DEI Now ‘On the Run’

Editors at National Review Online assess the backlash against misguided diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

It was a great racket while it lasted, but so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have spent the last year in retreat — compelling the practitioners of discriminatory “social justice” to conduct a flailing rearguard action in a flight to more defensible terrain.

Last year, Republican lawmakers in states including Florida, North and South Carolina, Texas, and Ohio passed laws proscribing the invidiously prejudiced hiring practices DEI advocates insist upon, and they blocked in-state schools from imposing racial and ideological litmus tests on their students. The Supreme Court found that explicitly racially conscious college admissions were flatly unconstitutional. And the private enterprises that committed vast sums to mollifying the activist class by parking DEI functionaries in sinecures within their human-resources departments began paring back their beneficence. As NPR reported last August, the job-posting index Indeed saw DEI-related job postings decline by 38 percent over the first half of 2023 — a trend that has only accelerated in the intervening months.

The counterattack against DEI by Americans committed to colorblindness rather than meting out cosmic retribution to those with disfavored accidents of birth compelled the activist class to retreat to its final redoubt — higher education. But even there, DEI is under siege. And there’s increasing evidence that it is losing the fight.

This week, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees voted to cut funding for the school’s DEI initiatives in the coming year’s budget. To add insult to the injury, the board stipulated those $2.3 million are to be diverted to the campus’s public-safety and policing departments instead. “It’s important to consider the needs of all 30,000 students, not just the 100 or so that may want to disrupt the university’s operations,” the board’s budget committee chairman, Marty Kotis, said curtly.