Leaders of the University of Michigan, one of America’s most prestigious public universities, like to say that their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is inseparable from the pursuit of academic excellence. Most students must take at least one class addressing “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.” Doctoral students in educational studies must take an “equity lab” and a racial-justice seminar. Computer-science students are quizzed on microaggressions.

Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I. is encoded with left-wing ideologies. Michigan’s largest division trains professors in “antiracist pedagogy” and dispenses handouts on “Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” like “worship of the written word.” The engineering school promises a “pervasive education around issues of race, ethnicity, unconscious bias and inclusion.”

At the art museum, captions for an exhibit of American and European art attest to histories of oppression “even in works that may not appear to have any direct relation to these histories.” The English department has adopted a 245-word land acknowledgment, describing its core subject as “a language brought by colonizers to North America.” Even Michigan’s business school, according to its D.E.I. web page, is committed to fighting “all forms of oppression.”

A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.

When Michigan inaugurated what it now calls D.E.I. 1.0, it intentionally placed itself in the vanguard of a revolution then reshaping American higher education. Around the country, college administrators were rapidly expanding D.E.I., convinced that such programs would help attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty.