Authored by Teresa R. Manning via American Greatness,
Just over a year ago, President Trump issued two executive orders banning destructive diversity ideology (a.k.a. “DEI” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion”) from the federal government and its contractors, including colleges and universities. The EOs sought to restore merit as the basis of hiring, advancement, and college admissions.
Both EOs reinforced prior actions by the president as well as by the Supreme Court: In his first term, Trump signed EO 13950, Combatting Race and Sex Stereotypes, which banned divisive concepts based on race and ethnicity, a measure duplicated in many states; and in June of 2023, the Supreme Court decided Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard (“SFFA”), which found that diversity rationales for racial preferences in admissions were themselves discriminatory and therefore unlawful.
Notwithstanding these major legal developments against DEI, colleges and universities, especially in Virginia, are continuing business as usual to promote it, albeit under different names, a move known as rebranding. “To avoid scrutiny,” said one official at the University of Virginia, diversity offices are now called offices for “community and belonging,” while “queer brunch” is now marketed as “cozy brunch.” At George Mason University, the DEI office is now called the Office for Access, Compliance, and Community—same staff, same stuff. They do this even though Trump’s EO explicitly banned rebranding, stating such programs are illegal “under whatever name they appear.”
Obviously, bad actor schools are engaged in bad faith noncompliance.
In this 250th anniversary year of America’s founding, we should remember that the word “diversity“ is absent from our foundational documents: it does not appear in either the Declaration of Independence or in our Constitution.
How, then, did “diversity” become so ubiquitous—in education, government, and corporate America—and what does it really mean?
“Diversity” is in fact a top-down, divide-and-conquer strategy pitting Americans against each other based on race, ethnicity, and sex (and now including “gender” and gender ideology). It distracts from—and detracts from—talent and excellence, actually encouraging racial discord as everyone must have skin color or race in mind, rather than achievement or moral character. Accordingly, it destroys nations. Only corrupt politicians, owned and controlled by anti-American handlers, could parrot the lie that “Diversity is our strength.”
Many date the debut of diversity ideology from the 1978 Supreme Court case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, where the medical school of the University of California at Davis had a special admissions program reserving 16 of its 100 open spots for minorities, often with lesser qualifications than white applicants, such as complainant Allan Bakke. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell announced in this opinion that “diversity” was a legitimate governmental interest. But he and the other justices rejected the medical school’s rigid quotas to get there—insisting, instead, that race should be one of many different criteria for admission even while stating that “racial and ethnic considerations are inherently suspect” under the Constitution.
These ambiguities guaranteed more fights about the role of race in college admissions and elsewhere.
In 2003, the Court made matters worse in Grutter v. Bollinger, where Justice Sandra Day O’Connor elevated “diversity” from a permissible state interest to a compelling one, finding that the University of Michigan law school’s racial preferences in admissions were lawful, provided they were tailored and individualized.
Historically, “compelling state interests” concerned public safety, national security, or the protection of minor children. With no history, tradition, or textual basis to do so, the Grutter Court not only shoved diversity onto this list but also put it above a citizen’s right to equal protection of the law guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. For this reason, many called the decision illegitimate. In practice, this case was the official government stamp of approval for discrimination against Christian, heterosexual men of European descent, as they are the only demographic said not to contribute to diversity.
In short order, campus bureaucracies, federal programs, and corporate trainings trumpeted DEI—often barely defined. Now, however, documents show that employers such as Amazon benefit from “diversity,” but employees decidedly do not: a divided workforce helps prevent unions as well as other forms of protection for workers’ rights. Similarly, campus administrators with few real or marketable skills no doubt also benefit from DEI, while serious students decidedly do not: university bureaucrats in DEI “BS Jobs” are paid handsomely with unprecedented student loan amounts. Graduates get the debt; campus bureaucrats get the paychecks.
Thankfully, the high Court corrected itself in the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a case where DEI was rejected and its rationales found to be incompatible with the equal protection of laws. Chief Justice John Roberts explained that DEI itself presumes that skin color or ethnic background results in a “characteristic viewpoint,” a form of racial stereotyping forbidden by civil rights guarantees. Diversity ideology is also incoherent and incapable of judicial review. (Transsexuals now add diversity? Perhaps pedophiles will too?) If race is a plus for some, he pointed out, it is necessarily a minus for others—which is to say, even individualized approaches result in illegal racial discrimination. Finding racial preferences in college admissions unlawful, Roberts went on to broaden the holding, saying, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”
It is in this context that President Trump’s January 2025 executive orders were issued. The administration is following up on the Supreme Court’s landmark SFFA decision, a case that took years for the courts to decide and which corrected the destructive Grutter opinion.
It is also the context in which colleges and universities are brazenly flouting the law.
The actions of Trump and the Supreme Court have prompted Offices for Civil Rights at both the Justice and Education Departments to launch investigations into a number of colleges and universities, including in Virginia; a federal appeals court recently upheld the administration’s actions. Resolution agreements have been reached in some instances. And that is all to the good.
But the record shows that schools do not operate in good faith. That means that agreements on paper must be enforced, checked, and double-checked to have real effect in practice.
Let’s hope that will also happen—with special attention paid to bad faith rebranding.
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Teresa R. Manning is Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars, President of the Virginia Association of Scholars, and a former law professor at Virginia’s Scalia Law School, George Mason University.
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