Disaster is looming over universities affected by President Donald Trump’s executive order that halted government diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and spending. Or not: The policy might just bring higher education back to a normal balance of power.
Despite a grim outlook from universities with concerns over “suspending research projects, canceling conferences and closing offices,” it seems that schools will now be able to do their own thing. Trump’s order will dismantle DEI-advancing frameworks — “under whatever name they appear” — but it does not intend to flush out “diversity” as a concept. Still, the fear of diversity loss is what academic DEI proponents should be clinging to. Financial fears are easily remedied, and frankly, they should have expected such things as “diversity-associated” funds to backfire.
However, around the same time that this deconstruction came into view, some schools have built licit diversity-ish centers of their own. Notorious academic Ibram X. Kendi, once professor and director at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, left for Howard University to take up the same role at the school’s newest Institute for Advanced Study. By any guess, Kendi’s work at Howard will be more of the same race-grifting he led at BU — not the sort of project one wants to see popping up at universities at the start of America’s “golden age.” The endeavor pairs well, though, with the Ohio State University’s plans for the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. It is one of five state-mandated intellectual diversity centers and is prominent because of the school’s prior enmeshment with DEI programs as well as its Senate’s futile vote rejecting the proposal.
The Ohio State University’s initiative is good — and probably needed: centers like it are often just broadly defined vehicles for conservative thought on campus. Yet it remains named as an “intellectual diversity center,” which Ohio tax dollars fund. And Kendi, whose shtick is well-known by now, can operate as expected. Both projects seem at odds with a renewed anti-DEI culture, and both are entirely legitimate.
At Howard, Kendi’s institute is an example that overtly Left and equity-coded programs will still be possible without the so-thought fascist hand of Trump entering to overrule.
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More than policy testing, the Ohio State University’s center has made some headway in wresting the university from the tyranny of left-leaning academics. The university Senate vote does nothing to deter state law and only makes the transition more difficult.
The faculty’s distaste for a dedicated intellectual diversity center would be fine if it were not pure bias. These sorts of initiatives passed into the university system seamlessly in years past when they implied left-ideology inculcation. The fact that a department welcoming — not necessarily favoring — conservative activity is met with such resistance is part of why DEI was forcibly rescinded in the first place.