The DEI gravy train is losing traction at its strongest bastion: American universities. Even more than large woke corporations, colleges – blessed by lavish public taxpayer support or steep private endowments – are a natural environment to unleash progressive social engineering on captive audiences. But the worm has turned, and momentum is resoundingly against an enforced agenda that was always based more on emotion than sound reason.
“University of Missouri President Mun Choi had sleepless nights thinking about losing $1 billion in state funding due to diversity, equity and inclusion programs” is the very apt way The Center Square begins its report on the Show-Me State’s flagship university’s decision to eliminate its official DEI vice chancellor position. The Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity office will be shut down, Choi announced on July 30, saving taxpayers an estimated $6 million.
Dollars or DEI?
The controversial agenda will still lurk within the UM infrastructure but in a decentralized manner, which will likely mean less overt pressure to conform to an intentionally divisive social ideology for students merely seeking to acquire a useful college education.
Conservative states have led the charge by threatening comfortable public university officials where they are most vulnerable – their place at the taxpayer trough. “Missouri is the latest red-state public university to cave to political pressure on DEI,” the decidedly left-leaning Inside Higher Ed website laments. “The University of Arkansas, which Choi pointed to as a model, dispersed its DEI office last summer, and the University of North Carolina system Board of Governors ordered campus leaders to do the same last month.”
The list gets longer by the day.
Auburn University, the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and Iowa State University have all closed DEI offices in recent weeks.
Fueling Racial Anger
The University of Missouri drew national attention in 2015 for what critics have widely derided as a racial “tantrum” by black students. “About 40 students protested throughout the MU Student Center, carrying banners and shouting about justice and the racism they say they face every day,” The Columbia Missourian, a newspaper affiliated with the school’s journalism department, reported in October 2015.
“‘White silence is violence, no justice, no peace,’ they shouted for minutes on end. The rally participants marched alongside tables packed with students studying and eating lunch. Some students ignored them, some smiled, and some started to repeat the words of the rally participants,” the paper detailed.
“Racism Lives Here” was the name of the on-campus movement. Black players on the college’s high-profile football team threatened a boycott. A spirit of severe racial grievance against white students was front and center.
“My hair has been called dirty. I’ve been called ghetto. I’ve had people not wanting to sit next to me. I have people not wanting to work with me in class. So, yes, we clearly have a racism problem here on campus,” 25-year-old student Danielle Walker told The Missourian.
“We want to see a hate crime policy initiated. We want our chancellor to formally make an announcement that we do have a racial problem here on campus and that they are seeking to make sure it gets addressed properly,” Walker said.
University leaders responded in a predictable fashion, folding completely. MU President Tim Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin resigned upon demand. Wolfe was bitter to feel the brunt of emotion-driven progressive bullying so often inflicted upon less credentialed Americans at schools, workplaces, churches, and elsewhere.
“This is not, I repeat is not, the way change should come about,” Wolfe mournfully declared. “Change comes from listening, learning, caring and conversation.”
This is the one-way street that created the DEI monster.
Ousted DEI Vice Chancellor Maurice Gipson, who assumed his post in the summer of 2020 as the George Floyd riots broke out across the country, is glum about the changing fortunes of his once-thriving niche. “When I started in 2020, it seemed a world of possibilities was open to us,” Gipson said. “Now, people are not as open to those conversations.”
Imagine that. The citizens of Missouri don’t believe that having their taxpayer money used to label them as racist is a worthwhile endeavor. Major corporate brands, such as Bud Light and Target, have felt the backlash of a public fed up with woke social engineering. Still, higher academia is the bubble that most allowed the divisive movement to thrive. If DEI is excised in its ideal habitat, its days as a social bully are numbered across the general social spectrum.
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