President Trump declared war on DEI almost immediately upon taking office, with a slew of executive orders classifying DEI programs as illegal discrimination. This was a broadside against higher education, a declaration of war against decades of leftward ideological creep in American academia.
Sadly, it won’t be enough to make a difference long term. It’s time to discuss seizing the university endowments. It’s time to consider a total moratorium on federal student aid. Words are cheap, but money talks.
Here’s the problem with simply banning DEI—even the DEI people can’t really define DEI. Hell, it’s a three letter acronym of buzzwords, “diversity, equity, inclusion.”
Largely, it functioned as a stand-in for whatever its adherents wanted it to be, morphing day in and day out. Debate over Israel-Palestine exposed this, with civil wars in academic departments and protests on campuses because no one could agree which side is more marginalized, or who deserved to be equitably included more.
DEI is simply a chameleon for a more pervasive worldview endemic among the types of champagne socialist academics and sheltered college students who fill our college campuses.
It’s not so much an ideology as a smug self-assuredness that they think the right things, and everyone else thinks the wrong things. A dose of perceived intellectual superiority, as they whip up another NYT cooking recipe for lemony garlic miso gochujang brown butter pasta.
Ban the acronym DEI, and they’ll simply find another one. In fact, they already have. Academics are very good at manipulating obtuse language to suit their aims and get around restrictions. One could argue that’s their primary skillset.
U-M Nursing, for example, simply rebranded their DEI office to the “Office of Community Initiatives.”
Personally, I’d have preferred “formerly known as DEI” because FKA-DEI has a nice ring to it.
But it’s meant to be bland, meant to hide, meant to weather the storm that Trump has wrought. To keep doing what they’ve been doing, just under another name, another linguistic framework.
Does anyone think these bureaucrats actually feel chastised? That they felt the popular will of the country, did some soul searching, decided they were wrong, and want to change?
No one believes this, and they sure aren’t saying it. The mindset is the polar opposite—siege mentality, hiding in the bunkers, doubling down behind closed doors.
The resistance—libs love to brand themselves this way.
They’re more comfortable shrieking outside the halls of power than they are actually doing things. More comfortable complaining about daddy than being parents themselves.
I guarantee you that, within the walls of the Office of Community Initiatives, the conversations are more on the order of “how do we survive and resist Trump and the deplorable MAGA patriots” and not “how do we actually best serve our campus.”
Simply banning DEI won’t be enough to right this ship. The ideologues will survive, endure, keep working, and these regrettable battles will go on forever.
The only way to end the struggle is to completely and totally overhaul the American system of higher education. Yes, to gut it. You do that by going after the money.
U-M has a $19 billion endowment, the third largest of any public university in the nation. Harvard has a $53 billion endowment. Princeton, $34 billion. Billions and billions of dollars in these war chests, accumulated and invested over many decades, like a dragon’s hoard.
Malcom Gladwell called Princeton the “World’s First Perpetual Motion Machine.”
If you run the numbers, Princeton makes double its entire operating budget in investment income every year. It could give every student free tuition, cover every federal research grant, and even pay all the parking tickets on campus, and still have a billion left over.
Princeton is essentially a hedge fund with an education hobby.
U-M is better described as a hospital with a school attached. More than 60% of the university’s revenue comes from the U-M hospital system. The bulk of which comes from actual medical care, treating patients and such.
Leave it to the brilliant minds at U-M, they figured out how to milk the two biggest grifts in the country, federal student loans AND health insurance.
Listen, hospitals and schools are good.
But academia has become an excuse for tremendous institutional self-aggrandizement. Financialization that, in the end, funds poisonous ideologies like DEI that discriminate, dehumanize, and promote anti-Americanism.
Downsizing academia by going after the money might, in the end, pushes these institutions back toward their true purposes. With no room for frivolous spending, they’ll have to axe the DEI department for good.
Going after the endowment money would be tricky and legally dubious, but even the threat of it would be enough to make some heads spin. A moratorium on federal student loans is much more doable and would deny these colleges an incredibly lucrative money stream.
The status quo exploits students, in the end, with the federal government using them as a pass through entity to funnel money to academia. Students are left holding the bag, to the tune of $1.7 trillion in federal student loan debt and climbing.
Where did all that endowment money come from, in the end?
A lion’s share of it from the federal government, passed through unfortunate students saddled with loans. The government should claw back those funds at the very least—maybe even use them to pay off the student loan debt they incurred in the first place.
The feds should not be sending money hand over fist to universities and wrapping up students in an usurious scheme.
That’s what’s led to all this bloat in the first place and gave colleges the means and resources for absurd ideological movements like DEI. Loans inflated tuition prices, making college education far more inaccessible than it was before.
Colleges know they can endlessly raise tuition, because there’s no sticker shock. Most students aren’t paying out of pocket. They’re borrowing the money, or their parents are borrowing.
Ending the federal student loan grift would lower tuition costs and require institutions to prioritize efficiency. The budgetary haircut would end the reign of the DEI bureaucrats for good, instead of letting them keep their positions with a quiet rebrand.
Seize the endowments, threaten them if you can, and end the federal student loan program. That’s how you really fight back against DEI. Even better—that’s how you save academia from itself, by forcing it to prioritize educating students at a reasonable cost.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
