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For years, you’ve been warned about the freakout on college campuses. The situation has gotten out of control, but the tide may have turned in 2023 when the radical ideologies of America’s elite universities were exposed. The situation was further improved by the appointment of Sen. Ben Sasse to lead the University of Florida. Now that President Donald Trump is once again in the White House, he is eliminating incentives for DEI programs on college campuses, and the purpose of higher education may be restored. John Sailer and Louis Galarowicz explain the effect of DEI on the University of Colorado, writing:
President Trump’s executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” reaffirms what has been true since the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Discrimination in hiring isn’t allowed. The order will deter universities from violating the law. Its ripple effects could also help reverse a related trend: ideological discrimination, which has reshaped the very meaning of higher education.
At the University of Colorado, Boulder, administrators, department heads and professors worked in tandem to advance racial preferences in hiring, documents acquired through a public-records request reveal. In the process, they recruited faculty who pushed the university’s research agenda in a more ideological direction, often with the aim of better recruiting minorities.
In a hiring proposal that the National Association of Scholars acquired, faculty and staff of the university’s program for writing and rhetoric argued that recruiting a “BIPOC” professor—the acronym stands for “black, indigenous and people of color”—was vital to the department’s “curricular and programmatic goals.” Faculty at the department of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures, proposing to hire a German-studies professor, touted the racial diversity of the department’s preferred candidate and explained how she could revise courses on fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy to incorporate “critical race studies perspectives.”
Both of these scholars, and many more, were hired through the university’s Faculty Diversity Action Plan, a special funding program for diversity-focused faculty hiring, which ran until 2023, when it was restructured and renamed. Created in 2020, the program played a significant role in dictating whom the university hired. In a 2022 faculty meeting, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was asked how many professors were hired through the program since it began. He estimated that around 90% were either hired through the program or were spousal hires.
The records acquired—the Faculty Diversity Action Plan proposals that resulted in successful hires—reveal the ambition of the diversity, equity and inclusion movement. Through the program, the university brazenly prompted departments to select faculty based on race. In many cases, this went hand in hand with a declared preference for hiring scholar-activists.
One version of the application form, which was used in dozens of the hiring plans, asks departments: “How will this hire increase the number of underrepresented faculty members in the unit (e.g., US Faculty of Color, women in disciplines where underrepresented)?”
The university’s framing should have immediately raised legal red legal flags. Long before Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned race-based discrimination, which President Trump’s executive order reaffirms. Consultants often remind universities that they can’t base hiring decisions on race.
Yet, competing for the funds to bring in new faculty, academic departments happily followed administrators’ prompting and boasted about their intent to discriminate. “Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community,” wrote faculty and staff at the journalism department. “Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member,” wrote faculty at the geography department.
The program ram-rodded its diversity priorities at an impressive scale. Several plans proposed not only single hires but the hiring of multiple professors at once. “This cluster hire,” faculty and staff at the college of engineering and applied science wrote, “has the goal of doubling our underrepresented faculty in the college.” Another cluster hire, faculty at the information science department noted, “emphasizes hiring Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Latinx, and Pacific Islander faculty.” Faculty at the department of ethnic studies wrote: “We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.”
The proposals are remarkable for their candor. It’s also absurd that while referring to the specter of systemic racism, they propose systemic discrimination.
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