Is DEI Done? Not Yet.
“DEI is done at the University of Virginia,” said Governor Glenn Youngkin in a Saturday interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingram.
“This is a big day for the University of Virginia,” the governor said a day after the UVA Board of Visitors voted unanimously to abolish the university’s office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and end practices that discriminate on the basis of race. “It also, I think, makes a huge statement for the rest of universities across the nation.”
The UVA decision indisputably represents a milestone in the battle to create a color-blind society in Virginia, but it is an exaggeration to say that DEI is “done.” DEI advocates have been stunned by recent events, but they have not converted. They haven’t even submitted.
Youngkin expects Virginia’s other public universities to follow UVA’s lead. We won’t know if they will until their boards convene. The threat of losing federal funding combined with Youngkin-appointed majorities could be sufficient to get UVA-like resolutions passed. But responsibility for carrying out the resolutions will fall upon leaders who constructed or maintained the DEI systems in the first place. They will have plenty of support from staff, faculty, students, sympathetic media, and Democratic legislators.
Consider George Mason University. President Gregory Washington has said he will comply with President Trump’s executive order ending DEI, reports The Fourth Estate student newspaper. How? Through website editing and office rebranding.
The Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has been updated to the Office of Access, Compliance, and Community, wrote Gregory in a university-wide email. “It simply affirms our actual compliance through more precise naming,” he said. Meanwhile, the language on Mason’s websites and digital platforms will be reviewed “to ensure they accurately reflect [Mason’s] compliance with new and pre-existing federal requirements.”
In other words, don’t expect much change at GMU beyond renaming offices and job titles, and scrubbing the phrase “diversity, equity & inclusion” from the website.
The UVA Board of Visitors anticipated the possibility of cosmetic compliance by including the following in its resolution:
Ensure there are no efforts to circumvent prohibitions on the use of race by relying on proxies or other indirect means to accomplish such ends; and
Ensure there are no third-party contractors, clearinghouses, or aggregators that are being used by institutions in an effort to circumvent prohibited uses of race.
But the resolution does not address the semantic strategy: keeping DEI intact by adopting new verbiage. Universities are incubators of woke bafflegab; academic are constantly giving words new meaning. UVA can expunge “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” from its official vocabulary, but there’s nothing to stop the institution from cloaking its underlying philosophy, predicated upon the conviction that America is systemically racist, sexist, and homophonic, by employing different words with similar meaning.
DEI advocates are true believers. Consider the example of Catherine Cotrupi, interim assistant dean and director for the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Strategic Partnerships at Virginia Tech.
University officials are prohibited from using university resources to advance political causes. But it appears that Crupi used her work email to slam local conservative school board candidates as “hateful” and to urge readers to volunteer to work for their opponents’ campaigns. Her use of government email arguably violated Tech and state policy, reports The Daily Signal.
The political left in Virginia’s college campuses is dazed and confused at the moment, unsure of how to respond to Trumpian shock and awe amplified here in Virginia not only by Youngkin but Attorney General Jason Miyares. But do not think that DEI supporters are going quiescent. They’re not. They’re recalibrating.
One smart thing the UVA board did was require President Jim Ryan to report back in 30 days with an update on compliance. Having spent years of his life building the DEI regime at UVA, he is not likely to be an enthusiastic convert to the new order. The Board will have to keep him on a very short leash.
James A. Bacon is the founder of Bacon’s Rebellion and a contributing editor with The Jefferson Council.
