What Did You Expect to Happen? How DEI Wound Up in Trump’s Crosshairs

It’s been a jarring spring for school and college leaders. They’ve spent much of the past decade embracing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI)—building DEI departments, mandating implicit bias trainings, sponsoring race-based affinity groups, and opening women’s sports to biological males.

Then, their whole world turned upside down. Donald Trump moved back into the White House. He deemed race-conscious education practices illegal, ordered schools and colleges to recognize only two sexes, and moved to pull hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania for civil rights violations.

Education leaders are frantically scrubbing websites, canceling programs, hiring Republican lobbyists, and prepping for federal investigations. All of this anguished activity has been accompanied by the plaintive cry of, “How could this happen?!”

The answer is simple: Over the past decade, schools and colleges carelessly embraced an agenda that was out of step with mainstream American values. Education leaders blithely went along for the ride as ideologues, grifters, and opportunists transformed sensible intuitions about fairness and opportunity into toxic dogmas—and then into the lingua franca of American education.

Colleges went all in. By 2022, nearly half of large institutions used DEI when awarding tenure. In practice, that typically entailed mandatory “DEI statements,” loyalty oaths that 56 percent of moderate faculty (and 90 percent of their conservative peers) describe as “ideological litmus tests.” Last spring, progressive Harvard University law professor Randall Kennedy condemned DEI statements as “pledges of allegiance” that screen out conservatives and those who “show insufficient enthusiasm for the DEI regime.” Indeed, many institutions looked at diversity statements before bothering with actual qualifications. At the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, DEI statements alone were used to reject as many as three-quarters of professorial applicants.

DEI dogma was omnipresent in K–12, too. Parents shared tales of third graders who were ashamed of their “whiteness” or who tut-tutted their parents for using outdated gender terminology like “boys” and “girls.” The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History featured an online guide for “Talking about Race” in K–12 that rejected “hard work,” “self-reliance,” and “be[ing] polite” as habits of “white culture.” The famed KIPP charter schools ditched their 25-year-old mantra “Work Hard. Be Nice” as a legacy of “white supremacy” culture that threatened efforts to “dismantle systemic racism.” In January 2025, a national survey of high schoolers reported that over a third have teachers who “often” or “almost daily” tell them America is a fundamentally racist nation.

Formerly mundane teacher-training workshops offered a striking illustration of how far things had gone. The Equity Collaborative taught educators that “independence,” “individual thinking,” and “self-expression” are racist hallmarks of “white individualism.” Teachers in Seattle learned that we live in a “race-based white-supremacist society,” in Buffalo that they should embrace “queer-affirming network[s] where heteronormative thinking no longer exists,” and in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ [gender] identities.” A raft of similar examples were available pretty much anywhere someone filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

Not Whether, but When

Of course, “anti-racism” wasn’t, and isn’t, about nondiscrimination.

Rather, it was a radical ideological and political project. As anti-racist avatar Ibram X. Kendi explained in his bestselling How to Be an Antiracist, “There is no such thing as a not-racist idea. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.” He proposed an “antiracist amendment” to the US Constitution that would ban “racist ideas by public officials.” What qualified as a “racist” idea? The culprits included standardized tests, capital gains taxes, antidrug laws, and pretty much anything else the mercurial Kendi disliked. How did this half-baked authoritarianism get celebrated by college presidents and promoted in elementary schools? In truth, mostly because “anti-racism” sounded nice and, while millions bought the book, it became clear that few had actually read it.

Campus leaders, funders, and the education blob have been so staggered by the DEI pushback because they spent the better part of a decade embracing it with little or no consequence.

In 2017, while detailing a disturbingly off-the-rails exercise in “anti-racist” pedagogy, Grant Addison and I observed, “Efforts to combat bias, ineptly handled, can actually magnify racial tensions and conflict,” and “when battalions of advocates are urging schools to join an ‘anti-racist Resistance,’ it’s easy for passion to override good judgment.” Later that year, we noted the enthusiasm for “progressive stacking,” a teaching practice dictating, as one University of Pennsylvania instructor put it, that “I will always call on my Black women students first. Other [people of color] get second tier priority. [White women] come next. And, if I have to, white men.” We cautioned that DEI enthusiasts were courting blowback “when ‘anti-bias’ educators start employing race-based distinctions as an instructional tactic.”

Yet remarkably, all of this didn’t really penetrate the public consciousness during Trump’s first term. Republican officials would quietly concede that some of it seemed problematic but explain they didn’t want to get “sucked into culture wars”—that they wanted to focus on “things that matter.” Many remained mum for fear of being tagged as bigots. When Harvard students shouted down Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos as a “white supremacist” in 2017, I was shocked at how few were willing to push back on this ludicrous slander. This partly reflected the mainstream media’s ability to bully skeptics into acquiescence by caricaturing frustrations and downplaying legitimate concerns.

Campus leaders, funders, and the education blob have been so staggered by the DEI pushback because they spent the better part of a decade embracing it with little or no consequence. It wasn’t until the pandemic summer of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, when the results of their embrace started to spill over into public awareness. “Equity” became a mantra to justify ineffectual school discipline and nutty grading policies. Transgender “inclusion” morphed into teaching gender identity in kindergarten and putting pornographic materials in middle school libraries. And “diversity” was used to justify the race-based grouping of students, an exercise that in practice looked like a bizarre homage to Jim Crow.

What Brought Things to a Head?

What finally triggered the ferocious DEI backlash? The most important factor may have been the pandemic, which shattered long-standing trust in schools while giving parents an unprecedented window into what was happening in classrooms. The most common thing I heard from parents during the pandemic was, “I had no idea!” Parents who had never had much visibility into what students did all day were suddenly concerned by the prevalence of dubious dogmas.

Meanwhile, conservative muckrakers like Christopher Rufo kept surfacing indefensible examples of DEI zealotry; Republican governors (most notably Ron DeSantis) demonstrated that political upside existed in taking on woke behavior; fights over school closure and gender ideology birthed a web of new activist groups braced for cultural conflict; and the Biden administration’s whole-of-government equity agenda nationalized the fight over DEI. Then, on October 7, 2023, the hypocrisy of the DEI project was laid bare. Overnight, the same campus officials who had policed speech and punished so-called microaggressions became free speech absolutists who insisted that Hamas apologists bullying Jewish students raised nuanced questions of academic freedom. It became all too clear that equity meant some were more equal than others.

By January 2025, the reckoning was well underway. And now the Trump administration, with a thick playbook of state-level initiatives and a deep bench of seasoned activists, has the means and motive to supersize it. Moreover, the Obama and Biden administrations gifted the Trump team a powerful cudgel. They pioneered a strategy for weaponizing educational civil rights enforcement, using informal “Dear Colleague” letters to eviscerate due process rights on campus, compel schools to employ race-based quotas for school discipline, and reinterpret “sex” as gender identity in Title IX regulations. It was preordained that Trump 2.0 would energetically seize upon those precedents.

Looking Forward

So, what should we make of all this?

First, contrary to the suggestion that DEI backlash is a “distraction from what really matters,” this stuff does really matter.

It’s a mistake to think that education reform is about either “the culture wars” or “what really matters for kids.” Correcting course on culture is essential if schools and colleges are to regain public trust and refocus on academic achievement. It’s hard to focus on rigorous math instruction when educators fret that it’s racist to worry about correct answers or offer advanced math instruction. It’s tough to create the conditions of academic excellence when educators are reluctant to address student misconduct or personal responsibility is dismissed as a racist construct.

Second, the truth is that DEI indisputably lost its way.

I don’t think a lot of people in or around education ever meant to endorse all this. They just sleepwalked (or got bullied) into embracing a series of dogmas that are noxious to 70 or 80 percent of Americans. I’ve spoken to a lot of left-leaning education leaders in recent months who’ve said, “Yeah, some of this DEI stuff really did go too far.” Educators mouthed words that didn’t really reflect their views of equality, fairness, inclusion, or respect for difference. They swallowed their doubts because they didn’t want to get hassled. It was the most banal kind of capitulation. This was the lingo of funders and federal grants. They had no appetite for getting attacked by their young employees. So, they just kind of went along.

Third, concerns about some of the Trump administration’s methods are warranted.

Is the administration stomping on process, at times acting arbitrarily, threatening academic freedom, and potentially exceeding its legitimate authority? Yep. Some of these efforts deserve to be checked or countermanded by the courts. And there’s a real risk that the Trump administration will fuel its own backlash and that it’s establishing troubling precedents. We live in an era of thermostatic, tit-for-tat politics. Those leading the administration’s efforts should keep that in mind, especially if the aim is to restore healthy, broadly supported cultural norms.

Those troubled by the Trump administration’s extraordinary assault on DEI would do well to pause the outrage long enough to ask what admixture of disdain, arrogance, and groupthink led them to imagine there’d be no consequences for a half-baked national experiment in cultural revolution.

All that said, the remarkable thing is how DEI went so wrong. I mean, even a curmudgeon like me supports diversity, equity, and inclusion—if it means engaging with those who have diverse perspectives, treating people fairly, and making room for those of different circumstances and backgrounds. The lion’s share of Americans want schools and colleges to offer a robust, serious look at our history; treat every student fairly; make everyone feel welcome; reject racial discrimination; and insist that people treat each other with dignity and respect. We have an opportunity to reclaim that shared creed. But that requires appreciating where “anti-racism” and DEI went wrong.

Five years ago, Addison and I penned a long meditation on all this, titled “‘Anti-Racist’ Education Is Neither.” As we put it, “There’s a tragic bait-and-switch at work [as] Americans who care passionately about equality and justice have been dragooned into advancing an incoherent, illiberal agenda.” Those troubled by the Trump administration’s extraordinary assault on DEI would do well to pause the outrage long enough to ask what admixture of disdain, arrogance, and groupthink led them to imagine there’d be no consequences for a half-baked national experiment in cultural revolution.