Is the Right Winning the Battle Over DEI? – HotAir

Clearly things have changed in the battle over DEI. Just a few years ago the left clearly had the upper hand on college campuses, in public schools, in corporate boardrooms and in government offices. DEI books were bestsellers and it was just assumed DEI had a firm hold on the culture. But even before Trump won the White House, DEI seemed to be losing its grip. Affirmative Action was ended by the Supreme Court. Top colleges began requiring the SAT again. Corporations started walking back their DEI commitments.

Once Trump won the election, resistance to DEI became official policy. Yesterday, Christopher Rufo argues that the right is finally winning this battle, in part because it finally has embraced a winning argument.

The argument is straightforward: Racial discrimination is wrong whether it targets whites, Asians, and Jews, or blacks and Hispanics. Any institution that continues to discriminate based on race is ineligible for federal support.

Critics have called this approach “weaponizing civil-rights law.” But civil-rights laws have always been a weapon—it’s just that conservatives have finally decided to wield them.

The Ivy League’s presidents are struggling to understand and respond to the moment.

Coincidentally, there’s an article up today at Politico which seems to confirm that universities are indeed struggling to grasp what is happening and uncertain how to respond.

POLITICO reached out to more than 60 public university and campus system presidents to ask about how their institutions are responding to the federal pressure to end diversity programs.

Only one agreed to an interview.

Several requests went unanswered, some university leaders declined to be interviewed, and others referred to their published statements and federal policy updates.

What really seems to be shocking to many on the left is suddenly finding themselves on the wrong side of the argument. How dare someone suggest their efforts are racist and discriminatory.

Georgia Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones II expressed alarm over the environment the Trump administration is creating to further fuel these efforts.

Jones slammed the language used in Trump’s executive order, which describes diversity programs as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.”

“To call it immoral discrimination, that goes beyond the pale of just having a legal difference,” Jones said. “The language being used now by Republicans is beyond anything really we’ve ever seen, especially for a president.”

Jones is not wrong about what many Republicans are now saying.

“It’s racist,” said Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), who leads the House higher education subcommittee. “We shouldn’t be able to look at each other and make any predictions about our opportunities because of our skin color. That’s why DEI has to go away. Affirmative action, same thing.”

Going back to Christopher Rufo, he argues that a recent NY Times interview with Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber demonstrates that many on the left don’t realize where they stand when it comes to civil rights laws against discrimination.

After carefully listening to his position, I’ve concluded that he understands neither the argument against him nor, frankly, his own. Eisgruber claims to be defending a noble cause—America’s civil-rights tradition. In reality, he is defending his university’s policies of racialist discrimination…

If pressed, I’m sure Eisgruber would concede that President Eisenhower was right to mandate desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957—and to deploy the 101st Airborne Division to enforce it. What he fails to grasp is that, in this analogy, Princeton is Little Rock Central High School, and he is Governor Orval Faubus. Under Eisgruber’s watch, Princeton has systematically discriminated on the basis of race and has repeatedly violated the principle of color-blind equality—the core ideal of civil-rights law.

Some schools seem to be acknowledging, at least partly, that some of the DEI policies they have embraced were wrongheaded. Several schools have recently announced they are doing away with mandatory DEI statements which can be used to hire or promote people for adherence to left-wing beliefs rather than for their merit as individuals. And as mentioned, others have brought back the SAT, a test that some DEI trainers consider racist.

I’m not convinced the right has won this battle yet as there are still a lot of holdouts in blue states, but there has definitely been a turn in the tide. The right is now fighting back using the civil rights laws that already exist to demand a colorblind approach from schools and corporations who do business with the government. Ultimately, this will probably result in court battles over which elements of DEI violate those civil rights laws. Progressives who think nothing will change if they resist hard enough are going to be in for a surprise. They are going to lose some of these battles. They are going to find themselves on the “wrong side of history” in some cases.