DEI is Broken and Evasive. Universities Need to Dispense with the Raggedy Old Ideology With No Relevance for Students

In North Carolina, a profound realization is happening across state universities—no one really misses DEI now that it’s gone.

In June 2024, the UNC Board of Governors, which oversees all public universities in North Carolina, released guidance stating that DEI offices are in violation of their broad principles of equality and institutional neutrality. Yet on June 10th, guerrilla investigators found former Western Carolina University Director of Institutional Assessment Karen Price admitting that WCU is trying to “embed” DEI in its university anyways. In the video, the investigator said that WCU is trying to make DEI unable to be “legislated out,” to which Price agreed enthusiastically.

This video release shortly followed another video posted on June 3rd in which another investigator goaded now former UNC-Asheville Dean of Students Megan Pugh to say that she will keep implementing their vision for equity until “more or less, they get mad at us, but they haven't done it yet."

And that video followed the exposure and viral transmission of a video in which UNC-Charlotte Assistant Director of Leadership & Community Engagement Janique Sanders boldly proclaimed that “we’ve renamed; we’ve reorganized; we’ve recalibrated, so to speak,” DEI at the university and that they merely changed the language of DEI to evade the Board of Governors ruling on it.

Liberal outlets piled on the video investigators for the tactics that garnered these admissions from university staff (WCU initially said that the interviewers posed as “distressed students”). But there is no dispute about the truth of the words that were being said, repeatedly, by NC administrative staff: they are intent on evading rulings on DEI.

Of course, these videos reveal just how expendable DEI really is.

During the height of the “Great Awokening,” DEI advocates were insisting that their jobs and work were essential, that they really helped students, and that racial injustice was plaguing the university and only they could fix it.

Yet, after these employees were discovered saying these things, each of their respective institutions fired them, often with statements accompanying their decisions like “the director of institutional assessment has no role in policy or compliance decisions and was not authorized to speak on behalf of the university.”

The Director of Institutional Assessment, which according to the job description “oversees academic and support units’ program reviews” and even helps the university negotiate with accreditors, certainly sounds like a role that should have some authority over speaking on behalf of the university or assisting with policy. Yet if each of these administrators could be fired so unceremoniously after comments about DEI that we all know many leftist administrators hold, then they were occupying quite expendable roles at the university in the first place.  

Pugh gloated as she bragged about how she would do DEI until “they get mad at us.” Sanders likened herself to a resistance outfit and thought herself a “covert” operative. She said that changing the language of DEI would be enough to fool people who found out: she doesn’t want to call it “diverse groups of people.' We can just say 'everybody has different stocks of knowledge.'"

Yet their jobs were eliminated in seconds. There is no public outcry. No one misses them. If DEI continues in the university system by a simple flip of the quill and a few re-dotting of I’s and re-crossing of T’s, then its function at the university is zilch. Zero. Nada. It truly the self-defeating ideology that George Orwell famously described in 1984: “We have always been at war with Eastasia.”

In other words, DEI is the eternal war, resistance for the sake of resistance. And just like Oceania’s propaganda line was used to render the resident of Oceania unthinking, even incapable of thinking, about it, DEI administrators who revel in their resistance just to find out that no one really cares about their “work” at all are to be pitied most of all, for they are fighting a war against nothing, a way that no one cares whether they win or lose.  

Of course, there is a real war going underneath this fake war for what DEI is and isn’t: the war against administrative bureaucracy and the managerial state. It's worth noting that these recorded administrations never once mention what “the work” that they are actually doing in the name of DEI is. That’s because DEI involves no work. DEI is the paycheck.

At Davidson College, a team of 4 or 5 diversity officers and assistants have been in place since the beginning of 2024. One professor confesses to me that he has not seen or interacted with the DEI officer. A student, a black senior, tells me that the Chief Diversity Officer mainly acts as a “consultant” to the school, and that he doesn’t work with her or even know what she’s doing. The office has of late produced no papers, recommended no findings, and found no reportable discoveries that have impacted Davidson. (The current Director of DEI, Chloe Poston, was quoted in the student newspaper saying that she is working on “creat[ing] metrics for diversity, equity, and inclusion to track ongoing progress,” as well as an administered but yet-unreleased survey on free speech attitudes of students and faculty.) 

Metrics would perhaps strengthen the case that DEI at Davidson is producing anything substantive. Because currently, based on recorded testimony and the fact that no one misses any of these employees once they are gone, we reach an inevitable conclusion: that DEI is just paid propaganda for the eternal war. 

The eternal war against nothing at all.

(READ MORE: Indoctrination or Education? The Universities Funded by the Gates Foundation)