Political Change Possible Because The Culture Now Recognizes “DEI Has Been a Failure”

Political Change Possible Because The Culture Now Recognizes “DEI Has Been a Failure”

I appeared recently on the Liz Collin Reports podcast at Alpha News, based in Minnesota, to talk about the Civil Rights Complaint filed by the Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org) against the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) regarding a ‘Design Justice’ program that openly discriminated against white students and segregated students by race for those activities at which white students were permitted.

We covered the Civil Rights Complaint in Repeat-Offender U. Minnesota’s BIPOC-Only Design Justice Initiative Challenged by Equal Protection Project.

While the discussion covered the Civil Rights Complaint and the egregious conduct of UMN, we also talked about where the fight against DEI discrimination is heading in light of the Trump victory in the 2024 election.

Here is an excerpt from the write up of the interview at Alpha News:

“The University of Minnesota Twin Cities has a program called Design Justice and that Design Justice program has different elements, but they actually segregate the students by race. The program in general is open only to BIPOC—Black, Indigenous, People of Color is the acronym of the day on college campuses—and within that program, they do have some events for so-called ‘white allies,’ but they’re segregated events. The white ally events are open to everybody. The BIPOC events are only for BIPOC students. So it’s a segregated, racially discriminatory program at a public university in Minnesota,” Jacobson explained….

One description from Design Justice explains that “open events are meant for all identities/university affiliations and closed events are intentional spaces for BIPOC students.” There are separate “white ally affinity space events” designed for “white allies/accomplices within the College of Design.” [image omitted]

“This is one of the more outrageous programs that we’ve seen at the Equal Protection Project. We filed almost 50 of them so far, including several in Minnesota. I’ve rarely seen anybody quite so brazen as the University of Minnesota Twin Cities is here, where they literally have segregated openly,” Jacobson said.

“There are multiple levels of violation. The first is because this is a public university, this violates the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment, which provides that no one shall be denied equal protection of the laws and on account of race or other factors. So, this is a violation of equal protection. You have different standards for different students in a public university,” he continued.

“You also have the Civil Rights Law of 1964 Section 6, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or color, which this does, and that applies to the University of Minnesota because it receives federal funding, and the Department of Education itself provides federal funding to the University of Minnesota so Title 6 applies. So this is also a statutory civil rights violation.

“Those are the two claims we’ve asserted because we’ve asserted them at the Department of Education, which does not normally or may not even have jurisdiction over state law claims. But we do cite in our complaint in a footnote that this violates Minnesota law and it also violates the University of Minnesota’s own rules and regulations. By filing this complaint, all we’re really saying is, ‘How about you live up to your own rules in addition to federal law,’” Jacobson concluded.

When he launched the project in 2023, the University of Minnesota was one of their first few complaints for something similar. This will now be the sixth his organization has filed in Minnesota.

“Hopefully that will change under the second Trump administration and that federal funding will be put on the line,” Jacobson said.

An excerpt from the transcript regarding the future of DEI appears below the podcast video;

Transcript Excerpt (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)

WAJ (02:12):

This is one of the more outrageous programs that we’ve seen at the Equal Protection Project. We filed almost 50 of them so far, including several in Minnesota. I’ve rarely seen anybody quite so brazen as University of Minnesota Twin Cities is here, where they literally have segregated openly, as you say, it’s open. They’re not hiding anything. And that raises a whole host of questions. It also not only violates federal civil rights laws and the Constitution, because it’s a public university, it probably violates a whole host of Minnesota laws and maybe even Minneapolis local ordinances that do not allow, um, places of public accommodation to engage in discrimination.

So at every level, this program appears to violate the law, which raises the question, where has the university been? Who vetted this, who reviewed this? University of Minnesota? Like every large state university has elaborate and enormous bureaucracies devoted to stamping out microaggressions and all sorts of minute forms of possible discrimination. Yet you have an open program sponsored by the university, which literally segregates students on campus for different aspects of programming. It’s really unbelievable.

***

WAJ (06:42):

And really, until these universities have their funding put at risk in a serious way, they’re not gonna change. We end up playing Whack-a-Mole with them. We stamp out this problem and another one pops up over there. Then you deal with that one and another pops up someplace else because there’s no credible threat to the university. Hopefully that will change under the second Trump administration, and that federal funding will be put on the line

***

Collin (12:03):

And on that note, it does sound like you are hopeful things could change under a Trump presidency. It seems that that many people are waking up, and perhaps there isn’t the appetite for this… it seems like they’re more comfortable calling it out now.

WAJ (12:22):

It took it time to change the culture on this. And maybe other people said it, but I remember Andrew Breitbart saying that politics is downstream from culture. And that’s certainly true when it comes to DEI post George Floyd, and obviously Minnesota is familiar with that case.

There was this mad rush, particularly in academia, but also corporations and government, to implement what were frankly racially discriminatory programs. And that Mad Rush was a reflection of the culture, the culture emanating from Black Lives Matter movement and other protest movements.

But … three, four years later, people are burnt out on it. They see it’s been a failure.  I’ve been screaming about this for four years, that this is going to be a disaster. You’re setting people against each other that there’s no good outcome here. From pitting races against races and turning everything in life into racial conflict.

And lo and behold, the culture has changed on it [over] three to four years of people like us and others, many others, hammering on [DEI] has changed the culture when it comes to DEI. And so now political change I think is possible because the culture has changed.

[The] New York Times three, four weeks ago did a major, I think it was for their Sunday magazine story, on the University of Michigan and the DEI efforts there. The university of Michigan in the last decade has spent, I think the number was a quarter of a billion dollars. So $250 million on DEI, bureaucracy and programming and the conclusion by the New York Times, not by some right wing newspaper, the conclusion was it’s been an abysmal failure and it actually made things worse.

WAJ (14:15):

And that’s what we’ve all been saying. The so-called right wing conspiracy theory is now accepted truth, even at the New York Times. It took two to three to four years. But now all the things we’ve been saying that this is a threat to our society, that…  if you wanted to tear our country apart, what would you do differently than they are doing in education? There was just a study that came out, I forget the name of the organization, but a respected organization which found that exposure to DEI program makes people more likely to scream about racism, but equally important, more likely from the left to embrace very radical ideologies.

And so at every level, DEI has been a failure.

I teach at Cornell University, at the law school. I’ve led the effort there to tell the Board of Trustees, get rid of this. They don’t listen, obviously, but I think they’re going to start listening because the culture has changed.

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