How Linda McMahon can root out and destroy camouflaged DEI programs 

The Trump administration is well on its way to ridding public colleges and universities of diversity, equity and inclusion programming. President Trump's Jan. 20 anti-DEI executive order and the Department of Education’s Feb. 14 “Dear Colleague” letter are good first steps.

But to root out this toxic ideology effectively, the administration must tap higher education insiders who understand the inner workings of academia. 

An expert panel would be more effective than a group of departmental bureaucrats or lawyers because universities have gotten more sophisticated and nuanced in rebranding their DEI offices in order to circumvent state bans while avoiding backlash. 

Like any other industry, academia has its own systems and language. Policies and directives created without such knowledge make masking and circumventing easy for bad actors. To achieve the worthy goal of defunding schools that allow DEI courses and programming, Education Secretary Linda McMahon should create a panel of academic experts — including conservatives — responsible for identifying the applicable divisive ideas being propagated on campuses.

We’ve already identified numerous examples of higher education obfuscating its DEI initiatives. For example, offices across the country have dropped the “E” (equity) to avoid the DEI acronym. Some have tried to rebrand using synonyms for "inclusion" such as “belonging” or “community.” In recent months, the University of Mississippi renamed its DEI office the “Office of Community and Belonging.” Utah Valley State renamed its DEI office to “Office of Inclusion and Diversity,” and Michigan Technical University rebranded its DEI office as the Office for “Engagement and Belonging.”

Those offices have deftly distanced themselves from the equity and social justice language that exposed their political aims. But now they offer the country a Trojan horse of intercultural centers, diversity offices, and inclusion initiatives that appear to promote worthy causes but actually house the toxicity of DEI. 

As of March 5, there are 203 open DEI positions in higher education. The majority use rebranded or reworded titles to get around the DEI acronym. Many — though not necessarily every single one — represents a violation of the administration’s education policy. 

Targeting DEI programming by name alone will be insufficient to root out its toxicity from higher education. Conservative academics have the specialized knowledge to see through deceitful academic jargon. The ideas and language found on diversity offices’ websites and at their events have their own history in activist far-left scholarship. DEI tenets belong to a genealogy of revolutionary fervor that is easy for academics to hide from the general public and difficult to tease out of college bureaucracies. 

An expert panel would also help prevent the Department of Education from targeting worthy diversity initiatives that neither use DEI nor falsely present their divisive rhetoric as the only solution to inequality. For example, intercultural exchanges are positive things that can strengthen communities, particularly college campuses. That is not the case when ideologue administrators graft their radical political preferences on to operations and try to pass them off as if they were merely encouraging diversity.

Last year, Randolph College in Virginia rebranded its Office of Diversity, Identity, Culture, and Inclusion and its Center for Identity, Culture, and Inclusion into the singular Intercultural Center. The college then confirmed that the leftist equity agenda was one of its core principles.

It is not always that obvious when leftists colonize diversity efforts for their political ambitions. This is why the Department of Education needs to make sure it is appointing auditors with the requisite academic expertise to move through the minefield of leftist terminology and trickery.  

Diversity and cross-cultural understanding are positive things, but ideologues have weaponized those objectives to promote radical and discriminatory ideas as the only means for addressing inequality. That gas-lighting needs to stop for the sake of students’ futures. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize divisiveness and failure. 

Additionally, without firsthand experience working in a university, it is very easy for non-experts to distinguish between when academics talk generally about divisive subjects and when they specifically push divisive ideologies. It is virtually impossible to study Western history and society without reading Marx or studying social inequalities, because scholars cannot rely on second-hand accounts of primary sources. But that should not be confused for a license for professors to impose their politics on students. 

Any panel investigating DEI in higher education should focus its efforts on intercultural centers. These officers are not new, but they have now become a hub for concealing DEI in their vague and benign mission statements about promoting diversity and cross-cultural understanding. That concealment is an example of the “covert discrimination” against students that the Department of Education's letter references. 

The Department of Education is embarking on an undertaking of gigantic proportions. McMahon is no doubt capable of the task at hand. Trump picked her for the job because of her business acumen. Successful CEOs know their blind spots and when they need to delegate to subject-matter experts. Engaging conservative academics will be essential to rooting out the DEI virus in American education.

Zachary Marschall, Ph.D., is editor-in-chief of Leadership Institute's Campus Reform and an adjunct assistant professor of arts administration at the University of Kentucky.