The Battle Against DEI in Higher Education is Just Getting Started

The Battle Against DEI in Higher Education is Just Getting Started

Heather Mac Donald sees the ongoing situation at Columbia as essential but also a reminder of how much needs to be done.

She writes in City Journal:

Columbia’s President Resigns, But the DEI Battle Is Just Beginning

With the resignation of Columbia University’s interim president, the academic-diversity complex seems to have sent out a warning shot: cooperation with the Trump administration will be punished. Outgoing president Katrina Armstrong claimed in her resignation letter, submitted Friday, March 28, that she had always “planned” to return to her various bureaucratic positions in Columbia’s medical schools. Quite possibly true. But the question is: For when was that return planned?

The timing suggests that the decision was forced by external pressure. Armstrong had been facing a faculty revolt for over a week, as well as a lawsuit from eight Columbia students. The faculty objected to Armstrong’s decision to comply—more or less—with a set of Trump administration demands issued as a precondition for avoiding a $400 million cut in federal funds.

The Columbia faculty, or at least its most left-wing, pro-Palestinian bloc, had also revolted against Armstrong’s predecessor, Minouche Shafik. According to her critics, Shafik had failed in Congress to sufficiently defend Columbia’s pro-Hamas campus protests. Then she failed to protect those illegal protesters from arrest.

Now the faculty appear to have taken another scalp.

The irony is that Armstrong had outmaneuvered the Trump administration in some of its demands. Contrary to press reports, that outmaneuvering was not a concealed stratagem; she merely used clever drafting. In so doing, she had served a reminder that the president’s team had better start reading the fine print if it wants to secure its counterrevolution. Other recent developments in academia confirm how wily the Trump administration’s diversity-industry opposition is.

Read the whole thing.

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