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Curtis Bunn
MSNBC
Excerpt: One by one, diversity, equity and inclusion programs at some of the country’s biggest companies fell apart in 2024, with signs that efforts to reverse DEI initiatives will only ramp up in 2025.
This year saw the rise in prominent figures like Elon Musk and Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, among others, who vocally pushed against DEI initiatives. Major companies, including Walmart, Lowe’s, Ford and Toyota, heeded the calls and dialed back their DEI programs, particularly after social media-driven campaigns by influencers like Robby Starbuck.
University of Austin, Substack
Excerpt: Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, King George III formally declared Americans to be rebels and traitors. This dashed the colonists’ hopes for a peaceful reconciliation. And set the path to declare a new nation based on the proposition that all men are created equal. But on the heels of America’s quarter-millennium since the Declaration of Independence, I want to do something a bit unfashionable: I want to defend inequality.
Of course, all men are created equal. But all men are not the same. We have unequal curiosity, unequal intellect, unequal talent, unequal courage, unequal drive, unequal achievement. I want to defend this kind of inequality because I believe it is the most important way that UATX distinguishes itself. And because being honest about inequality is the most important way that UATX can help you be extraordinary.
Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Viewpoint diversity. Civics. Western civilization. Republicans and conservative-leaning groups across the country have been using these terms prolifically, and at times interchangeably, to explain what’s lacking in higher education today and why the overhauls they’re pushing are necessary to save the sector from domination by the left.
Now the White House is fueling their push, demanding viewpoint diversity under threat of huge funding cuts. Some say universities need to reform themselves to regain public and governmental support. But even academics and higher ed observers who may agree that universities have become too one-dimensional now find themselves defending the academy against a conservative campaign to force change under the banner of terms that sometimes sound like euphemisms.
Len Gutkin
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, has fiercely defended DEI initiatives in the face of pressure to disavow them from the Trump administration. But in his forthcoming book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, he recommends that colleges jettison at least one such initiative, namely “politically loaded practices like mandatory diversity statements for job candidates.”
Given that Eisgruber has accused other college leaders, as The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch put it, “of carrying water for the Trump administration,” his concession on diversity statements matters. If even the Ivy League’s biggest defender of the status quo ante Trump has turned against diversity statements, it seems likely that they’re on the way out.
