DEI Changes Afoot

Times are a-changin’.

We’ve documented some of the more egregious DEI episodes at UNC System schools in recent months, and we’re not the only ones.

As the pendulum appears to be swinging back in the direction of normalcy and reason, a recent article detailed how DEI programs are being examined in other states and at the federal level. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio introduced the “Fairness in Higher Education Accreditation Act,” which would ban officials from considering an institution’s DEI or affirmative action policies when determining accreditation.

The threat of losing accreditation has been used as a tool by lefty activists to force universities to adopt DEI policies — and to try to stop universities from introducing centrist programs, as was the case at UNC.

Rubio said when introducing the bill, “Wokeness should not be mandatory.” It’s an attempt to roll back more and more aggressive action on DEI policies – many of which stem from the U.S. Department of Education. U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah said that Rubio’s bill “safeguards against manipulating the accreditation process to advance ideological agendas.”

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbot signed a bill recently that will end DEI programs at his state’s colleges and universities.

The article also highlighted a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action at UNC that could come any time. That ruling could impact how universities that receive federal funding deal with affirmative action and discrimination based on race.

As we’ve said repeatedly, we believe that universities should expose students to all sorts of worldviews. Want to offer a class on critical theory? Great! But universities should not be pointing students to just one worldview as the end-all-be-all.

We were happy (for a moment) to see UNC’s School of Medicine, which had one of the more egregious examples of a social justice activism curriculum, seem to abruptly change course. But that’s not apparently what the School of Medicine committed to — more on that later.

And pushback to UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership — and absurd threats about the school’s accreditation — show that some faculty don’t want to offer different views of the world to their students.

That’s wrong, and the force of public and policymaker opinion looks to be moving in the other direction. Good.