A Look at Princeton's DEI Structure Amid Trump Trashing DEI

By Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Princetonians for Free Speech Original Content

“Princeton Doubles Down on DEI Amid Nationwide Attacks,” the Princeton Alumni Weekly reported recently – and a few weeks later, the Trump Administration launched at warp speed a profusion of legal and rhetorical attacks on universities and their DEI programs for alleged sins against freedom of speech and for “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination.” The Administration may make major cuts of outlays to universities, and Vice President J.D. Vance and others have spoken of taxing income on university endowments. 

The pressure is intense on Princeton and all other universities to have a deep and prompt review of their DEI policies, their design and effectiveness, their use of overt and covert racial and gender preferences in admissions, financial aid, faculty hiring and training, racially segregated dormitories, graduation ceremonies, and other programming.

The little-known nature and size of Princeton’s DEI -- “diversity, equity, and inclusion”-- activities appear by some estimates to be more extensive, at least in terms of numbers of DEI personnel, than at most other Ivy League schools, and much more extensive than at most larger state schools – although modest by comparison with some, such as the huge and much-remarked DEI bureaucracy at the University of Michigan. Meanwhile, the University of Virginia spends an estimated $20 million a year to or for employees who work on diversity, equity and inclusion, according to an analysis of the public school’s spending by a group called OpenTheBooks.com. It said UVA has at least 235 employees whose job titles signal they do DEI work for the school. (UVA has claimed this was inaccurate.)

This article will describe in some detail Princeton’s DEI activities and the effects university DEI programs have had across the nation, and will sketch the Trump Administration’s anti-DEI policies.

I think that careful change on the DEI and racial and gender fairness fronts would be a good thing at Princeton as well as around the country -- if done right. But on the risk of trusting the Trump Administration to do it right, see Columbia University’s John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia and New York Times columnist He writes:

“The problem with Trump’s executive order is that it goes beyond addressing this recent transmogrification of DEI [into “an institutionalized anti-whiteness”] and puts a wholesale pox on what a certain kind of person is given to calling ‘stirring up that stuff’ about race. . . .  There is no mending in Trump’s order, which instead attempts to simply vaporize any institutionalized commitment to social justice. One can be utterly revolted by the way DEI has been practiced of late while still supporting institutions that use outreach strategies to identify applicants less likely to come to their attention via normal channels.” See also Cathy Young’s “Donald Trump is no Warrior for Free Speech.”

Also, on February 21 a federal judge blocked Trump’s bid to deprive federal funding from programs that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives. U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson, of Baltimore, ruled that Trump’s policy likely violates the First Amendment because it penalizes private groups based on their viewpoints and is written so vaguely that it chills the free speech of federal contractors.  Litigation over the scattershot, sometimes perverse Trump offensive will no doubt continue for years

And in the words of Wenyuan Wu, “expecting the visible hand of swift government action to undo decades of damages from omnipresent thought capture is plain wishful thinking.”

Meanwhile, there are green shoots of reform at a few universities, including the recent adoption of the “Vanderbilt-WashU Statement of Principles,” by the Boards of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, “to affirm and codify each university’s ongoing commitment to . . . values,” including“to pursue the truth wherever it lies [without] a political ideology or . . . a particular vision of social change.”

Princeton Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity (since 2011) Michele Minter has “estimated there are about 75 DEI practitioners” at the University (which has about 5,600 undergraduates) spanning many different offices.Some analyses and insiders suggest that universities generally have more employees focused on DEI than their titles suggest, and that some have outsourced their DEI functions to third-party providers. Minter’s own office lists a staff of 20 including her. More broadly, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni reported that administrative costs per student at Princeton rose from $18,000 in 2013 to $34,000 in 2022 (with comparable rises at MIT, Harvard, and Stanford).

Princeton also has an “Office of Diversity and Inclusion–Campus Life (ODI),” which includes the Carl A. Fields Center and the Gender + Sexuality Resource Center. The School of Public and International Affairs has a  well-developed DEI program. Its website says: “Over the last year, over 120 students have attended weekly DEI dinners, discussing topics like racial equity analysis and disability allyship, and celebrating the rich diversity of our community. The DEI team supports several graduate affinity groups, including the Students and Alumni of Color (SAOC), FIRST+ (first-generation and/or low-income (FGLI) students, alumni, professors, and staff), SPIA LGBTQ+, SPIA Latine, SPIA AAPI groups, and any students interested in hosting programming that celebrates identity and experiences of its members and the communities they serve.”

The Athletics Department has its own “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Policies”;  the English Department has its own “diversity statement,” among other things. And so on.

 “One website, ‘Visions for a More Just World — To Be Known and Heard: Systemic Racism and Princeton University,’ was recently taken down,” the Daily Princetonian reported.

“According to an archived version of the website, it aims to confront the history of racism at Princeton and share current anti-racist work at the University. The website included documentation of initiatives, such as removing Woodrow Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs, endowing a professorship in Indigenous Studies, and creating The Princeton & Slavery Project. It also included history and interviews about racism at the University. While the exact date it was removed is unclear, a version of the website was up as recently as Jan. 20.”

Another statistical analysis comes from a  March 14, 2023 article by Kevin Wallstein., drawing on a Heritage Foundation study. It estimated that Princeton has about 5 DEI personnel per 1,000 undergraduates, or about 28, leading the Ivy League except for Harvard’s more than 8 per 1,000, and far above the 1.8 DEI bureaucrats to 1,000 students averaged by public universities. (I cannot explain the difference between the Wallstein/Heritage and Minter estimates.)

At Princeton, which some fault for a kind of “politicized orthodoxy,” all important decisions ultimately pass through President Eisgruber, who has held his job since September 2013. The Board of Trustees acts, according to some insiders and outward appearances, as a rubber stamp.

After Trump was first elected in 2016, and amid the of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements,Time magazine stated in 2019 that the DEI industry had "exploded" in size. Within academia, a 2019 survey found that spending on DEI efforts had increased 27 percent over the five preceding academic years.”

How does DEI affect Princeton students and faculty? President Eisgruber has suggested that it enlightens students, while also acknowledging thatthose who identify as “extremely conservative” report lower rates of belonging than others and higher rates of concern about being treated respectfully. He has also asserted that “racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in structures of the university itself,” and he outlined a wide range of “anti-racism” initiatives, such as ‘[d]evelop[ing] an institution-wide, multiyear action plan for supplier and contractor diversity,bringing together and expanding efforts focused on procurement and diversification of vendors, consultants, professional firms, and other business partners, including external investment managers.”

In contrast to the touted benefits of DEI programming, much evidence suggests it is counterproductive.  For example, a recent study reportedly found, “[D]iversity, equity, and inclusion materials have a wide range of negative consequences, including psychological harm, increased hostility, and greater agreement with extreme authoritarian rhetoric, such as adapted Adolf Hitler quotes.” 

But for perspective, it’s worth noting the experience of a man named Jesse Owen:“[B]etween the years of 2015 and 2021, I served — in various capacities — [at Casenovia College, Near Syracuse, New York] in roles that would be considered DEI under current law and never once was involved in Affirmative Action. . . . The current debates over DEI are deeply frustrating to me, even though as a relatively well-off, straight white US-born man, none of the policies explicitly aim to assist me. This is because I know that the brush paints an incredibly wide swath over policies that I believe most Americans would support, if not benefit from.”

The greatest sin by activist Princeton faculty and DEI and other administrators against free speech and open inquiry –well-documented by mathematics Professor Sergiu Klainerman in 2022 (too long ago to be revisited in detail now) -- was the dishonest smearing of highly respected then-Professor of Classics Joshua Katz as a racist by many administrators and faculty in 2021. This was followed in 2022 by Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s firing of the tenured professor. The reason given was that Katz had not responded appropriately to the University’s 2018 investigation of his consensual relationship with a 21-year-old student more than a decade earlier, for which he had already been suspended for a year without pay. The real reason for firing Katz, in the view of many Eisgruber critics (including me), was Katz’s widely assailed 2020 Quillette article calling a group of students who had been known years before as the Black Justice League “a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands.”

As four distinguished Princeton professors – John Londregan, Sergiu Klainerman, Michael A. Reynolds, and Bernard Haykel -- wrote in 2022, under the headline “Academic Administrators Are Strangling Our Universities”: “In retaliation for publishing opinions that Princeton administrators disliked, administrators deliberately misquoted [Katz] and held him up to the incoming class [in the online ‘To Be Known and Heard’ presentation] as the epitome of racism.”In the words of Professor Robert P. George, “There is no question in my mind as to whether Katz was defamed . . . . Nor am I in any doubt as to whether the underlying motives were malicious.”

It is unclear exactly who prepared which parts of the presentation and who approved the presentation’s initial publication and its later use in the mandatory 2021 freshman orientation. But DEI bureaucrats were involved. The official “co-sponsors” of the presentation included the Office of the Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity, Michele Minter; the “Advisory Group” included Shawn Maxam, a Minter subordinate; the two “Project Leads” included the above-mentioned Carl A. Fields Center.

(Vice Provost Minter has not yet responded to repeated requests for comment.)

The four professors continued: “When a group of [eight] faculty led by Sergiu Klainerman [filed a complaint about the online presentation’s treatment of Katz] and was turned down [by the same Michele Minter], they recurred to a faculty appeals committee. That committee unanimously denounced the Eisgruber administration’s behavior, and recommended the administrators tasked with the investigation be removed from it. President Eisgruber has chosen to ignore the findings of the faculty committee, citing a second, secret, investigation of the administration’s conduct, conducted by...the administrators.”

Some students feel that DEI puts a chill on free speech. As senior Alba Basri puts it: “It is clear to me that the DEI ideology and policies . . .  have spilled into classrooms. Many professors have enthusiastically endorsed these policies and bring them up in the classroom. I am enrolled in Molecular Biology 101 this semester, and I was displeased to see that a full page of the syllabus (page 4-5) was dedicated to DEI principles. . . . No matter how much Eisgruber and others argue that inclusivity and free speech go hand in hand, declarations such as these undoubtedly have a chilling effect on free speech. One value must take priority over the other, and it is clear which one the University has chosen to prioritize.”

Some faculty members agree, and add that free speech is not the only value harmed by DEI programs. Said Mathematics Professor Klainerman in an email:“DEI has redefined equity to mean that ‘every visible disparity between groups has its origin in discrimination.’ It is this fact, more than anything else, that explains the terrible impact that DEI has on universities.

“As direct forms of discrimination are now virtually nonexistent in academia, discrimination has been redefined as an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be observed directly. Rather, it manifests instead through unequal outcomes. Once justice was reformulated in terms of equality of results, it became untenable to insist on merit and the pursuit of truth; these values had to be abandoned or redefined, whenever they came into conflict with the new orthodoxy.’’

Said another faculty member, who preferred not to be named because of the sensitivity of his comments:“[A]t Princeton concerns about identity are all around. In many conversations about hiring or graduate admissions, race and/or gender are introduced. People will assert that ‘this job must go to an A or B,’ in spite of federal law and merit. Many of the Princeton institutions to which I pay attention have made inappropriate statements.” And, this faculty member added, for years the faculty hiring process has been permeated with quasi-covert racial/gender preferences.

Abigail Anthony, a 2023 graduate and journalist who now sits on the Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) board, wrote in 2023, in  “How Academic Freedom Died at Princeton”: “In recent years, Princeton has embraced the imperatives of diversity, equity, and inclusion, making it an unwelcoming space for anyone—conservative or liberal, religious or secular—who happens to dissent.”

Anthony, a self-described conservative, continued: “Princeton’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are misnamed: They divide, exclude, and ostracize students of all political affiliations by rendering it socially dangerous to express any criticism of progressive mantras. Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees, which could explain the land acknowledgements in syllabi and the deluge of departmental anti-racism statements that inform students what can and can’t be said in class. . .  

“Princeton’s diversity bureaucracy functions as an ideological surveillance system that regulates the social and academic cultures. Freshman orientation has compulsory events that include ‘diversity and inclusion’ in the session’s title, as well as mandatory programs on LGBTQ identity, ‘mindfulness,’ socioeconomic status, and the university’s ‘history of systemic racism.’”

Speaking of ideological surveillance, a 2024 graduate, Matthew Wilson, who has done work for PFS, wrote in 2023, in “Princeton’s Bias-Reporting System Is Stifling Campus,” that:

“Princeton maintains a highly sophisticated bias-reportingapparatus that incorporates elements . . . from anonymous reporting to third-party hosting software . . . overseen by the university’s DEI office, known as the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity. The DEI office accepts two types of bias reports — those made in-person, by email, or through an online form by identified complainants; and those made anonymously. Both faculty members and students can be the subject of bias reports. . . . 

“Along with reports of fraud, theft, and sexual misconduct, members of the campus community can . . . submit anonymous reports alleging bias or discrimination. . . . Student data . . . can be handed over to government authorities or private parties upon request. . . . Princeton also keeps its own documentation of bias reports. In an email, Princeton spokesman Michael Hotchkiss [implied] to me that Princeton files away all bias reports — including complaints sent in anonymously and those which are judged to be frivolous or baseless — in order to use their contents to justify further interventions into academic affairs and student life by DEI administrators. . . .”

“[E]ven when Princeton determines that reported bias constituted protected speech, or did not occur at all, accused persons can still be subject to what are known as ‘No Communication’ and ‘No Contact’ orders.… No-communication and no-contact orders were originally intended to shield victims of sexual assault and harassment from their assailant. But Princeton has recently deployed them as weapons to silence student journalists and heterodox voices on campus.”

Wilson concluded that “[a]ll of this creates an atmosphere of mutual mistrust and repression” and that “Princeton’s labyrinthine bias-reporting apparatus . . . poses dueling significant risks to free speech and student privacy. By encouraging students to tell on peers whose speech they find offensive and facilitating a campus culture of anonymous reporting, no-contact orders, and self-censorship, Princeton’s bias-reporting system utterly fails to uphold the university’s stated commitment to ‘protect and promote free expression.’” 

DEI surveillance explicitly undermined academic freedom in at least one incident, with President Eisgruber’s full support. As PFS reported in January 2022, Michele Minter was brought in by Firestone Library’s chief librarian Anne Jarvis to excise the work of two eminent 19th Century Jewish artists from a planned exhibit because these artists had Confederate ties. The exhibit’s creator and Princeton major donor Leonard Milberg’53 cancelled the exhibit in protest.  (President Eisgruber made the preposterous claim that, in censoring the exhibit’s content, Minter and Jarvis were exercising their free speech rights.)

Vice Provost Minter “credits the support of University presidents Shirley Tilghman and Christopher Eisgruber ’83 for Princeton’s commitment to and expansion of DEI work despite necessary adjustments to accommodate evolving legal and regulatory requirements,” according to the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Trump has of course exuded across-the-board hostility to such programs, as PFS cofounder Ed Yingling wrote on January 24: “[A]mong the many Executive Orders signed by President Trump are three that, while not specifically addressing campus free speech or academic freedom, show the intention to move aggressively on these and related issues. The first relates to DEI policies in government and
the second relates broadly to government censorship of speech at the federal level. The third, most important for higher education, aims to end discriminatory policies and restore merit-based opportunities throughout the country.” opportunities throughout the country.”

To give a taste of the Trump offensive:

--"New Executive Order tries to curb colleges’ attempts to circumvent ban on affirmative action,” widely read essayist Jerry Coyne asserted in his “Why Evolution Is True” blog  in January.

--“The Department of Education on Friday [Feb 7] canceled $15 million in federal grants that were used to fund diversity programs at three universities, according to information provided by a department official, the latest move in the Trump Administration’s efforts to defund DEI,” Aaron Sibarium wrote in The Washington Free Beacon on February 10.”

He added: “Ostensibly meant for teacher training and development, the grants were in fact used to support courses and workshops on DEI concepts—including ‘white privilege,’ ‘systemic racism,’ and ‘linguistic supremacy’—as well as the establishment of a ‘social justice’ center. The awards were part of the over $1 billion that the Biden Education Department spent on diversity programs in American schools, nearly half of which went to grants for race-based hiring.”

--“I thought the academic DEI juggernaut was unstoppable,” wrote Lawrence Krauss inThe Wall Street Journal.“Then a week after President Trump’s inauguration, I got an email with an announcement from the Department of Energy: ‘The Office of Science is immediately ending the requirement for Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) Plans in any proposal submitted. . . . ‘

“[This]is seismic. The major source of physical science research support in the country has sent a message to universities: Stick to science. It may be the death knell of what appeared to be an invulnerable academic bureaucracy that has been impeding the progress of higher education and research for at least a decade.”

Litigation over the scattershot, sometimes perverse Trump offensive will no doubt continue for years. On February 21 a Baltimore-based federal judge blocked Trump’s bid to deprive federal funding from programs that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives. U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson, of Baltimore, ruled that Trump’s policy likely violates the First Amendment because it penalizes private groups based on their viewpoints and is written so vaguely that it chills the free speech of federal contractors.

The ever-increasing polarization of university faculty and (especially DEI) administrators into what now amounts to an overwhelming majority who are left of center and a shrinking handful who are right of center has done grave damage to the ability of faculty and students aliketo think. (The same would be true if the right were as dominant as the left is now.) To borrow from FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff: “[I]deological bubbles and echo chambers are where free expression and the free exchange of ideas go to die.”

Jonathan Rauch, an uncommonly wise author and journalist who skews neither left nor right, makes a similar point: “In a room where everyone agrees with everyone else on fundamentals that don’t get questioned, you will not be learning. You will be making mistakes, and you will be unaware of those mistakes.”

Rauch continues: “Consider the data collected by Pew Research when it asked Americans whether they agree with the proposition, ‘Colleges have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country.’ During the decade spanning 2012 and 2022, the percentage expressing agreement went from 26 percent to 45 percent. Almost half of Americans now think that colleges have a negative effect on the country. That’s a collapse in confidence—one that I believe has been caused by at least six separate factors.”

The first factor Rauch cites is “the rising ideology that said ‘fact’ is merely a colonialist, sexist construction; and that we should not put stock in the concept of objectivity, as it’s just a power play. This ideology has seeped in deeply, including a variant that says intellectual inquiry and the very idea of fact endangers the safety of minorities.”

The second factor, he notes, is “emotional fragility—some of it real, some of it not so real. But in both cases, there is a sense that if you expose people to ideas that offend them, or which are shocking, or which seem harmful to them, you are committing a form of violent assault. . . .Almost all university professors have by now encountered some version of this.”

Third comes homogeneity: “[T]here is the dramatic change in the political leanings of American professors . . . since the Cold War period. As recently as the mid-1990s, the percentage of university faculty members self-reporting centrist political views was only slightly lower than the percentage self-describing as left or liberal; and conservatives still amounted to roughly one-fifth of university academics. Then, beginning in the late 1990s, you see a massive shift. And within the space of just two decades, about 60 percent of faculty were on the left, and only about 12 percent were conservative.”

“As for Harvard University faculty’s political leanings, a 2021 Harvard Crimson poll found that about 3 percent of participating academics self-reported as conservative; 19.5 percent were “moderate”; and the rest—77.6 percent—described themselves as liberal (about 48 percent) or “very liberal” (about 30 percent). When you’re in a community as politically homogeneous as this, it becomes hard to question orthodoxy and, thus, to do good science.”

Fourth, says Rauchcomes politicization, and the need to “toe a certain line” to get funding, or a promotion, or a job, including in the natural sciences, 

Fifth, there is discrimination: “Consider survey research published by Eric Kaufmann in 2021. He asked academics in Canada, the United States, and the UK whether they engaged in discrimination against conservatives. In all three countries, a significant number of professors and PhD students reported that they’d discriminated against right-leaning ideas or scholars when evaluating papers, grant applications, and promotions. And remember that Kaufmann’s data, … tracks only those academics who admit discriminating. . . .”

“Understandably, as Kaufmann’s results demonstrate, conservatives perceive a toxic environment on campus. When asked whether their academic department presented a ‘hostile climate towards people with your political beliefs,’ only 3–5 percent of leftist academics answered in the affirmative. Among conservatives, the corresponding figure was about 70 percent.”

And sixth, adds Rauch, there is bureaucratization. “At Ohio State University, to take one well-known example, there were no fewer than 189 full-time DEI staff as of 2023—up from 88 just five years earlier. And while the head count roughly doubled during that period, the total compensation paid to DEI staffers tripled, to more than US $20-million per year. . . . [M]any of these newly hired people aren’t academics by training. They don’t do science. They don’t do research. They may not have ever stepped in a classroom as a teacher. Yet at many universities, these are now the people who are telling tenured professors what to do and how to do it—whether in or out of the classroom.”

“When you put those six factors together,” adds Rauch, “and then allow them to reinforce each other, the result is to distort and chill academic life.”

The best data we have seen on the effects of DEI bureaucracies on the free speech climate at universities in general suggests, in the words of the Wallstein article, that:

“Universities with more DEI personnel are only creating a more welcoming, accepting, and inclusive environment when the question is whether controversial liberal speakers should be allowed to speak on campus. On every other dimension of campus speech, larger DEI bureaucracies do not lead to better free speech climates. What’s more, along a number of other dimensions of campus speech (e.g. student comfort with expression outside of classrooms, support for disruptive action in response to offensive speech, the perceived difficulty of having ‘open and honest’ conversations), universities with more DEI employees perform worse. In short, DEI bureaucracies commonly hurt and infrequently help free expression on college campuses. Whatever their benefits (and they may be considerable on other dimensions), DEI bureaucracies do not help speech climates.” 

In a more recent (January 11) article, headlined “How the rise of woke ‘educrats’ is destroying higher education,” the Manhattan Institute’s Ilya Shapiro, Princeton ’99, wrote: “The statistics on the growth of nonteaching staff are mind-boggling. In the 25 years ending in 2012, the number of professional university employees who don’t teach grew at about twice the rate of students. In the same period, tuition at public colleges more than tripled.

“What all this really means,” Shapiro added, “is that students are paying more and more to fund an expanding cohort of well-compensated bureaucrats, without getting anything in return. And this isn’t just a budget issue. Administrators are more radical than professors, and not steeped in norms of academic freedom, all of which detract from the educational environment.”

Shapiro continued: “A 2018 survey found that faculty had a liberal-to-conservative ratio of about 6 to 1, with 13% of our nation’s professors self-identifying on the right. Students are more balanced: 42% of freshmen called themselves centrist, while 36% said they were liberal and 22% conservative. 

“In contrast, two-thirds of higher-ed administrators self-identified as liberal — with 40% calling themselves far-left — and only 5% said they were on the right. That makes for a  liberal-to-conservative ratio of 12 to 1.”

The racial affirmative action preferences in admissions that the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional last year have been championed by the same university administrators who promote expanding DEI programs So far, the decision has produced surprisingly minimal effect on Princeton’s admissions. 

Not much has changed since 2021, when the University announced that “[s]ixty-eight percent of U.S. citizens or permanent residents in the [newly admitted class of 2025] self-identified as people of color, including biracial and multiracial students.” Or 2024, when31.3 percent self-identified as white. In stark contrast, the 2001-02 school year, 63.5% of enrolled freshman students (752 out of 1195) were white. Such numbers have caught the eye of Trump insiders, who suspect that Princeton might be hearing from federal civil rights enforcers.

There are also anecdotes about how the racial preferences may work. A Princeton student reported to a source of mine that she and other Jewish students had complained to a Princeton admissions officer that the number of admitted Orthodox Jews had shrunk to the point that it is hard to have a well-attended minyan ritual. The response was that admitting another white Jewish kid would not help Princeton's diversity numbers. See also “Teen hired by Google was rejected by 16 colleges. Now he’s suing for discrimination.”

And while “President Eisgruber claimed in last year’s ‘State of the University’ letter  that such ‘inclusivity’ enhances excellence,” University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne countered that “there is a tradeoff between excellence and [racially preferential] diversity.” Bill Hewitt ‘74 recently argued in the Princeton Alumni Weekly that “the pursuit of diversity through measures that diminish meritocratic standards undermines academic rigor” and that “race-based measures work against Martin Luther King Jr.’s goal that individuals be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.”

From Wallstein:

“[T]he rise of DEI bureaucracies has actually coincided with the beginning of a ‘Free-Speech Crisis on College Campuses’. Careful observers of American higher education saw the tension between DEI and free speech early on. Most notably, ina 2016 lecture, Jonathan Haidt pointed out that universities were now attempting to simultaneously pursue ‘two incompatible sacred values’: truth and social justice.

“Haidt argued for a schism in higher education, with universities explicitly adopting either a John Stuart Mill-style commitment to the pursuit of truth through unfettered speech or a Karl Marx-ian commitment to the pursuit of ‘social justice’ (even if it occurred at the expense of free expression). . . . It was clear from the start that, regardless of what was on their websites, DEI bureaucracies were more likely to suppress than encourage free expression on college campuses.”

In a 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed, headlined “How ‘Diversity’ Turned Tyrannical,” Lawrence Krauss wrote that DEI had created “a climate of pervasive fear on campus” that was shutting down vitally important discussions. According to Krauss, “The DEI monomania has contributed to the crisis of free speech on campus.”

A document circulated by California Community Colleges, headed “DEI in the Curriculum: Model Principles and Practices,” counsels: “Take care not to ‘weaponize’ academic freedom and academic integrity as tools to impede equity in an academic discipline or inflict curricular trauma on our students, especially historically marginalized students.”

Wallstein summarizes: 

“DEI and free expression have now become the antithesis of each other. . . . As I demonstrate below, more DEI personnel are, in fact, associated with notably worse attitudes toward free expression among college students. As I also show, however, DEI programs do not always matter in the ways that their critics assume. Specifically, using a combination of FIRE’s 2022 survey and the Heritage Foundation’s 2021 report ‘Diversity University: DEI Bloat in the Academy,’ I find that larger DEI bureaucracies: (1) increase student tolerance for liberal speakers while exerting no effect on tolerance for conservative speakers; (2) raise levels of discomfort related to self-expression outside of the classroom but have little impact on self-expression inside of it; (3) encourage marginally more support for attempts to disrupt campus speech through violence, blockages, and shout-downs; and (4) leave students feeling that ‘open and honest’ conversations are difficult on a slightly larger group of political issues.

“Overall, then, there is a significant amount of evidence that DEI is bad for campus speech climates and an even greater amount of evidence that DEI does very little to promote viewpoint inclusion. . . . [O]n every single one of the 71 campuses, there was more tolerance, on average, for liberal speakers than conservative speakers, especially at universities with more DEI personnel per 1,000 students.” On the other hand, “it appears that DEI bureaucracies have not (at least up until this point) significantly shaped the way students feel about expressing themselves in the classroom,” while “the greater the relative size of the DEI bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students feel expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students.”

In addition, adds Wallstein, “The graph suggests a strong and positive relationship between the size of a university’s DEI bureaucracy and the acceptability of disruptive conduct to prevent a controversial speech from taking place on campus, with more DEI personnel being correlated with a stronger willingness to accept disruptive behavior (r=.55, p=.00).”  And “universities with more liberal students are significantly more likely to endorse disruption (r=.74, p=.00). . . . DEI probably does not reduce support for disruption and may slightly increase it. . . . Students seem . . . to find it challenging to talk to each other about a larger set of issues when their universities employ a relatively large number of DEI personnel. . . . [W]e must conclude that although DEI bureaucracies may or may not make ‘open and honest’ conversations on college campuses harder, they almost certainly do not make them easier.”

As the above-mentioned article by Princeton professors Londregan, Klainerman, Reynolds, and Haykel concludes:“If nothing is done to revive universities by recentering their core mission around the faculty power, campus visits may soon differ little in substance from trips to see the T-Rex at the Museum of Natural History.”

Stuart Taylor, Jr. is President of Princetonians for Free Speech.