On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order (EO) titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Numerous American colleges promptly began reassessing their DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies to ensure they did not jeopardize their federal funding. Some universities that embraced race-based admissions or benefits policies concurrently turned a blind eye to antisemitic discrimination. The University of Vermont (UVM) recently joined the ranks of public institutions revising their policies to conform to constitutional requirements.
The “woke” movement seemed to racialize every aspect of American life in the name of reversing unproven claims of systemic societal white supremacy. This was especially prevalent in colleges and universities, which the president’s EO specifically targeted: “[I]nstitutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.”
Temple University, the University of Arizona, Northeastern University, Columbia University, and others began complying with the anti-DEI order as early as February. Others claimed they were already in compliance with federal law and the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision, which held that using skin color as a primary factor in admissions violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
UVM — slow to rectify its prominent neo-racist violations of this Supreme Court precedent — was shocked into alertness by threats to the strings of its plump federal purse. The university receives approximately $260 million in research funding in about 1,000 active grants, 70% of which are awarded to UVM faculty and staff as primary investigators. In some cases, it seems money talks louder than virtue signaling for college elites. Kirk Dombrowski, the university’s vice president for research and economic development, was hired in 2020 to increase federal research funding at UVM. He has remarked that “UVM is treading carefully to safeguard its research endeavors from potential disruptions.”
UVM has an additional black mark due to its prominence in another racist sphere – failing to protect Jewish students from unlawful discrimination and racist harassment. Contrary to howls of alleged Trump administration racism in its DEI objections, it was a federal investigation under the Biden administration that “found that the University of Vermont mishandled allegations of antisemitism on its campus.” Settlement of the federal complaint in April 2023 resulted in UVM “taking steps to address the issue.”
This precedent meant that UVM walked on thinner ice than many other institutions did before Trump. It faces double jeopardy for its shameless racial preferencing of “BIPOC” students, with a record of discriminatory conduct against Jews. As a public university, it faces stiffer federal oversight than private Harvard College. As explained in the Daily Signal:
“[I]n addition to the joint-government task force’s claim that Harvard leadership failed to meaningfully confront pervasive insults, physical assault, and intimidation of Jewish students, there’s also a blistering internal university task force report that maintains that Harvard allowed antisemitism to permeate ‘coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.’
“Harvard, a private institution, can do as it likes … But what ‘constitutional principle’ dictates that the federal government must provide this specific institution with $3 billion in federal contracts and grants?”
UVM Professor Aaron Kindsvatter bravely blew the whistle against UVM for its racist DEI policies on March 8, 2021, posting a YouTube video titled “Racism and the Secular Religion at the University of Vermont.” He went unheeded and even scorned by the Green Mountain State’s flagship university for stating what is axiomatic: “The problem is that there’s a new kind of discrimination on campus … And this discrimination is against whiteness … The thinking that informs it is so crude, and so lacking in falsifiability, and speaks so eloquently to our tribal impulses, that the same logic that informs what is currently being called whiteness now can easily find its way to desperate persons who need a group to hate and who will adopt the suppositions that inform whiteness towards their own ends.”
Histrionic Democrat charges that Trump is a racist for upholding the Constitution’s equal protection clause ring especially hollow in ultra-progressive Vermont. UVM is shape-shifting its DEI policies with renaming shenanigans. Ruby Espejo, chair of UVM’s Committee on Common Ground Values, said during a Feb. 25 meeting, “This will not change the work we do.” Neo-racists are slow to learn the errors of their ways, even when their jobs (and their employers’ federal funding) depend on it.
In comments to Liberty Nation News, Kindsvatter echoed this lingering problem of elitist institutions too unenlightened to fathom that their woke racism is against the law and anathema to the American creed:
“In reifying racialization as a means of social change and in cloaking such racialization in pleasant-sounding euphemisms such as DEI, universities have perpetrated a fraud and have abdicated their responsibility to the society that supports them. Members of the public should bear in mind that universities only changed their policies because they were forced to, not because they have displayed mature reflection or adopted responsibility for the spread of an ideology that substitutes base racial animus for critical thinking.”
That nicely sums up the ongoing battle between Trump and higher education DEI initiatives. The fight is between the rule of law and neo-racists seeking to undermine constitutional equality. There is still much work to be done to reverse the explicit racism of DEI on America’s antisemitic campuses.