What Comes After D.E.I.? | The New Yorker

She and others touted the same initial stat about H.B. 261’s success: after the bill was passed, Weber State opened the Student Success Center, which offers things like advising and workshops on personal finances, to all students. More than a thousand students visited in the fall of 2024. The previous fall, only four hundred and fifty students had shown up at seven different race-, ethnicity-, and gender-focussed cultural centers—combined. Grover, the Senate sponsor, told me that he sees Utah as a national leader on this issue. “The country has definitely moved on D.E.I.,” he said. “This is where we’re going now.”

It seems like in every generation conservatives have questioned the role of gender and race on campus, whether they’re focussed on women’s liberation or affirmative action or C.R.T. In recent years, however, the most significant shift has happened not on the right but in the center and on the left, as leaders who once embraced D.E.I. have come to doubt the way it has been carried out. Patel, the Interfaith America president, who describes himself as an Obama liberal, blames the backlash on the “anti-oppression” strain of D.E.I., which emphasizes the marginalization of minority groups. “For it to prove itself right, it has to define minorities as people who are principally victims of something,” he said. He described events with students that “felt like Communist Party meetings,” where young people were unable to see themselves as anything but oppressed. “There’s no college president who wants classrooms to become Communist Party meetings.”

In 2022, Raj Vinnakota, a friend of Patel’s and the president of an organization called the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, started talking with college presidents about the unease they felt on their campuses. They worried that the perspectives at their schools had become too narrow, and that their students didn’t understand how to engage with opposing viewpoints. Higher education had become polarized, with a college degree serving as a reliable predictor of how someone might vote. People had come to view higher education “as a private good,” Vinnakota told me. It’s easy for politicians to vilify college when the point of it is to adopt the right ideas and get ahead rather than to become a productive member of society. “There is a public-good responsibility that is being lost, that is being devalued, that is being deprioritized,” Vinnakota said.

In August, 2023, he launched a new initiative, College Presidents for Civic Preparedness. A few months later, Hamas fighters invaded Israel, initiating a war. On campuses, “the floodgates opened,” Vinnakota told me. A hundred and twenty-three presidents are now in the group, and have committed to protecting open debate and free inquiry. Roslyn Artis, the president of Benedict College, an H.B.C.U. in South Carolina, told me that the goal is to take on “the P.R. problem in education, which generally is born of this perception that we are biased, we are liberal, that we are producing little anarchists.” In 2019, Artis hosted Trump on campus. “I nearly died over it, politically and otherwise,” she said. Benedict is about eighty per cent Black, and eighty-four per cent of students come from low-income families. Artis believes that she has a responsibility to expose students to views they might not like. “I am anti-safe space,” she said. “It is our students who have to assimilate. The world does not assimilate to them.” But Lori White, the Black president of DePauw, a majority-white liberal-arts school in Indiana, who also joined the coalition, was careful to note that philosophical discussions about freedom of expression go only so far. As a student, she said, “if I’m in an argument with you, and you say something controversial that I feel like somehow compromises my humanity, it’s really hard for me to hear. I’m not yet mature enough, sometimes, to be able to accept that.”

In this charged political moment, college presidents may have mixed motives for waving their hands in the air in favor of free expression. It’s not just Trump’s crackdown: legislatures around the country are considering anti-D.E.I. bills along the lines of Utah’s. Texas and Florida have already placed even stricter limits on academic content seen as biased or indoctrinating. When I asked Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, whether presidents are flocking toward pluralism because they’re afraid of being hit with a lawsuit, he laughed. “They’re entirely that,” he said. “One hundred per cent. What else would they be? People are afraid—as they should be!” Still, to see the pluralism pivot entirely as an exercise in covering your ass would miss the depth of the soul-searching that college presidents are doing. Especially after Trump’s election, presidents “feel lied to” by their diversity experts, Patel told me. For years, college administrators claimed that minority groups felt literally endangered by the ideas of Trump and his allies. And yet, to take just one example, roughly fifty per cent of Latinos under the age of forty voted for him. “It’s, like, You’re just wrong,” Patel said. “You’re like a dentist that pulled the wrong tooth.”

A few months after H.B. 261 passed, Villarreal, the U’s V.P. of E.D.I., left the school for another job. “It was disappointing,” she said. “I really struggled with the question of where I had failed to cross some bridges.” She had wanted to turn diversity work at the U into something bigger than racial box-checking. “It was a failed vision on my part,” she said. Perhaps the banner under which she was working, the campus-diversity movement, no longer serves the purpose it was meant to. A movement that had always focussed on making people feel that they belong had become associated with division and exclusion. “The acronym and the word—there’s no win in it,” she said. “There’s no win in claiming D.E.I. Let’s just be clear about what we’re doing.”

As with so much of the debate over D.E.I. and free expression, H.B. 261 is largely about language. It prohibits state-funded universities from using the phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” for offices or trainings. It requires professors to enter their course titles and syllabi in a public database, presumably so that others can see how they describe their lessons. Leaders at the U put out a guidance document for staff that reads a bit like instructions for the board game Taboo, in which the goal is to describe a word without actually saying it. The document advises avoiding interview questions about working with a “diverse team,” for instance, swapping that for a question about working with “people from backgrounds that are different from your own.” Before the law was passed, the university sponsored and funded a half-dozen race- and ethnicity-based student groups. These groups were told that they, too, had to comply with the new law; the Black Student Union, for example, could not take public positions on concepts like anti-racism or intersectionality. Nearly all the student groups decided that the bureaucratic compliance wasn’t worth the effort, and gave up their sponsored status. Alex Tokita, a senior who serves as president of the Asian American Student Association, one of the formerly sponsored groups, told me, “There’s a lot of disappointment and feelings of helplessness. All these things are being taken away without anybody to really talk to about it.”

Several of the school’s identity-related cultural centers have also shut down. This winter, another student leader, who asked not to be named because she was worried about being targeted by ice, took me on a tour of the student union, which is being rearranged to comply with the law. We visited what had once been the Center for Equity and Student Belonging. She led me to the back of an office, where men were assembling furniture next to a stack of moving boxes. The walls were blank; administrators had recently removed art work depicting eight female activists, including Angela Davis, the Marxist prison abolitionist, and Grace Lee Boggs, the Asian American Black Power activist. “This is where we used to always congregate,” she said. Now it’s less clear whether students are welcome—not that they’d have much of a place to sit. We walked past the old LGBT Resource Center, which had been replaced by the catchall Center for Community & Cultural Engagement. It hosted programs celebrating M.L.K. Day, and planned to hold events for Pride Week—both allowed under the new law. “It’s a little bit confusing,” she said. “The centers share awareness of the different cultures that are represented here on campus, without talking about the adversities. So it’s more performative.” When I asked whether she had gone to the events, she shrugged. “I don’t engage with them as much,” she said. Nearby was another center with an impossible-to-remember generic name, the Center for Student Access and Resources. The director, Kirstin Maanum, used to run the Women’s Resource Center. The new center’s acronym—CSAR—was pasted on an otherwise blank wall. “Students have observed that it feels like a dentist’s office,” Maanum said.

Later that afternoon, I met a student named Sadie Werner. She had been the president of the Black Student Union when H.B. 261 passed, and quit out of frustration over the new rules. “I have shed way too many tears over this bill,” she said. She used to hang out at the Black Cultural Center, where students could reliably find programming, friends, and free food; now, she said, the space is locked. Werner heard that one of her scholarships—which had been administered by the center—was being eliminated, sending her into a panic about how to pay for school. It turned out that no scholarships had been eliminated, but they had been distributed among several different offices. Werner said she hadn’t heard about how to reapply.

Grief over the end of the U’s cultural centers has gone far beyond students and staff. The Democratic minority leaders in the Utah House and Senate, Angela Romero and Luz Escamilla, both went to the University of Utah; they met at what was then known as the Center for Ethnic Student Affairs. “In 1997, there was hardly anyone with black hair in Utah,” Escamilla told me. The center “really helped us feel that we belonged at the University of Utah.” The fact that both she and Romero came through the same program and ended up as leaders in the legislature “speaks volumes,” she said. Romero told me, “If it wasn’t for the Center for Ethnic Student Affairs, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. I am a product of D.E.I., and I am O.K. with that.”

Even a year after the passage of the law, Escamilla couldn’t understand what it was trying to achieve. “I don’t know how erasing someone’s identity is getting you closer to collaboration,” she said. “I was trying to understand, Why is this bothering you? How could this be harming you, that kids have a way of belonging?” Escamilla’s district in Salt Lake is predominantly working class and Latino. “It was so heartbreaking to me that the kids in my neighborhood, my district, the children I represent—it was us fighting for them, and no one else,” she said.

When the university announced that it would be closing the Women’s Resource Center, Maanum took down the art that hung on the walls. She loaded a couple of pieces into her car and returned them to the former staff members who had donated them. She and her colleagues organized a farewell party at a brewery. They wore T-shirts with the center’s logo. They took Polaroid selfies. They wrote love letters to what their community had been.

The pictures and notes sit in a small cardboard box on a shelf above Maanum’s computer. She meant to take them to the university archives, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do so. “I take them down and read them,” she told me. “Some days I cry.” Inside the box, stickers decorated with groovy flowers and “WRC” in nineteen-seventies-style font note the dates of the center’s founding and closure, like an obituary: 1971 to 2024.

The big question for the pluralism paradigm is whether it will eventually go the same way as D.E.I., becoming a target for lawsuits and culture-war backlash. The intellectual framework of pluralism seems legally sturdier than that of D.E.I., which focusses on certain aspects of identity in a way that arguably runs afoul of America’s civil-rights laws. The Supreme Court recently banned race-conscious admissions, for example, and many colleges have moved to end race-specific scholarships after facing legal challenges. By contrast, pluralism emphasizes everyone’s ability to thrive, with all their differences fully respected. It’s less clear how pluralism will land politically, though, in the Trumpian moment. A strong movement for pluralism on campuses, largely spearheaded by liberals, was well under way before Trump was elected. The coterie of scholars and consultants who are pushing pluralism are all deeply worried that their work will be construed as yet another leftist program of indoctrination—or, now that Trump is cracking down on D.E.I., mistrusted by academics as capitulation to the regime. “It’s important that this work does not get co-opted as just a conservative thing or a liberal thing,” Manu Meel, the head of BridgeUSA, a network of student groups that host conversations about controversial topics, told me. “It has to be an American thing.”

The philanthropic sector may or may not follow the pluralism pivot. Michael Murray, the president of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, which fund projects in higher education and religion, told me that “since October 7th things have changed quite a bit in terms of available philanthropic dollars.” High-net-worth individuals “have made it clear that they are willing to put resources on the line for institutions to do work in this space.” Jennifer Hoos Rothberg, the executive director of the Einhorn Collaborative, a nonprofit philanthropy, has put together a group of funders who she says want to take pluralism work from “nice to have, soft, squishy” to “tangible, measurable, meaningful, and sustainable.”

Even traditional philanthropists in higher ed are poking around pluralism. Terri Taylor, a strategy director at the Lumina Foundation, a heavyweight funder with one and a half billion dollars in assets, told me that a group of twenty organizations joined a call in December, after Trump’s reëlection, to trade notes on efforts to foster dialogue on campuses. Still, the foundation, which has historically focussed on equity, is leery of abandoning its emphasis on racial justice. “Race is, in many ways, a superseding factor,” Jamie Merisotis, Lumina’s C.E.O., told me. “Being a person of color, being Black, or being someone who comes from an underrepresented ethnic group like Latinos leads to poorer outcomes.” He sees the turn away from D.E.I. as a response to its politicization. “To walk away from the construct of race or ethnicity,” he said, “means our collective talent as a nation will suffer.” The most stalwart D.E.I. advocates see the criticisms of current D.E.I. practices as cover for racism. Paulette Granberry Russell, the president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, said, of legislators who oppose D.E.I., “The real interest is in obliterating efforts that provide support for particular communities. It’s been two years of trying to get a message across that this work is not divisive, it’s not discrimination, it’s not exclusion or indoctrination.” She added, “Don’t let them get away with saying it’s divisive.”

At a place like the University of Utah, these debates are largely theoretical. H.B. 261 is the law, and the school must move forward. I met with Taylor Randall, the president, in his office. He has been working with Patel, the Interfaith America president, along with others to develop a pluralistic vision for the U—not a repackaged form of D.E.I. but a new vision, based on coöperation across difference. Randall has a scholarly background in accounting, and his attraction to pluralism is fittingly pragmatic. “A market economy functions on relationships and transactions, which naturally require compromise and coalition-building,” he said. Helping students find common ground is “the most practical skill I can teach.” Students need to learn how to state and debate their views, he added: “It’s one of the critical skills we’ve got to have as citizens.”

The U is starting to roll out new initiatives. In addition to Patel, the school has brought in Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor and a self-styled happiness guru, and Timothy Shriver, the chairman of the Special Olympics, as “impact scholars” who regularly visit the campus. There are scholarships for students who do service projects with one another. Faculty and students who pitch ideas for collaborating across lines of difference will be eligible for grants. “We’re in the early stages to see whether this framework is going to work or not,” Randall said.