It looks like Gregory Washington, president of George Mason University , picked absolutely the worst time to defend the DEI bloat at his school. In Boston, some 460 miles north of GMU’s Fairfax, Virginia , campus, Ibram X. Kendi is almost single-handedly bringing down the edifice of racialism he did so much to erect.

As a result of Kendi’s rather abrupt but highly instructive downfall, Washington finds himself defending a racialist ideology that suddenly is being seen for what it is.

To wit, diversity, equity, and inclusion, critical race theory, environmental, social governance, and all the other racial acronyms that have increasingly bedeviled the lives of Americans for the past decade, are becoming the new emperor with no clothes, even for liberals.

Damning was the condemnation offered by David Decosimo, a BU colleague of Kendi’s. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "The debacle that is Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research is about far more than its founder, Ibram X. Kendi. It is about a university, caught up in cultural hysteria, subordinating itself to ideology."

It feels a bit like the descriptions of when Pope John Paul II went to Poland in 1979. Millions came out on the street, and then, suddenly seeing that they had strength in numbers, they lost fear of their communist oppressors. The pope called on them to "not be afraid." At issue are cascading media reports of Kendi’s financial negligence and tyrannical conduct at the Center for Antiracist Research that Boston University so ill-advisedly set up for him at the height of the racial hysteria that followed the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots.

In late September, Kendi laid off 19 staff members at the center, leaving between 15 and 17 still at work. This quickly led to charges that he had blown through at least $43 million he had raised, including a "no strings attached" grant of $10 million from the very "woke" former owner of X/Twitter, Jack Dorsey, while producing no research. "Ultimately, we ended up with no antiracism studies programs at all. Meanwhile, the rumbles of discontent were turning into an earthquake and people kept leaving. No matter how hard people tried, things didn’t improve," Phillipe Copeland, a former center researcher who left in frustration before the implosion, wrote in the Daily Beast.

Seeing no other alternative, BU itself said on Sept. 21 that it had decided to "launch an inquiry into the management culture" at the center. Just as the drama was unfolding in the sprawling campus running alongside Boston’s Charles River, a nine-hour drive south, in Fairfax, the president’s office at GMU was also gripped by its own commitment to "antiracism."

On Sept. 22, Washington chose to react in surprisingly public fashion to a report a day earlier by my Heritage Foundation colleague Jay Greene and me. Our report revealed that “surprisingly, public universities in Virginia have larger diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies than taxpayer-funded universities in any other state."

One of the reasons we found that surprising is that Virginia is decidedly a purple state, having elected a governor in 2021 precisely because of his opposition to critical race theory in schools. Our report noted that "George Mason University, which has a reputation as a right-of-center institution, has 7.4 DEI personnel per 100 tenure-track faculty, which is the highest of any public university in the country analyzed in this Backgrounder."

Washington reacted by first emailing all the GMU faculty the day after our report was published. He gave an overly expansive definition of who is included in the victims categories that deserve special attention: "Mason defines diversity to include our communities of color and the LGBTQ+ community, but also international students, students with disabilities, veterans and those who are first generation, parenting, low income, neurodiverse, and of many religious traditions." We didn’t even count all the staff he includes as part of GMU’s DEI effort.

He also rejected that GMU has, as we wrote, 69 officials working on DEI. "Our own careful analysis shows the number of staff focused on DEI services at 17," he wrote. As we pointed out in a response , we got our number from GMU’s own websites and have enumerated all 69 job titles, while Washington cannot produce his list of 17. Is Washington’s defense really that GMU is putting out false information on its websites about the number of officers working on DEI?

Then on Sept. 26, Washington doubled down, spamming GMU’s 40,000-strong student body, again raising technical issues, such as why we counted in the denominator of the ratio only tenured or tenured-track professors, or why we compared Mason to Power 5 schools. You can read our response to that here. Tellingly, Washington has never addressed the part of our report that questioned the propriety of using taxpayer money for its websites linking to far-leftist organizations and causes, including BLM, which, like Kendi, is also under a cloud for mismanaging millions of dollars. This one , for example, urges students to read about antiracism, the Kendian concept.

Washington should explain his views on this matter. As professor Decosimo wrote in his refutation of Kendianism, "Whether driven by moral hysteria, cynical careerism or fear of being labeled racist, this violation of scholarly ideals and liberal principles betrays the norms necessary for intellectual life and human flourishing. It courts disaster, at this moment especially, that universities can’t afford."

Does Washington support Kendian-style "antiracism," yes or no? Virginia taxpayers paying for his sprawling DEI ventures at GMU would like to know.

Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution .