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Alecia Taylor
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Republicans made the case in a congressional hearing on Thursday that campus diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts promote discrimination, echoing lawmakers at the state level who are working to restrict such practices.

Republican politicians and other critics increasingly argue that DEI can be racist and sexist because its model sorts identity groups based on physical characteristics and historical privilege, creating a system that pits the “oppressors” against the “oppressed.” Thursday’s hearing, held by the U.S. House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, continued that line of attack — with discussion dominated by conservative voices opposed to DEI.

Jim Martin
The News & Observer

Excerpt: Recently, all Davidson College student-athletes were required to watch a film entitled, “I’m Not Racist, Am I?” Its provocative message disavows “The Dream.” Regardless of what you think, say or do, it insists that if you’re white, you are racist. If you’re of color, you cannot be racist. In their lexicon, “racist” is just a synonym for “white.”

Oddly, some activists believe this fiction. They want to indoctrinate America’s youth for the noble goal of eliminating racism. Great. Then why insist upon bogus definitions that evoke only insult and injury? How can racism be eliminated if some of us remain melanin challenged? Their Cynical Race Theory is malicious and unworkable.

Excerpt: A war is raging over “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Opponents and supporters of DEI have very different ideas about what it is. “DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism,” hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman tweets. “Good businesses look where others don’t, to find the employees that will put your business in the best possible position to succeed,” businessman Mark Cuban counters.

Both men have a point. Some of what happens under the DEI banner is truly objectionable, even illegal—hiring, promotion and admissions standards under which race trumps qualifications, training sessions that create a hostile environment for whites. But as companies, universities and other organizations weed out these practices, they should be careful that the parts of DEI that the majority of us agree on don’t become collateral damage.

Ashlynn Warta
James G. Martin Center for Academic Freedom

Excerpt: In July of 2020, UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor sent an email to the university’s leadership cabinets requesting responses to three questions regarding “structural racism.” Through public records requests, the Martin Center obtained a copy of the many responses submitted over the following days by Chapel Hill’s academic and administrative units.

Our previous article on this subject introduced the chancellor’s DEI questionnaire and examined some of the more extreme proposals supplied by respondents. Below, we look in greater detail at the “solutions” proposed by Chapel Hill’s various divisions and schools.

By Harrison Rosenthal
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: In a recent turn of events, FIRE’s understanding of actions by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine regarding recommendations from a diversity, equity, and inclusion task force have come into question.

Isaac Barsoum 
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Leftists at Princeton cheer the assassination of Charlie Kirk — at least, that’s what you would think if you’ve been reading the Opinion section of this newspaper lately. On Sept. 17, Tigers for Israel President Maximillian Meyer ’27 declared that Princeton’s progressives exhibit “a willingness to cheer violence itself.” Princeton Tory Publisher Zach Gardner ’26 didn’t go quite so far, but did say that students “treat bloodshed flippantly,” at least in the context of Kirk’s assassination.

Here’s one problem: large portions of both their arguments rest on evidence drawn from Fizz. For the uninitiated, Fizz is a campus social media app where any Princeton student can say anything at all, true or false, behind the veil of anonymity. It is remarkable that I have to say this: Fizz is not real life.

Maximillian Meyer
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: Members of the far-left have spent years talking down to the American people from a position of self-styled moral superiority. They have scolded that it is racist to support the police, transphobic to seek to keep biological men out of women’s sports, and emboldening of Nazis to dare to support President Trump.

Rhetoric reducing political opponents to “Nazis” excuses people from ever having to engage with the other side. And when the core values of honest dissent and earnest dialogue slip out of the political arena, it’s all too easy for violence to fill the void.

Andrew Bosworth and Hellen Luo
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: A flurry of Trump administration executive orders and memos have paused, blocked, and then unblocked various streams of federal research funding since taking office, leaving scientists confused about their funding.

In his Jan. 28 email to the campus community, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 acknowledged the confusion surrounding funding, writing that “you can expect to receive guidance from the Office of the Dean for Research, which is coordinating University-wide efforts.”

Abigail Rabieh 
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: It’s been my belief that going outside of Princeton to complain about Princeton’s functioning is always wrong. The benefit of a small community is precisely its opportunity to voice your beliefs in an open forum, one that is easy to access and easy to get responses. It is not hard to publish a letter in the ‘Prince,’ and the entire undergraduate community can be accessed via an email listserv. This, of course, guarantees no changes — I know well that the University is not accountable to its constituents. But that’s just the nature of the University: it’s a place where you subordinate yourself to receive an education. 

It seems I’ve been playing by outdated rules, however, because this is not how most people interact with Princeton.

Lexi Boccuzzi
City Journal

Excerpt: By February of this year, my frustration with the biased coverage of the Daily Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania’s legacy student publication, had become irreconcilable. The paper’s leadership had consistently employed an ideological tilt to shape campus discourse, with their reporting of the protests following the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel and their strongly discouraging or outright censoring my probes into Penn’s draconian Covid-19 regulations being two prime examples.

The lock-step orthodoxy enforced by many elite-school papers should come as no surprise, given their staffs’ typical ideological makeup. In its 2023 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) report, the Daily Princetonian found that 90.2 percent of its editors identified as “left-wing.”

PEN America Press Release

Excerpt: PEN America said today calls to remove a book from a Princeton University syllabus and fire a professor were “highly misguided” and ”unwarranted.” The book in question, slated for inclusion in a course called ”The Healing Humanities — Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South,” critiques the state of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians.

Jonathan Friedman, PEN America’s program director for Free Expression and Education, said: “If we scrubbed college campuses of any book that could cause any offense, we would be left with a fairly barren environment for academic inquiry. University education is meant to challenge minds and be a place for open exchange about global political issues, even when they are contested.”

Alex Norbrook and Alan Plotz
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Princeton rolled out a new protest website two weeks ago, expanding their “time, place, and manner” restrictions to more times, more places, and more manners. By placing explicit bans on some of the most common forms of political demonstration, tightening language on obscure and inconsistently-applied existing restrictions, and departing from a constructive approach of speaking with protestors, the policies intend to stoke fear and chill protest.

We, the undersigned member organizations of the Princeton Progressive Coalition, oppose these tightened restrictions, reject the University’s hostile approach to protest, and call on all who support free speech and free expression to challenge these protest bans.

Elisabeth H. Daugherty, Brett Tomlinson, Julie Bonette, Carlett Spike
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: The pro-Palestinian protesters at Princeton slowly began cleaning up their encampment on Cannon Green Tuesday morning. Signs had been put up around the area reading, “This space is CLOSED in preparation for University events,” and workers began installing lighting for Class Day.

A video posted on Instagram by the protesters seemed to show a Public Safety official telling them Tuesday morning to leave. Urvi, a spokesperson for the protesters who is a first-year Ph.D. student and has asked to be identified only by her first name, would say only that they stand by their demands. Princeton Israel Divest Now (PIAD) published a statement on social media at 1 p.m. and said they were considering their next steps.

Annie Rupertus and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Princeton tradition and a political protest clashed on Friday, April 19, as pro-Palestine demonstrators walked near the Class of 2026 Declaration Day celebration, where recently-declared students in black and orange sweaters posed with department banners behind the iconic Nassau Hall. Some paused amid the protest, while others continued taking photographs with protesters in the background.

The demonstration, which ran for over an hour and a half, was a show of support for the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University, where students set up tents beginning Wednesday morning on the campus’ center lawn to demand Columbia divest from companies tied to Israel. On Thursday, Columbia President Minouche Shafik authorized arrests and suspensions of over 100 protesters at the encampment.

Dhruv T. Patel, Avani B. Rai, and Saketh Sundar, Crimson Staff Writers
Harvard Crimson 

Excerpt: A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration violated the Constitution when it froze more than $2.6 billion in research funding to Harvard, striking down the freeze in its entirety and delivering the University a major legal victory.

The decision from United States District Judge Allison D. Burroughs hands Harvard a summary judgment win on core constitutional grounds, finding that the administration’s freeze orders were retaliation for protected speech. She also found that the government failed to comply with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which requires agencies to give notice, investigation, and an opportunity to respond before terminating federal financial assistance over civil rights violations.

Cam N. Srivastava
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Harvard College Dean David J. Deming told students that the College can no longer host programming targeted at specific races or identity groups during a presentation to Peer Advising Fellows last week — telling attendees he assumed they already understood why the change was necessary.

Samuel A. Church and Cam N. Srivastava 
Harvard Crimson 

Excerpt: Harvard College will close its offices for minority students, LGBTQ students, and women and fold their staff and programs into a new center within the Office of Culture and Community, according to a Wednesday message from College Dean David J. Deming.

In place of the three centers, the College will establish the “Harvard Foundation” within the recently-formed OCC, under the College’s Dean of Students Office. Current staff from the Harvard College Women’s Center, Office for BGLTQ Student Life, and Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations will be reassigned to the Foundation. Roughly 50 employees worked at the three offices, including more than 15 student interns, according to archived versions of their websites.

Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: One of President Donald Trump’s latest executive orders aims to end “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion policies and could upend programs that support underrepresented groups on college campuses.

Whether the order, signed late Tuesday night, will be effective is not clear, some experts cautioned Wednesday. Others celebrated it as the end of DEI in America.

Hans Bader
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: If a university is ordered by the government to investigate each instance of speech that is bigoted to determine if it cumulatively contributed to a “hostile environment” for some minority group, it will have a powerful incentive to adopt a “zero tolerance” policy for offensive speech, to avoid the time and expense of constant investigations, and avoid potential liability for a “hostile environment.” That’s true even if the speech is political or religious, such as advocating the elimination of Israel or Palestinian self-rule or questioning Jewish, Arab, or Middle Eastern practices.

Yet, that burdensome duty to censor is more or less what the Biden administration told universities to do in recent Title VI and Title IX investigations, such as in a press release about an investigation of Drexel University for anti-Semitism, and an accompanying letter resolving the Title VI investigation.

Dear ACTA friend,

Since its founding, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has advocated for strengthening civic education at America’s colleges and universities. Our democratic republic depends on an educated citizenry—the rising generation must have a robust understanding of our nation’s history and system of government.

Our country is facing a civic knowledge crisis, and with it, a crisis of civic order. ACTA’s recent survey, Losing America’s Memory 2.0, has brought to light some startling findings about the state of civic literacy among college students. Most students are unable to identify the speaker of the House of Representatives, term lengths for members of Congress, or the branch of government with the power to declare war.

The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Harvard has some slow learners, especially in the dean’s office. Lawrence Bobo, the dean of social science, kicked up a storm this week when he wrote in the Harvard Crimson that faculty members who criticize Harvard or its policies should be subject to university punishment.

David Chmielewski
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In November 2023, I wrote a letter to the editor on the importance of remembering the radical side of Princeton’s activist history and the politics of how we remember campus activism. As I wrote that letter, I could never have imagined the incredible things that current Princeton student activists would achieve just six months later with the Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment, also known as the Popular University for Gaza.

One of our moral imperatives now is to make the memory of the encampment useful, to understand what it represented and will represent for future generations of student activists.

The Editors
National Review

Excerpt: Last week, the University of Florida peremptorily announced that it had ended its ill-fated experiment with DEI. “The University of Florida,” the college’s missive confirmed, has “closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors.”

As a practical matter, one would not wish the men and women of Tallahassee to micromanage every last feature of academic life in Gainesville, but, evidently, that is not what is happening in this case. Instead, the state’s authorities are establishing minimum guidelines for how taxpayers’ money can be spent, and they are doing so in a manner that upholds the most precious of America’s ideals.

Press release
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Each of the professors teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the California Community Colleges system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching.

The regulations explicitly require professors to pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.” Faculty performance and tenure will be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of the government’s viewpoints.

By Sarah Lehr
Wisconsin Public Radio

Excerpt: The University of Wisconsin will no longer require diversity, equity and inclusion statements from job applicants, UW System President Jay Rothman announced Thursday.

Vitus Larrieu
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: The University is investigating the disruption of a speaker event on Monday with former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 wrote to The Daily Princetonian on Tuesday. Eisgruber also said that he had personally apologized to Bennett and said he was “appalled at reports of antisemitic language” outside the event.

Eisgruber’s statement followed a letter written by Danielle Shapiro ’25 and Maximillian Meyer ’27, the respective presidents of pro-Israel student groups B’Artzeinu Princeton and Princeton Tigers for Israel. The letter accused protesters of antisemitism, asking Eisgruber to implement a campus-wide mask ban and dissolve Princeton’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The letter also called on Eisgruber to issue a public apology to Bennett and initiate disciplinary action against the protesters.

Tyler Coward, Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Freedom thrives when the people, not bureaucrats, decide which ideas are worthy of discussion, debate, or support. As FIRE has long argued, campus reform is necessary. But overreaching government coercion that tries to end-run around the First Amendment to impose an official orthodoxy is unacceptable. And the White House’s new Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education raises red flags.

The compact includes troubling language, such as calling on institutions to eliminate departments deemed to “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” Let’s be clear: Speech that offends or criticizes political views is not violence. Conflating words with violence undermines both free speech and efforts to combat real threats.

Dan Mangan
CNBC

Excerpt: The U.S. Department of Education said Wednesday that Columbia University has failed to meet the standards for accreditation because the Ivy League school “is in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws” for allegedly tolerating harassment of Jewish students on campus.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, an accrediting institution that Columbia belongs to, of the alleged violation. The department noted that by federal regulations, “accreditors are required to notify any member institution about a federal noncompliance finding and establish a plan to come into compliance.”

Jonah Valdez
The Intercept

Excerpt: In March, a group of scholars filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to block the government from detaining and deporting students and professors for speaking out about Palestine. 

Now, as the case heads to trial in Massachusetts federal court in July, those professors and students worry they may be targeted by immigration officials for speaking out in the courtroom on the witness stand. 

Nicole Barbaro Simovski, Ph.D.
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy, Substack

Excerpt: Diversity statements started to be commonly required for applications for university faculty positions starting in the 2010s. These statements—often one- to two-page essays detailing a candidate's commitment to advancing diversity, enquiry, and inclusion goals in their academic work—have been a fierce topic of debate. On the extremes, one side sees diversity statements as simply asking faculty candidates to demonstrate how they advance the university’s values. The other side sees them as thinly veiled ideological filters in hiring.

After a decade, following intense controversy over the use of these statements in hiring, the UC system has officially put an end to the practice.

Nicole Barbaro Simovski, Ph.D.
Free the Inquiry

Excerpt: Diversity statements started to be commonly required for applications for university faculty positions starting in the 2010s. These statements—often one- to two-page essays detailing a candidate's commitment to advancing diversity, enquiry, and inclusion goals in their academic work—have been a fierce topic of debate. On the extremes, one side sees diversity statements as simply asking faculty candidates to demonstrate how they advance the university’s values. The other side sees them as thinly veiled ideological filters in hiring.

Kyle Cheney
Politico

Excerpt: A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s bid to deprive federal funding from programs that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives.

U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson ruled that Trump’s policy likely violates the First Amendment because it penalizes private organizations based on their viewpoints. And the judge said the policy is written so vaguely that it chills the free speech of federal contractors concerned they will be punished if they don’t eliminate programs meant to encourage a diverse workforce.

Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A federal district judge in Kentucky tossed out President Biden’s overhaul of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, ruling Thursday that the regulations exceeded the department’s statutory authority and violated the U.S. Constitution.

The Education Department is now unable to enforce the new regulations, which took effect last summer following a lengthy process to rewrite a rule put in place by the first Trump administration. The decision was part of a lawsuit brought by Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The firing of a University of Michigan official has raised questions about who was involved in the decision as well as why exactly the diversity, equity and inclusion leader was shown the door.

Many media outlets reported within the past few days that the university fired Rachel Dawson, who led the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives, after she allegedly made antisemitic comments at a conference in March. University officials initially declined to fire Dawson but reversed course after facing pressure from at least one member of the Board of Regents, The New York Times reported.

Nicholas Confessore and Steve Friess
New York Times

Excerpt: The University of Michigan will no longer require diversity statements as part of faculty hiring, promotion and tenure decisions, the school announced on Thursday, marking a major shift at one of the country’s leading public research institutions.

The new policy, issued by Michigan’s provost, comes as the university’s regents weigh a broader overhaul of its sprawling diversity, equity and inclusion programs, among the most ambitious and well financed in the country.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: North Carolina’s four-year public universities have eliminated 59 positions and “realigned” about 130 more since the University of North Carolina Board of Governors repealed the system’s DEI policy, according to a newly released summary from the UNC system.

In May, the board voted 22 to 2 to repeal and replace its policy with one that doesn’t mention race. The board required universities to report on their efforts to comply by the start of last week, and the UNC System released the results from this “equality certification” Wednesday.

Chris Linder

Inside Higher Ed

I was a victim advocate on a college campus for seven years. Since 2011, I have worked as a faculty member whose research, teaching and activism focuses on addressing sexual violence among college students. And for the past five years, I’ve led the development of a center for violence prevention on a campus where three women were murdered by domestic or dating partners in one year, followed by an additional alleged domestic violence homicide four years later.

Few things make me more ashamed or angry than the way the federal government attempts to intervene in sexual misconduct on college campuses. Politicians use survivors and transgender students as pawns in a political power struggle.

Wherefore art thou, Romeo? South Carolina’s new, one-size-fits-all library regulations will restrict access to the classics
John Coleman
FIRE

Excerpt: Yesterday, the South Carolina State Board of Education imposed new regulations requiring the removal of all books that include any description of “sexual conduct” from every public school library in the state. This means that classic literary works like “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Canterbury Tales,” and “Ulysses” could be taken off the shelves, raising First Amendment concerns.

Blanket bans like this one in South Carolina impose one-size-fits-all, top-down mandates that require school district administrators to review library books without analyzing whether the specific content is suitable for specific age groups and grade levels.

Nadine Strossen
Persuasion

Excerpt: The current Supreme Court term includes a cluster of cases that could well shape the future of online free speech. These cases invite the Court to determine the power of both government officials and social media platforms concerning “content moderation” policies, which in turn define platform users’ speech rights.

Given the unparalleled importance of these platforms for all manner of communication—personal, professional, and political—meaningful free speech rights depend on the platforms’ policies. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Court’s rulings over the next weeks may well determine the shape of speech online for years to come.

Megan McArdle
Washington Post

Excerpt: After a decade of ever-escalating commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion, elite campuses are reversing course. It's amazing to watch such an abrupt volte-face. What’s even more amazing is how far things went beforehand and how long the correction took to arrive.

Such double-think regimes are vulnerable to what economist Timur Kuran calls a “preference cascade in reverse”: As people realize their neighbors share their skepticism, they start voicing their true opinions, an effect that dominoes until the whole regime collapses.

Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: After months of grappling with a campus fractured by a polarizing debate over the Israel-Hamas war, Harvard announced on Tuesday that the University and its leadership will refrain from taking official positions on controversial public policy issues.

The University’s new stance followed a report produced from a faculty-led “Institutional Voice” working group, which advised leadership to not “issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.” Interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 wrote in an email that he accepted the working group’s recommendations, which were also endorsed by the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body.

Abigail Shrier
The Free Press

Excerpt: A police officer who pulls over speeding black motorists—and only black motorists—isn’t protecting “law and order.” He’s engaging in invidious discrimination. So too the university administrators who suddenly discover they are free speech absolutists only when student protesters call for the death of their Jewish classmates.

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.” But a “contrasting perspective” on diversity statements that the Crimson published argued that “furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring.”

But people who see the flaws of the status quo should not be seduced by the illusion that tweaking how DEI statements are solicited or scored is a solution. In fact, interviewing Hall, the ostensible reformer in the Harvard Crimson debate, left me more convinced that abolishing DEI statements is the best way forward.