DEI

The organization Defending Education released a report showing hundreds of active diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices and programs at universities and colleges across the country.

The programs endure despite a presidential executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination And Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” saying DEI programs violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights followed the executive order, warning states and schools that they must eliminate discriminatory DEI trainings and curriculums and end racial preferences in hiring and admissions – or lose federal education funds.

Defending Education, “a national grassroots organization working to restore schools at all levels from activists imposing  harmful agendas,” looked at 262 schools, from 46 states and Washington, D.C., and found 245 actively engaged in promoting DEI, with some having DEI embedded in multiple departments or colleges.

While a handful of schools have cut DEI programs, some schools are just moving programs and staff to their “‘equal opportunity’ and ‘civil rights’ offices.”

Other schools are simply rebranding offices and programs, using language like “access,” “advocacy,” “belonging,” “community,” “inclusive excellence” and “success.”

The report, University DEI: Status Quo and Rebrands, found:

To date, Defending Education has tracked 245 universities which still have institution-wide DEI offices and/or programming in operation, 180 schools or colleges (such as Colleges of Education, Engineering, or Medicine, etc.), with an overall total of 403 currently active DEI offices and programming.

Both the president’s executive order and the “Dear Colleague” letter point to an important U.S. Supreme Court decision the Institutions of higher education are flouting: Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.

In that 2023 decision, the justices ruled affirmative action, as exercised in the college admission processes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, unconstitutionally violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The court ruled that using race as a basis for admissions was discriminatory.

DEI is based on radical concepts from critical race theory and radical feminist ideology, which are both rooted in Marxist- and Freudian-based critical legal theory. When used in schools, DEI teaches staff and students:

• Our nation is deliberately and systemically racist, oppressing all minority groups.
• People have overlapping identities which make them either the “oppressed” or an “oppressor,” creating a hierarchy of oppression and victimization.
• “Gender” is one of those identities and is a “social construct,” distinct from biology.
• “Anti-racism” (i.e., reverse discrimination), LGBT activism, and radical feminist action must be employed to fight this systemic bigotry. 
• Groups must strive for equity – equal outcomes – rather than equal opportunity.

The Office of Civil Rights’ letter explained that DEI programs in schools are harmful to students:

Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon “systemic and structural racism” and advanced discriminatory policies and practices.

Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them – particularly during the last four years – under the banner of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (“DEI”), smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline. But under any banner, discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is, has been, and will continue to be illegal.

What is more, DEI programs don’t work.

Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, from Harvard and Tel Aviv University respectively, report in Anthropology Now:

Nearly all Fortune 500 companies do training, and two-thirds of colleges and universities have training for faculty according to our 2016 survey of 670 schools. Most also put freshmen through some sort of diversity session as part of orientation.

Yet hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.

The authors note, among other problems, that short-term trainings don’t change people, that DEI trainings are based on and activate stereotypes, and “people react negatively to efforts to control them.”

Yet colleges and universities haven’t learned this lesson. They persist in promoting harmful, ineffective programs. DEI has woven its tentacles into hundreds – probably thousands – of universities.

The threat of losing federal funds may change things, but DEI is still deeply embedded in academia and is not going away quietly. Merely changing the name is not the answer.

Parents and students looking for a good education should investigate and find out whether potential schools are promoting this harmful dogma.

You can find a list of universities and colleges with these programs at Defending Education: University DEI: Status Quo and Rebrands

Related Articles and Resources:

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Department of Education: Schools Embracing DEI Will Lose Funding

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Harvard Sues Feds Over Multi-Billion Dollar Funding Freeze

Is ‘Critical Race Theory’ Being Taught in Public Schools? CRT Deniers Claim it Isn’t

President Trump Ends Radical DEI Programs, Fires All DEI Personnel

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Morgan Stanley’s emphasis on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) left employees of all races feeling discriminated against, a Wall Street Journal exclusive revealed this week.

DEI is an ideology ostensibly focused on redressing past injustices perpetrated against “marginalized groups.”

Morgan Stanley bet heavy on this ethos in 2020, setting hiring quotas for people from “historically underserved communities” and creating programs offering bonuses, opportunities and privileges to women and racial minorities.

Five years later, the financial services giant is one of dozens of American companies reducing their DEI commitments. Employees interviewed by the Journal say the programs won’t be missed.

“[The diversity initiative Morgan Stanley put in place] had added to a divisive culture in which white and black employees said there were few winners,” the article reads, “despite what bank executives said has been a vigorous and well-intended effort to tackle a complex challenge.”

“Well-intended” is the operative word here. Though executives may have sincerely desired to increase Morgan Stanley’s demographic diversity, the corresponding programs did not execute this vision. Black employees reported feeling singled out, abandoned or duped. White managers say they were forced to hire underqualified women and racial minorities.

Morgan Stanley’s experience with DEI isn’t unique — it’s representative. DEI’s grand ideological goals cannot be implemented in the real world.

Poor Outcomes

DEI seeks to create a society in which everyone has an equal likelihood of achieving success. But, for an ideology promoting equality, practical manifestations of DEI almost always promote unequal treatment based on physical traits.

Consider Morgan Stanley’s six-month minority training program. Executives say it was designed to support future black leaders — the implication being that racial minorities needed specialized training to keep up with their white counterparts.

This is what employees actually experienced, according to the Journal:

For all executives’ good intentions, their plan to increase minority hiring left black employees feeling less included.

Lofty Ambitions, Reductive Application

The practical failure of DEI programs stems from two ideological flaws. The first is that DEI expects humans to untangle and redress the effects of historic injustices — a task for which we are woefully unqualified.

Consider the idea of monetary reparations for American slavery, which many DEI “experts” proudly support. In a perfect world, the fair distribution of reparations would require the government to:

• Determine which black people’s ancestors were slaves.
• Catalogue the deleterious, generational effects of enslavement.
• Weed out generational consequences caused by an ancestor’s poor choices or mistakes.
• Quantify the monetary worth of generationally compounded mental and physical suffering and lost opportunities.
• Subtract that money from the descendants of white people who owned slaves or benefited in some way from slavery.

That’s an impossible task. The “best” alternative DEI proponents have advanced thus far is for all white people to pay a flat fee to all black people — an ironically racist solution to the effects of historical racism.

Humans can’t begin to quantify the incalculable wrongs people have committed against one another since sin entered the world, let alone solve them. That’s why DEI programs’ unfailingly advance ham-fisted caricatures of “justice.”

An Identity Problem

In addition to relying on human ability for success, DEI erroneously assigns value to people based on race, sex and “gender identity.” People that belong to “oppressed” groups are treated favorably. People that belong to historic “oppressors” are treated poorly.

There’s a reason Romans 12:19 tell believers God alone should enact vengeance. Only God can dispense perfect justice because He alone knows every human heart and action.

Finite DEI proponents can only approximate justice by placing people in monolithic camps and slapping black and white judgements on each group — an approach doomed to failure.

That’s not to say people shouldn’t strive for justice. Romans 12:9 commands believers to “abhor what is evil” and “hold fast to what is good.”

But DEI’s total reliance on human wisdom and myopic focus on tribalism advances a mockery of justice, not a model of it.

TLDR: It’s no wonder Morgan Stanley employees are over it.

Additional Articles and Resources

More Than $1.1 Trillion Designated For DEI in 2025, Analysts Find

Disney, Target Among Major Companies Ditching DEI

President Trump Ends Radical DEI Programs, Fires All DEI Personnel

Department of Education Blew $1 Billion on DEI – Here’s Why It Matters

Disney, Target Among Major Companies Ditching DEI

Oklahoma Bans DEI in Universities and Government Agencies

Monique Duson: Responding to Critical Race Theory with Grace and Truth

Monique Duson: ‘Biblically Faithful and Sane Conversations on Race, Justice and Unity’

Corporate giants including Disney and Target have jettisoned “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) policies following President Trump’s evisceration of federal DEI infrastructure.

DEI encompasses programs, initiatives and policies ostensibly elevating “marginalized people groups.” In practice, companies use DEI to justify doling out jobs, promotions and wages to people of a certain race, sex or “gender identity.”

Mr. Trump signed four executive orders targeting DEI on his first day in office, fulfilling his promise to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of private life.”

One of these orders, titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” changed rules for federal contractors. Now, companies that do business with the federal government must be DEI-free.

This order poses a big problem for many recognizable companies, some of whom spent years injecting DEI into every aspect of their business model.

Here are some of the biggest names to ditch DEI following President Trump’s inauguration.

A once-stalwart defendant of DEI and LGBT Pride, Target stepped away from DEI just four days after Mr. Trump signed his DEI orders.

Internal memos obtained by Forbes indicate the retailer will:

• Stop participating in third party DEI surveys like the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.
• Halt “Racial Equity Action and Change” initiatives, which reportedly included “anti-racism training for employees, a focus on hiring and promoting black employees and sourcing more products from black employees.”
• Halt its “three-year diversity, equity and inclusion goals,” which were reportedly intended to “increase hiring and promotions of employees of color and women, and to increase its spending on diverse suppliers.”

Target claims the latter two sets of programs were already set to expire.

Google told employees it would cease setting DEI hiring quotas in early February, The Wall Street Journal reports. It’s an abrupt about-face from 2020, when the search engine giant vowed to spend the next five years growing its proportion of “leadership representation of underrepresented groups” by 30%.

The change comes amid a larger audit of the company’s DEI policies and initiatives aimed toward rooting out those that “raise risk, or that aren’t as impactful as [Google had] hoped.”

Disney will be tailoring its DEI programs to “focus more closely on business outcomes,” according to an internal memo obtained by Axios. So far, changes include:

• Removing DEI content warnings against “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of other peoples or cultures” from movies like Dumbo and Peter Pan. Instead, Disney will include an abridged warning in the movies’ descriptions.
• Axing it’s Reimagine Tomorrow initiative, which included a website “highlighting stories and talent from underrepresented communities.”
• Replacing it’s “Diversity and Inclusion” performance rating, which qualified DEI candidates for promotions and pay raises, with a new rating called “Talent Strategy.” The replacement category will reportedly be “more focused on how values drive business success.”

Disney’s emphasis on aligning “inclusivity” with good business is telling; DEI took a dire toll on the company’s bottom line. In 2023 alone, Disney lost $1 billion on four movies criticized for “pushing political agendas and storylines.”

An internal memo published to social media indicates Pepsi will:

• Abandon DEI hiring quotas.
• Replace its “Supplier Diversity Program” with one uplifting all small businesses, regardless of the race, religion or sex of their owners.
• Change the “Chief DEI Officer” position to one focused on “employee development.”

PepsiCo and its competitor, Coca-Cola are negotiating federal contracts. It’s not yet clear what Coke will do to meet the Trump Administration’s DEI-free contractor criteria.

An internal memo obtained by The New York Times suggests the parent company of BET, MTV and Paramount film studio will:

• No longer adhere to DEI hiring quotas.
• Stop asking applicants for their sex, race or “gender identity.”
• Stop offering DEI-related raises and promotions.

The entertainment company was all in on DEI just a couple of months ago. An archived version of its now defunct DEI website reads:

Paramount has financial inventive to fall in line with federal DEI policy. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is reviewing Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance Media.

The FCC’s chairman, Brendan Carr, hasn’t hesitated to investigate DEI policies — which he has called “invidious forms of discrimination” — at other entertainment companies. Mr. Trump’s “Ending Illegal Discrimination” order “urges federal agencies to investigate the worst DEI policies and programs in corporate America, higher education and other settings,” which could embolden Carr to conduct investigations into companies like Paramount.

Warner Bros Discovery, like Paramount, will no longer adhere to DEI hiring quotas or ask applicants for their sex, race or “gender identity,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

It also promised to stop participating in third-party DEI surveys.

The entertainment conglomerate did not, however, denounce DEI’s language or principles, telling staff it “plans to continue to tell inclusive and diverse stories and to build an ‘inclusive team’ through its recruiting and training programs.”

The variety of responses to President Trump’s executive order on DEI is an important reminder that legislation alone will not destroy DEI. Uprooting damaging ideologies requires changing hearts and minds.

That’s why citizens must do their utter best to refute principles of DEI in their homes, schools, churches and communities. Companies like Warner Bros Discovery won’t enthusiastically change their policies unless consumers show they are well and truly done with DEI.

Additional Articles and Resources

President Trump Ends Radical DEI Programs, Fires All DEI Personnel

Oklahoma Bans DEI in Universities and Government Agencies

Monique Duson: Responding to Critical Race Theory with Grace and Truth

Monique Duson: ‘Biblically Faithful and Sane Conversations on Race, Justice and Unity’

How to Talk With Your Kids About Racial Differences

BLM at School – How a Day Encouraging Parental Educational Involvement Was Overshadowed by a Week of Radical Ideology

Department of Education Blew $1 Billion on DEI – Here’s Why It Matters