Higher education in the United States is under fire, and much of it is deserved. News of its illiberal and divisive diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, as well as pedagogy and student activism, has made anything DEI or DEI-adjacent a target.

While DEI looks innocuous and indeed welcoming in principle, in practice, it often entails outright racial discrimination in faculty hiring and student enrollment, suppression and censorship of research, and restrictions on free speech that run counter to the American tradition of free expression and the campus tradition of academic freedom.

Nonetheless, the federal government has provided millions of dollars to promote these ideas. In recent years, grants from agencies such as the Education Department and the National Science Foundation all devoted astonishing amounts of funding to promoting DEI. Fortunately, the new administration appears to be cutting off this funding source.

But other federal subsidies for these poisonous ideas remain in place, such as the student loan programs. With the advent of income-driven repayment (good) and mass student loan forgiveness (bad), student loans provide the most subsidy to precisely the types of education that provide the least preparation for students entering the labor force. Curtailing this funding source would make economic sense since it is essentially financing malinvestment, but it would also have the benefit of reducing funding for illiberal fields that promote DEI.

Academia is brimming with dubious ideas and practices, so why did this pernicious version of DEI escape the lab of various “studies” departments and conquer college campuses?

The first reason is that DEI created and maintained a protective intellectual bubble for proponents. DEI largely emerged from the various academic “studies” departments, which are heavily centered on postmodern theory and activism. This means they deny the objectivity and efficacy of various institutions and work to destabilize them through direct action.

Ultimately, the problem is not that such ideas exist but that the federal student loan program pushes more young people, regardless of whether they need college, into homogenous cultures that value identity politics above all else. This has created what are called “prefigurative” bubbles that have mutated academia into a place abundant with feelings, particularly anger, and almost devoid of critical thinking.

Many academic departments, especially in the humanities, have become these miniworlds. These performative spaces function as nurseries for creating activists and academics who want to see an end to the U.S. as we know it, if not Western civilization as a whole. These departments have strengthened the influence of fields that inherently counter the norms of American society, possibly creating students unprepared for real-world situations, such as sought-after job skills. These initiatives and pedagogies often create an illiberal and activist-centered environment intolerant of anything right of democratic socialism.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LAUNCHES ‘END DEI’ PORTAL AT EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

DEI could largely escape the lab because of the vast subsidies in the form of research grants and student loans. These subsidies allowed DEI to circumvent market pressure that punishes activism training disguised as education.

The new administration has already curtailed research grants that subsidize the illiberal version of DEI, meaning student loans are the next step. There are many ways to fix the student loans so that they no longer underwrite the undermining of higher education and the nation. We’ve recommended shifting to a private lending system. Republicans in the House are contemplating instituting risk sharing, which would require colleges to repay a portion of loans when students fail to repay. Whichever path is taken, student loan reform is needed to stop subsidizing DEI.

Andrew Gillen is a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. Erec Smith is a research fellow at Cato and an associate professor of rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania.