Ivy League bastion Columbia University on Jan. 25 named University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor Jennifer Mnookin as its next president as the school continues digging out from a public relations disaster triggered by chaotic pro-Palestinian protests on its campus in 2024. Is this a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”?
Mnookin has a long history of robust support for racially discriminatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion” practices that includes apparent attempts to disguise the toxic agenda amid blowback from state overseers in recent years.
The new Columbia chieftain checks all the boxes for credentialed higher academia elitism: BA at Harvard, law degree at Yale, doctorate in history and social study of science and technology at MIT. Mnookin served as dean of UCLA Law School from 2015 to 2022, when she became chancellor at the University of Wisconsin.
At UCLA, Mnookin displayed all the telltale signs of the racially obsessed academic radical. In 2020, she was one of five University of California system law school deans to sign a joint statement publicly rebuking President Donald Trump for moving to ban critical race theory training for federal employees.
“The faculties of the UC law schools include many of the leading scholars in Critical Race Theory (CRT) and our law schools engage in a good deal of important scholarship, teaching and policy work about how race and racial oppression shape law and society,” the deans declared. “We are enormously proud of our CRT colleagues and the important work they do, and we are deeply distressed to see the federal government attack this important intellectual tradition, caricature it in an unjustified and divisive manner, and ban federal employees from learning about it through trainings.”
It was not an outlier.
In June 2020,when the Summer of George Floyd was erupting, Mnookin penned a “note to students, faculty and staff of UCLA School of Law,” decrying what she asserted to be the fundamental racial injustice at the heart of the American legal system.
“As members of a law school community in particular, we must recognize and grapple with the complicity of the legal system and law enforcement in acts of racism and violence,” she wrote. “These recent horrifying instances are, sadly, not aberrations; our legal system has been part and parcel of our nation’s shameful history of institutionalized racism.”
Mnookin openly stressed that UCLA Law School, under her watch, was in the business of minting racial activists.
“So many of our students came to UCLA Law in order to help move our legal system in a better direction. To build on its progress, dismantle its oppressive tools, and lift impacted communities,” her letter continued. “I do believe that your legal education and training can contribute to making this possible.”
Mnookin did not want intellectual rigor to get in the way of the anti-racism fight. In a 2019 interview with Reuters, she promoted her personal campaign to make it easier for applicants to pass the state bar exam in California.
This agenda did not disappear when Mnookin took the reins at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, though efforts were made to suggest otherwise.
The conservative legal organization Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) on Jan. 13 announced it was filing a new Title VI complaint against UW-Madison. Duplicity was at the heart of the latest charges.
“During the 2024-25 school year, WILL discovered that UW-Madison offered at least 60 race-based scholarships to students, excluding many white and Asian students from even applying for these scholarships,” a press release from the group stated.
“The following month, UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin, stated during a legislative hearing, ‘Nobody is getting a scholarship from UW Madison on the basis of the racial preference.’”
But that wasn’t true.
“Over the summer, WILL submitted public records requests to UW-Madison for a list and description of race-based scholarships for the 2025-26 academic year. These new records reveal that UW-Madison still offers at least 22 race-based scholarships for the current 2025-26 academic year,” the organization detailed.
How to account for Mnookin’s direct statement to the contrary? Semantics.
WILL included copies of UW officials’ correspondence outlining efforts to rebrand targeted DEI initiatives as “inclusive excellence.” Problem solved?
“Given political landscape and legislative decisions, do we need to refer to [Equality, Diversity and Inclusion] as something else (e.g., inclusive excellence)?” a memo from Office of the Chancellor Interim Chief of Staff Jennifer L. Noyes to Mnookin on Aug. 20, 2023, read. “Should we change the titles of our diversity personnel? Should we have greater clarity on the EDI numbers provided to the legislature? Should we reorganize and place EDI staff into student success areas? At what stage do we compromise our principles relative to reevaluating EDI?”
Noyes further declared to Mnookin, “For my part, inclusive excellence is the direction I believe you want to go.”
And so she did. In August 2024, Mnookin named LaVar J. Charleston “vice chancellor for inclusive excellence” at UW.
It did not go well. In March 2025, Mnookin was forced to demote Charleston after an internal review discovered numerous spending discrepancies.
“Perhaps most concerning is the totality of financial choices, including highly atypical and excessive spending across multiple dimensions – from bonuses to compensation adjustments to travel, supplies and furnishing,” Rob Cramer, UW-Madison’s vice chancellor for finance and administration, reported to Mnookin and Provost Charles Isbell Jr. on March 12,” according to The Capital Times newspaper in Madison.
And now all this is headed to Columbia. In the broken world of American higher academia, the more things stay the same, the more they never change.
