In a sign of the times, the Trump administration has initiated measures to dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs within educational institutions across the United States. The Department of Education has issued directives mandating, among other things, that universities eliminate DEI initiatives, warning that non-compliance could result in severe consequences. Universities, ever reluctant to backtrack on their progressive initiatives, have responded in several ways. One popular move has been to rename DEI offices, as if they could evade scrutiny simply by rebranding. Other institutions have admitted, explicitly or implicitly, that DEI had gone too far by teaching certain divisive concepts or hiring race-baiting consultants. They will attempt to “eliminate” DEI by maintaining its core concepts while cutting out the more obviously controversial elements.
Doing so will not address what is wrong with DEI. To understand why that is, it is helpful to examine a case study.
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan, one of the most prestigious public universities in the country, had been suffering a crisis of governance. In a still-unfolding saga, which, like that of many peer schools, involved heated demonstrations, uneven enforcement of campus rules, and accusations of bigotry and unfairness flying in every direction, the school’s Faculty Senate censured its regents for shutting down anti-Israel encampments, and establishing an institutional-neutrality policy. Shortly after, the student government voted to impeach its avidly anti-Israel leadership for inciting violence against “Zionist members” of the student government.
An anti-Israel student group was suspended for two years and lost its funding after demonstrating in front of a Jewish Regent’s house. In February 2025, the ACLU filed a lawsuit in federal court against the university for allegedly infringing on the free speech rights of students who had been banned from campus for participating in demonstrations that violated campus rules. “The university says it appreciates this history of activism,” said one student plaintiff in a telling interview, “but it will arrest students, ban students, surveil students and repress them through legal or school disciplinary means.”
These developments, featuring faculty backlash against institutional leaders, student backlash against ideologues in student-leadership positions, and lawsuits left and right, highlight once again the conflict between governance and ideology on American campuses. That is the conflict DEI, at its best, is meant to address – but fails to.
Issues on the Surface
It is hardly a new story. In fact, just a few weeks before the censure motion, The New York Times published a long article by Nicholas Confessore on the crisis created (or exacerbated) by diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at Michigan. If administrators and advocates across the country are willing to take seriously Confessore’s article and the broader problems DEI ideology, echoed in the censure motion, creates in the academy and beyond, they will have to admit that by any metric, something has gone terribly wrong.
Confessore’s thoughtful and candid reporting reveals a host of surface-level problems that at least warrant serious reconsideration of DEI’s direction. Among these are the bloated bureaucracy that DEI efforts have spawned, questionable hiring practices, and the rising tensions between identity groups on campus. Taxpayers have funded an inefficient boondoggle for mediocre bureaucrats who do not know exactly what they have been hired to do and whose day-to-day work has nothing to do with making student life healthier or a Michigan education more valuable. Faculty worry that an atmosphere of ideological conformity suppresses open inquiry and encourages disaffected students to become ideological enforcers against professors. All of this, as the article notes, contributes to a general atmosphere of distrust and suspicion among students, faculty, and staff alike – with no increase in actual diversity, equity, or inclusion to show for it.
It might have been tempting to mend, not end, DEI, by trimming administrative fat and yet again redoubling efforts to make all identity groups feel catered to. Surely some critics of DEI as it has manifested would have commended that as a step in the right direction. But administrative bloat, unclear directives, intergroup competition, and decrease of social cohesion are simply fruit of a poisoned tree.
The Insidious Nature of DEI
The real problem with DEI initiatives has always been inherent and more insidious: As the article demonstrates repeatedly by example, DEI empowers favored identity groups to make unfalsifiable and often unrepresentative claims about what they feel and need. It codifies the position that those claims are valid and require deferential official responses. This is a bad recipe for making all community members feel like equal citizens, rather than factions competing for power over one another. The foundational principle of DEI—that different identity groups have unique experiences that demand specialized policies and protections—is thus not merely contentious. It is untenable in theory, unworkable in practice, and inimical to the functioning of a university or any other institution with diverse membership.
By privileging subjectivity and rejecting the possibility of true cross-identity understanding, DEI makes it impossible to establish any kind of objective standard about what expectations, behaviors, and accommodations are reasonable or even desirable in a diverse and pluralistic community. Within the DEI framework, bluntly, there is no basis for administrators to tell students that they are fine and should stop complaining.
With no external measure of what constitutes legitimate discomfort or exclusion, any grievance, no matter how small or subjective, is treated as worthy of university action if it comes couched in terms of identity. This dynamic not only elevates emotional states into irrefutable truths—an epistemic error—it creates an ever-heavier load of complaints while disavowing the very concepts needed to mediate them. Worse still, DEI initiatives assume that the claimed feelings of “marginalized” groups automatically takes precedence over competing claims from non-marginalized groups or those not framed in terms of identity—leaving no room for debate, negotiation, or compromise, and incentivizing more identity-inflected power struggles.
Within this framework, there is no clear way to arbitrate between competing claims of exclusion. What happens, for example, when the demands of one identity group directly conflict with the desires or rights of another? That is precisely what campuses are dealing with as Jewish and Arab students clash over garb, slogans, and other symbols that seem menacing to one group and harmless, even integral, to the identity of another.
Identity Groups as Sovereign
In a telling example from Confessore’s article, “Jews, Palestinians, and their supporters all laid claim to Michigan’s promise of inclusion” as anti-Israel groups failed to pass an explicitly DEI-inflected vote to condemn “apartheid regimes.” Michigan’s DEI “leaders gave the school’s Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Award to a pro-Palestine student group” that “had issued a statement on Oct. 7 justifying the murder of Israeli citizens.” The award was later rescinded after the group’s leader posted calls for “death and worse” to “every single individual who supports the Zionist state,” which doubtless includes thousands of her Michigan classmates.
The same dynamic played out on campuses and in boardrooms across the country. Every identity group considered itself the campus sovereign, by virtue of being an identity group. They did so on the explicit encouragement of DEI’s worldview, which promised the allocation of resources based not on objective reality but subjective perspectives.
But when push comes to shove, DEI is a set of platitudes, not principles. It lacks the capacity to bear the very load it creates. Promises that all students should feel safe and included are simply too thin to resolve the very conflicts DEI stokes. DEI sees no moral difference between the failure to condemn (imaginary) “apartheid” overseas and students justifying murder. It might even find ways to celebrate the latter. That’s because it’s only metric is whether one advances the interests of identity groups as defined by activist groups, not whether those interests are good or worthwhile. Indeed, it provides no basis on which to say whether that is the case.
It’s a kindergarten solution to an adult problem.
Symptoms of dysfunction quickly result. Over and over a group claiming to represent a particular minority demands a change that another minority finds objectionable, and universities ratchet up the resources devoted to solving each one’s discomfort yet systematically avoiding solving the conflict between the two groups. Rather than fostering a sense of shared purpose by redirecting student energy to the distinct features of university life, like scholarship and genuine inquiry, DEI initiatives have created a zero-sum game where identity groups vie for resources, status, and power, sowing division rather than unity, creating the need for yet more administrators and more money to throw at inflamed tensions.
Ultimately, the problems highlighted in the NY Times article reflect a deeper truth: DEI is not “absolutely well intentioned, extremely thoughtful in its conception and design” yet “so virtuous that it’s escaped accountability,” as one Michigan Regent put it. Its entire premise is based on an unstable foundation. A system that prioritizes subjective experience above all else, while intentionally courting diverse members and insisting that each one cannot truly understand the other cannot create a cohesive, harmonious community. It creates discord and dysfunction.
Universities are for Education
DEI’s inadequacy does not make diversity, with the friction it inevitably generates, a challenge too great to bear or impossible to address. It simply means that universities will have to approach the challenge of diversity from a perspective – that is, the university’s own view of what its students are there for – rather than from a posture of deference to any and all groups’ stated perspectives.
Ambiguous as the term may be, however, universities are for education. With that sense of institutional purpose in mind, administrations should aim to resolve conflicts by asking what they have to do with education. If they are not genuinely interfering with education – and plenty of student demonstrations have and should be punished accordingly – they should be ignored. So long as college students vie for university resources and recognition of supposed traumas as a means of imposing themselves on their fellow students, universities should get out of the business of making students “feel” anything. That requires establishing clear standards of what education is, as far as the university is concerned, and what interference looks like. Those standards should be narrow on both counts. If possible, they should only serve to bar civil rights violations, like deprivation of access to parts of campus and genuine discriminatory harassment.
Reorienting the university and other institutions that have embraced DEI will take a major pivot in philosophy and practice. But that is clearly on the government’s agenda. It might be tempting to read the Michigan case study as a kind of constructive criticism, but the candid acknowledgment of these issues suggests that DEI is just one more in a long line of ideological systems that are not up to the challenges presented by actual human behavior.
No amount of tinkering with policies or budgets will salvage it, just as no gifted central planner can solve the problems of Communism. The University of Michigan and its peers have no excuse, at this point, for not recognizing what DEI really is—a noble-sounding theory of social cohesion that is just the opposite. Real social cohesion requires sober institutional design that fosters maturity and forbearance, rather than cultivating entitlement and a tyranny of feelings.
Tal Fortgang is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
