating as far back as the 1930s, according to Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev.
Dobbin and Kalev’s research on DEI raises questions about its efficacy and attracts more attention today. For years, researchers have collected survey evidence demonstrating that anti-bias programs and diversity training sessions either create no measurable change among participants or generate resentment—hearkening back to Bloom’s term again—among those who are told they are inherently biased.
Hundreds of surveys have found similar results. Meanwhile, the literature describing DEI does not contain consistent definitions of what, exactly, DEI is or believes.
More troubling, in November 2024, a report published by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab found that DEI training can actually create bias. Researchers wrote, “Across all groupings [of respondents], instead of reducing bias, [DEI training materials] engendered a hostile attribution bias … amplifying perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present, and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice.”
Strikingly, researchers found that DEI content prompted respondents to agree with modified statements made by Adolf Hitler—a fact that will come as no surprise to those who watched antisemitism run rampant over the last year.
DEI advocates can no longer make noble claims about the movement’s goals or outcomes.
“Participants exposed to the DEI content were markedly more likely to endorse Hitler’s demonization statements,” researchers wrote. “These findings suggest that exposure to anti-oppressive narratives can increase the endorsement of the type of demonization and scapegoating characteristic of authoritarianism,” the authors said.
Despite the research, some institutions, like UMichigan, required more to effect change. This is likely because rescinding DEI is an admission of error (and, in Michigan’s case, of wasted money).
DEI advocates can no longer make noble claims about the movement’s goals or outcomes. More people are willing to speak out about this now than even five years ago—so we should be confident that UMichigan’s announcement is a sign of more to come.
One of DEI’s institutional champions is backing down. Why isn’t your flagship?
Jonathan Butcher is the Will Skillman Senior Fellow in Education at The Heritage Foundation.
This article was originally published at jamesgmartin.center
