I appeared recently on The Federalist Radio Hour podcast, for a discussion hosted by Matt Kittle, on the topic of How The Trump Administration Can Excise DEI From America’s Colleges And Universities.
I’ve known Matt from back in the day when he was doing amazing investigative reporting on the Wisconsin ‘John Doe‘ attack on the conservative movement. Throughout it all, Matt led the way with his investigations and research on which we relied heavily for our own coverage.
We talked about a lot of topics for 45 minutes, but mostly about the collapse of higher education under the weight of CRT and DEI, how our Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org) is fighting back, and what the incoming Trump administration should do.
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[Transcript Auto-Generated, May Contain Transcription Errors.][Very lightly edited for transcript clarity.]
Kittle: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I’m Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today’s quest for Knowledge. As always, you can email the show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST, make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and of course to the premium version of our website as well. Our guest today is William A. Jacobson, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School and founder of Legal Insurrection the Great website, joining us to talk today about excising DEI diversity, equity in inclusion initiatives and programs from America’s colleges and universities. Professor Jacobson is also founder of the Equal Protection Project, devoted to the fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity. The project will not only investigate racial preference programs, but also litigate when necessary. I found that of course at the Cornell Review.
Gets your copy today. Professor Jacobson, thank you so much for joining us on this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
WAJ: Thank you for having me on.
Kittle: Absolutely.
We have spoken in the past about all kinds of government abuses, this is certainly one area of government abuse that has absolutely exploded over the last several years in this country. You told Tucker Carlson not too long ago, ‘this our highest ideal as a society is enshrined in the Constitution, the fourteenth Amendment and federal, state and local law, which is, you do not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. And we are seeing that, unfortunately, under the concept of equity, that there is outright discrimination on the basis of race.’ It is an interesting time in this country, a country that truly has dealt with the scourge of racism, discrimination and bias, a country though, that has moved away from the idea of equality into equity.
Let’s start there. What does the left mean when it says or uses the term equity.
WAJ: Well, equity they distinguish from equality. So equality is where everybody receives equal treatment.
Equity in their minds is outcome driven that you have to have equal results as opposed to equal opportunity and equal resources. In the context of diversity, equity and inclusion, it has a very racial tone to it racial aspect to it. And so if outcomes, if outcomes from a test, if outcomes from whatever the competition happens to be, if outcomes from admissions do not reflect the racial mix that they believe it should be, they believe that that reflects necessarily racism, and so their idea of equity is to manipulate the race of students, to manipulate racial and ethnic factors to reach what they consider to be the ideal racial mix. So equity is equal results.
But in the context of what we normally talk about it on campuses, it really is a racial quota system.
Kittle: It is absolutely contrary to meritocracy. Is it not.
WAJ: Well, Yes, because it’s not looking at how a particular person performs.
It does not treat individuals as individuals. It treats individuals as proxies for identity groups, could be racial identity groups, could be ethnic identity groups, could be sexual or sexual orientation or sexual self-identification identity groups.
My main objection to DEI in general has been that it is a group identity ideology at its core, and you can’t get away from that. People and students are proxies for whatever their group is.
Kittle: Well, we certainly have experienced the dangers of groupthink in this country of late and certainly over the history of this country at times as well. But these terms, diversity, equity, inclusion, they all come with the subjective salt or seasoning of a left that has been for years trying to control the language, control of the definitions of the language. These are are these not wide open terminalogy subject to change to whatever the political necessity is, if you will.
WAJ: The terms themselves are essentially meaningless. It depends what you do with them.
You need to understand that what’s referred to as diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI are simply the action agenda of a critical race perspective. So critical race theory that we heard so much about two three years ago, and the left decided we need a debate over what does it really mean, and it’s just a law school course, they would say, it’s just you know, theoretical, et cetera. And to a limited extent, they’re right. It is a law school legal concept that our legal systems, in our structures are meant to preserve a racial hierarchy and racial preferences, and there is no real search for truth. There is no real law. It’s all just a power play.
So critical race theory does that in a racial context. It grew out of critical legal theory, which was a more Marxist class sort of perspective that these structures in society are meant to maintain the class structure, and they substituted race for class in that classical Marxist paradigm.
But what has happened is DEI is how critical race concepts are put into action. So DEI is the action item to implement critical race theory. And that’s why you get into these definitional arguments and you get into these things, and why it’s very much in flux. It is whatever the particular university department or professor or bureaucrat wants it to be.
There’s no definite structure to it. But what it almost always means, if not always, is it is a group identity ideology that does not treat people as individuals, treats them as proxies for their group. And that’s why you have training, you have classes, you have admissions practices that treat people by group identity. So there is no definitive definition of what DEI is other than it is a group identity approach to implement the concepts from critical race theory.
Kittle: And as you say, by design that terminology is in flux. And this is something of course that has gone back a long time. I mean, we think about DEI in some ways popping up feels like overnight into the lexicon into the general conversation over the last few years in this country. But as you know, a critical race theory, anti racism, all of these sorts of viewpoints that America and Americans, particularly white Americans Americans are systemically racist.
You know, that’s a viewpoint that goes back sometime. I remember being an undergraduate at the University of Milwaukee many many years ago, back in the early nineteen nineties, and I remember if they weren’t using this terminology, they certainly were employing the ideology of it. How far does this stuff go back. Well, it goes back quite a way.
WAJ: As you say, this is not something new. What happened was these ideas percolated throughout academia. A lot of the practices took place in academia. Maybe they weren’t called diversity, equity inclusion, but very race-based focus on admissions.
We’ve been litigating admission affirmative action for decades now, and so these concepts were there, the ideology was there. What changed and what made a lot of people think it came out of nowhere was post George Floyd that changed everything.
It was almost like they had plans on the shelf to push this very deep into education and into society, but needed the excuse, needed the spark, and the George Floyd death was the spark, the weaponization of Black Lives Matter.
Now, Black Lives Matter had existed and it’s something we followed since before it was even an organization. It was created, the hashtag Black Lives Matter was created after the Trayvon Martin death and the George Zimmermann trial, which was an absolute valid case of self defense, but that’s when they created the hashtag. And it was after the Michael Brown shooting that they created the formal organizations and there are several of them, but the formal organizations of Black Lives Matter based on the false claim that Michael Brown was shot with his hands up saying don’t shoot.
And so there was a period of several years at least of Black Lives Matter activism of those concepts, but they never really caught on as much as they did after George Floyd when they’re burst out everywhere, and universities fell all over themselves to virtue signal. Same with corporations. Corporations and foundations pledged fifty billion, that’s b with a billion with a B, not million, fifty billion dollars to racial justice movements. Most of it probably wasn’t paid, but they pledged it, and campuses implemented anti racism programs.
And I witnessed that first hand at Cornell. I teach at Cornell Law School, and in July, I think it was or in June of 2020, so George Floyd died the end of May, in June of 2020, the president, then president of the university, Martha Pollock, assigned Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be An Anti Racist as summer reading for the university. Not mandatory, you aren’t going to be tested on it, but every summer there’s one book that the university selects as recommended reading for the entire university and which will be subject for undergraduates to seminars and other programming in the fall.
And they selected Ibram Kendi”s book How to Be An Anti Racist, it was offered free online to anyone with the Cornell ID and so I read it online for free, and it was pretty horrifying. It really instilled the concept of reverse racism, of retaliatory racism, and it was pretty horrible.
And then in July she announced, unilaterally announced a campus wide anti-racism initiative based on the Kendi book, which forced onto the campus essentially Kendi’s theory. Staff was immediately required to start attending trainings and seminars as part of their employment requirement, and they were going to be judged based on how well they did at implementing anti-racism in their jobs. And Kendi’s most famous saying is that current discrimination is justified to remedy past discrimination, and future discrimination is justified to justify to remedy current discription.
So basically, it is an anti-constitutional, anti-Fourteenth Amendment, anti-Civil Rights Act ideology that was implemented on Cornell’s campus. The president was able to do that to the staff because that’s administrative. She was also wanted it imposed on students and faculty. For that, she actually had to go to the faculty Senate, where, surprisingly to me, shockingly to me, there was some pushback about that.
But that’s what you saw at campuses everywhere. You saw purges of professors who criticized that. There was a fairly significant attempt to get me fired because I criticized the rioting and the looting of Black Lives Matter and the Black Lives Matter ideology. So it seemed like it came out of nowhere.
It was erupting everywhere, every campus, every corporation, every government entity was jumping on this Ibram Kendi style anti-racism paradigm. But it didn’t come out of nowhere. It had been at least one, probably two decades in the making.
Kittle: It is amazing to me all that you just brought us through.
It’s amazing and painful to think back, as you’re absolutely right. I mean, there was a real purge going on in our institutions of higher education and government, in business and elsewhere, and it was all based on this stuff. We just we seem to have lost our collective minds in the summer of twenty twenty. I now, I know there are a lot of moving parts in all of that.
We had this pandemic. There was fear driving a lot of things. There was an election watched by the world. In this country it’s a different topic altogether, But all of these things are just a millage of just nasty things happening.
And the outcome was again Americans moving away from the room, rule of law, from basic founding principles to pick up this ideology. How much of this is tied to the Marxist movement over the years in this country and around the world?
WAJ: As I mentioned, basically, what the left has done in the United States at least is substitute race for class, and so as opposed to perpetual class warfare, it’s now perpetual racial warfare and ethnic warfare, and that is the ideology. So a lot of people say, is it Marxist?
Kittle: Is it not Marxist?
WAJ: Well, the structure is similar, but it’s race instead of class.
And I think that’s deliberate because the people who want to tear down our society, which is the goal, was the stated goal of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m forgetting their names, three women who founded it, who described themselves as avowed Marxists. Their words, not my words.
If you want to tear apart American society, class isn’t really going to work because we were a very fluid society. We’re a society where you can move up the economic chain if you have talent and you have drive and you work hard, and many people do that. You know, many of our billionaires were not born into billions. The people who founded major tech companies, things like that, they may have been middle class or upper middle class, but they certainly didn’t come from billionaire class people.
So there’s enormous, enormous mobility, economic mobility in the United States. We just don’t have the class structure where that works. And so tearing our country apart based on class warfare was never going to work, and it didn’t work.
But race is something, you can’t change skin color, you can’t change ethnic history, you can’t change and so very you know, adroitly, the Marxists, mostly academia to start, recognized they need something better than class in order to tear down our society, and they found race, and they have been exploiting it at least since the nineteen eighties.
So I was at Harvard Law School. I graduated Harvard Law School in 1984. Harvard Law School was the epicenter of the critical legal studies movement. But I noticed, even in the early eighties, before there was even the term critical race theory, I noticed them injecting race into a lot of things, most particularly in terms of the anti-Israel movement on campus, which was small at that time, but it was there trying to portray that dispute as a racial dispute. And so you began to see this racialization of critical legal theory.
And so by the late eighties, early nineties, it now was beginning to be called critical race theory. The person who invented that term and is still to this day one of the leading proprietors of it, was a classmate of mine at Harvard Law School. So I witnessed this all in real time. I saw how everything became racialized.
And so is it Marxist? It grew out of a Marxist approach to society, substituting race for class, and so yes, people I think are generally accurate when they call it.
Kittle: That’s interesting. Legal Insurrection, of course, it’s written a lot about DEI initiatives and programs and mandates in our government and our institutions of higher education. I just wrote a piece for the Federalist and the Federalist obviously has also taken a good deal of time in investigating looking into these policies.
But you know, this is just thresh. We have a potential lawsuit coming out of the state of Wisconsin in Green Bay, Wisconsin’s fourth largest school district, where you have it appears to be a policy. There’s some mincing of words about what exactly it is, but it appears to be the case that you have in one case, a young elementary school student who was left out of an essential reading assistance program. The boy was diagnosed with dyslexia.
He was left out because of the color of his skin, and in twenty twenty four, that means the color of his skin white. They have a program in Green Bay. It appears that focuses those kinds of vital resources, those reading resources on certain racial classes black, Hispanic, and Native American, or as they describe it, nation origin, nation, or however it’s defined these days, it’s hard to keep up with the language. That appears to be a pretty egregious example.
What are some of the more egregious examples that you have seen in the DEI movement in higher education over the last few years in this country?
WAJ: We formed the Equal Protection Project, which is equalprotect.org, specifically to address the problems we were finding. So we have a website launched in February twenty twenty one called criticalrace.org, which documents, completely source linked documents, the spread of critical race theory and its variants throughout higher education, the professional schools, medical schools, and what we call elite private K through twelve meaning the national ranked boarding schools, and through that we began to get a lot of complaints from people about what they were seeing go on.
So in February 2023, we launched Equal Protection Project and brought over fifty challenges to programs where there is just outright discrimination. They will have a program where eligibility you have to be bipop, or you have to be black, or you have to be you know, non white student of color. They use different terms, but basically outright discrimination at public universities, at private universities.
We found forty two such programs at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. We just filed one with fifty one programs that discriminate. I think it was thirty some odd based on race and ethnicity and twenty some odd based on sex, which is also unlawful title mind, you know, so it’s rampant.
The administrators don’t seem to care. We’ve been filing them for the most part at the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education, and in about half the cases the schools will back down almost immediately, but they pop up elsewhere. It’s like playing whack-a-mole. So there is a widespread practice in higher education of open discrimination.
So it’s just about everywhere.
Kittle: It’s interesting to me that, you know, we talked about what was going on in twenty twenty fighting this fight at one point, and to some degree even into today after much so much has changed, but it was a lonely place to be on a very difficult battleground. For sure.
[promotional break]
Our guest today is William A. Jacobson, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School and founder of Legal Insurrection website. By joining us to talk about excising DEI diversity, equity and inclusion from America’s colleges and universities on this edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. How do you do that? As you mentioned, it’s whack-a-mole, you know, I think about it.
I think about this election in many ways was a sea change inflection based on the fatigue of the American and the American voter in particular over what we’ve seen in DEI all manners of it. You know, everything from transgender sports men in women’s sporting events, all the way through some of the programs like the one I talked about in Green Bay that is favoring racial classes over you know, others that still have the same educational needs. This is a massive industry, as we just reported at the Federalist a billion dollars plus has gone out in contracts from the Biden administration over President Biden’s tenure in office. That compares to nineteen million under the first Trump administration.
How do you go up against that powerful mass of money.
WAJ: There’s a couple of ways that relate to each other.
One is enforcement. You don’t need new laws and you don’t need new regulations. When money is given out in federal grants, they have to abide by the Civil Rights Act, they have to abide by the non discrimination laws. And what we’ve seen in the higher education realm is the Department of Education under Biden, which is the time period we’ve been doing it, has been fairly lacking in terms of enforcement. They have the power to pull funding from these schools, they have the power to take remedial action against these schools, and they don’t do it.
So I think the first thing that needs to happen is whether it’s through the ocr Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education or the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Justice. And there’s some talk about how those might be reconfigured under the new administration, but regardless is take enforcement action.
So a perfect example is they need to make a test case. They need to make an example of somebody, and we just filed a case against the University of Rhode Island with 51 openly discriminatory scholarships. The Department of Education incoming needs to make an example of that, needs to send a message messages to colleges that when you get federal money, including money from the Department of Education, you have certain obligations in order to keep that money and to continue funding, and one of those obligations is non discrimination.
So the first prong of what needs to happen is the federal government needs to start enforcing the rules and regulations they already have that require non discrimination if you’re going to get federal funding, and they’ve not been doing that.
Kittle: In fact, as you indicate, if anything, they’ve been going the opposite direction and encouraging this discrimination.
WAJ: The second one, which is completely related, is the funding itself. That money is the only thing that will motivate universities to change their ways.
They don’t really care about public opinion because they’re very insulated. They’re already in a bubble, particularly elite universities, but even some high ranking public universities like University of Michigan. So the federal government needs to start to pull funding from some of these universities unless they clean up their acts.
Money is the lifeblood of these places. The federal government funding dwarfs all other funding that sources that these schools have.
A perfect example goes back I think twenty, thirty years ago, something called the Solomon Amendment. The Solomon Amendment was when universities would refuse to allow military recruiters on campus because of the don’t ask, don’t tell policy of the Department of Defense, and Harvard Law School barred military recruiters, military JAG core recruiters, from coming to campus, and that violated the Solomon Amendment, which was congressional legislation that said if you do not treat military recruiters on equal footing as other recruiters, you lose your federal funding. And Harvard challenged that law, went up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court upheld it and said, you have no constitutional right to federal funding, and if you want the federal funding, you take it on the terms and conditions that the federal government imposes. And Harvard ended up backing down because it could not risk, because not just Harvard Law School, but Harvard University would have lost all of its federal funding hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
That’s what the federal government needs to do. It needs to say to these schools that you cannot engage in discrimination, you cannot violate the law and keep your federal funding, and we will pull it. Pull it for one or two universities, and you will see hundreds of others fall into line.
But you don’t get that. Pull it from Harvard, pull it from Columbia where there’ve been atrocious conduct and atrocious misconduct, and you will see everybody come around to it. And I guarantee you Harvard will back down, just like they back down on the military recruiters.
So combination of enforcing the laws that we have and using the power of federal funding to make sure that they comply.
Kittle: Well, truer words were never said, money talks, and we have learned over the last several years that money definitely talks on college campuses. Isn’t it funny? Do you find it curious? I mean, there’s still the backlash from these universities and the tough talk and all of these sorts of things. But there have been universities who have back down on the DEI sort of thing.
I think about the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin in the Midwest because they felt like they’re funding source of revenue from the state. In those cases, it’s coming to was in peril. Do you find it curious how the values that they espouse administration on these campuses about diversity, equity, and inclusion can disappear when we’re talking about cash.
WAJ: That’s right, And I should have mentioned also that states have a role in this.
I mean there are half dozen or more red states which have used their power over public universities, have used their power over funding to bring the universities back towards the center. Because when diversity is spoken about on campuses, it’s never diversity of viewpoint. There is no diversity of viewpoint on most campuses. The facultym and I just know Cornell is close to one hundred percent liberal to left leaning to far left leaning.
The Cornell Sun student newspaper has done many surveys over the years of donations from faculty, party registration of faculty, and it is literally close to one hundred percent liberal to Democrat. And so there really is no diversity of faculty when it comes to viewpoint, when it comes to political orientation, they don’t care if they’re happy that way only, and that creates a very toxic campus environment.
States have a big role at bringing things back to the center. Nobody is under an illusion that we’re going to all of a sudden have a bunch of conservative you know, public universities. That’s not going to happen. But at least introduce some diversity into the faculty, because the faculty drives a lot of these things.
Kittle: I spoke about it before, but the loneliness of the conservative on college campuses has always been, you know, an issue, but it’s gotten so much worse over the years. You’ve been in this business a long time.
Do you ever feel like, you know, as there been a time you feel like you’re tilting at windmills or that you’re howling into the wind.
WAJ: Yeah, I mean this is not an exaggeration, or if it is, it’s not by much. Cornell University is a big, sprawling place. They’ve got the Ithaca campus, the medical school in New York City.
I think their faculty number is ballpark eighteen hundredm ballpark. Of those eighteen hundred, you can count on one hand the number of faculty who are openly politically conservative. And when I say politically conservative and openly is important. There may be voters out there among faculty who keep it to themselves. There may be faculty who consider themselves economically or religiously conservative, but people who are outspoken about the political angle of things are almost non existent.
I would say I’m the only one, but there might be a couple of others, but I am close to the only one out of a faculty of eighteen hundred. Certainly, I’m the only one at the law school who’s openly politically conservative. And I don’t think that’s an exception.
Now, how many are openly politically liberal to left? Huge numbers. I mean, it’s almost taken for granted. So do I feel like I’m tilting it at windmills sometimes? Yeah?
But I also know that even having one faculty member who is outspoken the way I am gives a lot of strength to the students.
I’m the faculty advisor to almost every, if not every right of center student group on campus. I’d like to think it’s because I’m so wonderful, but the reality is there’s literally nobody they can go to. There is nobody else who’s willing to serve as a faculty advisor for a lot of these groups, if not most of the groups. And therefore, I feel my role is extremely important. I think even having one dissident on a campus makes a big difference.
The campus is still very, very wedded to the DEI camp, to the DEI agenda at the administrative level, but I do believe having me speak out against DEI, and I’ve openly called on the Board of Trustees to get rid of it completely, get it out of our system, that even having one person can make a difference. And so I don’t pretend that I’ve changed the course of the university, but it’s really important that there’s at least somebody speaking out.
And when I eventually retire, which will happen, they’ll literally be nobody on the campus to speak out on these issues, which is why I think it’s extremely important that these changes be made, that the Trump administration will have the power to do soon, because the small small number of, I wouldn’t even say conservative, of non-liberal professors, are aging out. I’m sixty five. I don’t know how many more years I’ll do this, but I think it’s important.
I don’t think I’ve been tilting it will wind mills. It is lonely. But I draw strength from the students, who are far more moderate than the professors as a group. And I draw strength from the alumni, who are far more moderate as a group than the administrators and the faculty.
I hope change comes, and I hope change comes in the next four years.
Kittle: Well, I’ll tell you this, I don’t believe that you’re tilting at Windmills. For what it’s worth.
I have long admired your work, and a dear friend of mine for years. We lost him at the university at Marquette University a few years back. But John McAdams, who was fighting the same fight on that Jesuit school campus, which you think wouldn’t have all of the kind of battles that maybe a Cornell has had, or a UCLA or Columbia or those sorts of things. But they’ve been steeped in dei in anti racism and critical race theory culture for a long time, and John courageously fought those battles to the point of the threat of his job, and I’m sure you have faced those same kind of things as you mentioned before.
But you’re right. There is a new day coming, and I think that you have a receptive audience. The President elect, the forty fifth and soon to be forty seventh president, who has been very outspoken about his feelings on DEI in this entire movement. Christopher Rufo has talked to President elect Donald Trump, how successful can this administration be? An administration that is set on fighting the swamp, draining the swamp? Can it drain the DEI swamp?
WAJ: It can drain it, mostly because we’ve only been talking about higher education, but the DEI agenda from the federal government goes so much more deep. The National Institutes for Health, National Science Foundation, various other bureaucracies have incorporated DEI requirements into their eligibility for federal funding. So if you’re a scientist, you may have to prove that you’ve you adhere to DEI. Those are things Trump can get rid of with the stroke of a pen, and I hope he will on day one. I hope he will.
That will eliminate an enormous source unrelated to education, an enormous source of DEI discrimination that takes place at the behest of the federal government and frankly as a federal government requirement. So I think he can do a lot.
And again, if he does the enforcement and the use of federal budget, federal funding for colleges and universities, and also K through twelve, I think he can do a lot.
Can he solve the problem? No, because people need to understand this is quasi religious for the adherents. It really is a religion for the DEI bureaucracy and the DEI advocates in many ways. And so will he get rid of it completely. No, But can he make enormous changes if he does it in a smart way. Yes.
I don’t think he was prepared in his first term for what he would face in terms of sabotage from the bureaucracy, sabotage from the states. But if he does it smarter this time, and I have every reason to believe he will because he’s had experience and he’s got advisors who are mapping things out for him, I think it can make a tremendous, tremendous impact.
Just to show you the power of an idea on campus, in the run up to the oral argument in the affirmative action case. So this was the fall. I’m getting losing track of the years. Whether it’s twenty twenty two or twenty twenty three, I guess it was twenty twenty two.
So in the fall of twenty twenty two, the Cornell Political Union, which is a truly nonpartisan debate society basically on Cornell’s campus, invited me to debate affirmative action. And they do it Oxford style debate where the speaker gives a presentation, takes questions, then the students debate among themselves, and I advocated the position that against affirmative action, race based affirmative action, and lo and behold. At the end, they take a secret vote, secret ballot vote, and my proposition passed.
So on a college campus where you would think ninety nine percent of the students would be in favor of affirmative action, in effect, I won the vote at the Cornell Political Union. I think part of that reason was it was a secret ballot. You just signed your piece of paper and put it in. You didn’t have to put your name on it.
So I have hope that students are not as indoctrinated as we would think, and that there is hope that the power of ideas can prevail on the campuses. But I’m also realistic that there are massive institutional forces, including massive bureaucracies, who were devoted to making sure DEI continues.
So I think Trump can do tremendous accomplishments, but nobody should think in four years this is over.
Kittle: So you’re telling us there’s a chance?
WAJ: It’s a one in a million chance, as they say in the movie, Yeah, there’s a chance. I mean there’s a chance to make substantial progress. Whether it can be purged from the discrimination done in the name of DEI, can be purged completely from the system, I think probably not, because it will continue to live on in faculty, it will continue to live on in bureaucracies, and you may not be able to change their minds.
But I think if we create a culture of equality on the campuses, if we go back to explaining the virtue of treating people as individuals rather than as proxies for groups, I think you’ll find a receptive audience on most campuses.
Whether they’ll admit to it, I don’t know, because there’s a lot of social pressures to go along. But I think I think this can. There is a chance, but it’s got to come from outside the universities. The universities have faculties and to some extent administrations, have become so radicalized that I do not believe internal change is possible.
It will take an external force like the federal government and the state governments to force them to come back to the middle.
Kittle: Yeah. In other words, the cancer is already there and it is going to take, as you say, external forces to remove excise that cancer. Final question for you, what is next? Then? What does twenty twenty five look like? For William Jacobson and the Equal Protection Project?
WAJ: I think we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing.
We’ve had a big impact. We’ve I think helped change the culture. There are certainly many other people who’ve done as much, if not more, than we’ve done. But we’re part of a movement that I believe has change the culture around DEI.
That has changed the culture enough around DEI that political change is now possible on the campuses when it comes to DEI, that structural change is possible. So we’re going to keep plugging away. We’re going to keep filing legal claims. We hope to increase the number of lawsuits we have as opposed to Office for Civil Rights complaints.
We’re going to continue to speak out on this. So we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, hopefully at a more aggressive and higher level. And for the first time in our existence as a foundation, as a nonprofit foundation, we will actually have the federal government on our side. It’s going to be a very strange feeling to have the federal government on your side, not hostile to you.
So we’re looking forward to twenty twenty five and we hope that the incoming administration is successful in affecting change.
Kittle: Yeah, it’ll be a bit, Dorothy. It’ll not be Kansas anymore, that’s for sure, and quite frankly, that’s a good thing. I wish you godspeed and good luck in your efforts.
And thank you so much for joining us on this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. Thank you for having me indeed anytime. Thanks to my guest today, William A. Jacobson, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School, Founder of Legal Insurrection, The Great website, joining us to talk about DEI where we go from here not America’s colleges and universities.
Professor Jacobson is also founder of the Equal Protection Project. You’ve been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I’m Matt Kittle, senior correspondent at The Federalist. We’ll be back soon with more.
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