Despite some pro forma jabs at Trump--"I disdain Trump hence the left should listen to my message"--this is a good survey of the damage DEI has wrought in academia:
A Look at Princeton’s DEI Structure Amid Trump Trashing DEI
By Stuart Taylor Jr.
March 23, 2025 AP
“Princeton Doubles Down on DEI Amid Nationwide Attacks,” the Princeton Alumni Weekly reported recently – and a few weeks later, the Trump administration launched a profusion of legal and rhetorical attacks on universities for alleged sins against freedom of speech and for “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination.” The administration may make major cuts of outlays to universities, while Vice President J.D. Vance and others have spoken of taxing income on university endowments.
The pressure is intense on universities to conduct a deep and prompt review of their DEI policies, their design and effectiveness, their use of overt and covert racial and gender preferences in admissions, financial aid, faculty hiring and training, racially segregated dormitories, graduation ceremonies, and other programming.
Princeton’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” activities appear to be more extensive, at least in terms of numbers of DEI personnel, than other Ivy League schools, and much more extensive than at most large state schools – although modest by comparison with some, such as the huge and much-remarked DEI bureaucracy at the University of Michigan. Meanwhile, the University of Virginia spends an estimated $20 million on employees who work on diversity, equity, and inclusion, according to an analysis by OpenTheBooks.com. It said UVA has at least 235 employees whose job titles signal they do DEI work for the school. (UVA claims this is inaccurate.)
I think that careful change on the DEI and racial and gender fairness fronts would be a good thing at Princeton as well as around the country – if done right. But trusting the Trump administration to do it right requires a leap of faith. Here is what Columbia University’s John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics and New York Times columnist wrote:
The problem with Trump’s executive order is that it goes beyond addressing this recent transmogrification of DEI [into “an institutionalized anti-whiteness”] and puts a wholesale pox on what a certain kind of person is given to calling ‘stirring up that stuff’ about race. … There is no mending in Trump’s order, which instead attempts to simply vaporize any institutionalized commitment to social justice. One can be utterly revolted by the way DEI has been practiced of late while still supporting institutions that use outreach strategies to identify applicants less likely to come to their attention via normal channels.
On Feb. 21 a federal judge blocked Trump’s bid to deprive federal funding from programs that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives. U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson of Baltimore ruled that Trump’s policy likely violates the First Amendment because it penalizes private groups based on their viewpoints and is written so vaguely that it chills the free speech of federal contractors. Litigation over the scattershot, sometimes perverse Trump offensive will no doubt continue for years.
And in the words of Wenyuan Wu, “Expecting the visible hand of swift government action to undo decades of damages from omnipresent thought capture is plain wishful thinking.”
Meanwhile, there are green shoots of reform at a few universities, including the recent adoption of the “Vanderbilt-WashU Statement of Principles” by the Boards of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, “to affirm and codify each university’s ongoing commitment to … values,” including “to pursue the truth wherever it lies [without] a political ideology or … a particular vision of social change.”
Princeton Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity Michele Minter has “estimated there are about 75 DEI practitioners” at the university (which has about 5,600 undergraduates) spanning different offices and departments. Universities generally have more employees focused on DEI than their titles suggest, and some have outsourced their DEI functions to third-party providers. Minter’s own office lists a staff of 20. More broadly, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni reported that administrative costs per student at Princeton rose from $18,000 in 2013 to $34,000 in 2022 (with comparable rises at MIT, Harvard, and Stanford).
Princeton also has an “Office of Diversity and Inclusion–Campus Life,” which includes the Carl A. Fields Center and the Gender + Sexuality Resource Center. The School of Public and International Affairs has a well-developed DEI program. Its website says: “Over the last year, over 120 students have attended weekly DEI dinners, discussing topics like racial equity analysis and disability allyship, and celebrating the rich diversity of our community. The DEI team supports several graduate affinity groups, including the Students and Alumni of Color, FIRST+ (first-generation and/or low-income students, alumni, professors, and staff), SPIA LGBTQ+, SPIA Latine, SPIA AAPI groups, and any students interested in hosting programming that celebrates identity and experiences of its members and the communities they serve.”
The Athletics Department has its own “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Policies”; the English Department has its own “diversity statement,” among other things. And so on.
“One website, ‘Visions for a More Just World — To Be Known and Heard: Systemic Racism and Princeton University,’ was recently taken down,” the Daily Princetonian reported.
“According to an archived version of the website, it aims to confront the history of racism at Princeton and share current anti-racist work at the University,” according to the Princetonian. “The website included documentation of initiatives, such as removing Woodrow Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs, endowing a professorship in Indigenous Studies, and creating The Princeton & Slavery Project. It also included history and interviews about racism at the University. While the exact date it was removed is unclear, a version of the website was up as recently as Jan. 20.”
Another statistical analysis comes from a March 14, 2023, article by Kevin Wallstein. Drawing on a Heritage Foundation study, it estimated that Princeton has about five DEI personnel per 1,000 undergraduates, more than any Ivy League school except for Harvard, which has more than eight per 1,000, and far above the 1.8 DEI bureaucrats to 1,000 students averaged by public universities.
At Princeton, which some fault for a kind of “politicized orthodoxy,” all important decisions ultimately pass through President Christopher Eisgruber, who has held his job since September 2013. According to both insiders and all outward appearances, the Board of Trustees acts as a rubber stamp.
After Trump was elected in 2016, and amid the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, Time magazine noted that the DEI industry had “exploded” in size. Within academia, a 2019 survey found that spending on DEI efforts had increased 27% over the five preceding academic years.
How does DEI affect Princeton students and faculty? Eisgruber has suggested that it enlightens students, while also acknowledging that those who identify as “extremely conservative” report lower rates of belonging than others and higher rates of concern about being treated respectfully. He has also asserted that “racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in structures of the university itself,” and he outlined a wide range of “antiracism” initiatives, such as ‘[d]evelop[ing] an institution-wide, multiyear action plan for supplier and contractor diversity, bringing together and expanding efforts focused on procurement and diversification of vendors, consultants, professional firms, and other business partners, including external investment managers.”
In contrast to the touted benefits of DEI programming, much evidence suggests it is counterproductive. For example, a recent study reportedly found, “[D]iversity, equity, and inclusion materials have a wide range of negative consequences, including psychological harm, increased hostility, and greater agreement with extreme authoritarian rhetoric, such as adapted Adolf Hitler quotes.”
The Threat Is Not Theoretical
Perhaps the greatest sin by activist Princeton faculty and DEI proponents against free speech and open inquiry – well-documented by mathematics professor Sergiu Klainerman in 2022 – was the smearing of highly respected classics professor Joshua Katz 2021. After being slandered as “racist” by various faculty and administrators, the tenured professor was fired by Eisgruber. The pretext was that Katz had not responded appropriately to the university’s 2018 investigation of his consensual relationship with a 21-year-old student more than a decade earlier, for which he had already been suspended for a year without pay. The real reason was Katz’s widely assailed 2020 Quillette article calling a group of students who had been known years before as the Black Justice League “a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands.”
In an essay headlined, “Academic Administrators Are Strangling Our Universities,” four distinguished Princeton professors (John Londregan, Sergiu Klainerman, Michael A. Reynolds, and Bernard Haykel) addressed what was as stake:
“In retaliation for publishing opinions that Princeton administrators disliked, administrators deliberately misquoted [Katz] and held him up to the incoming class [in the online ‘To Be Known and Heard’ presentation] as the epitome of racism.”
In the words of Professor Robert P. George, “There is no question in my mind as to whether Katz was defamed. … Nor am I in any doubt as to whether the underlying motives were malicious.”
It is unclear exactly who prepared which parts of the presentation and who approved its initial publication and later use in the mandatory 2021 freshman orientation. But DEI bureaucrats were involved. The official “co-sponsors” of the presentation included Michele Minter; the “Advisory Group” included Shawn Maxam, a Minter subordinate; the two “Project Leads” included the above-mentioned Carl A. Fields Center.
Many students feel that DEI dogma dampens open expression on campus. As senior Alba Basri puts it: “It is clear to me that the DEI ideology and policies … have spilled into classrooms. Many professors have enthusiastically endorsed these policies and bring them up in the classroom. I am enrolled in Molecular Biology 101 this semester, and I was displeased to see that a full page of the syllabus (page 4-5) was dedicated to DEI principles. … No matter how much Eisgruber and others argue that inclusivity and free speech go hand in hand, declarations such as these undoubtedly have a chilling effect on free speech. One value must take priority over the other, and it is clear which one the University has chosen to prioritize.”
Some faculty members agree that free speech is not the only value harmed by DEI programs. Wrote Professor Klainerman in an email:
DEI has redefined equity to mean that “every visible disparity between groups has its origin in discrimination.” It is this fact, more than anything else, that explains the terrible impact that DEI has on universities. …
As direct forms of discrimination are now virtually nonexistent in academia, discrimination has been redefined as an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be observed directly. Rather, it manifests instead through unequal outcomes. Once justice was reformulated in terms of equality of results, it became untenable to insist on merit and the pursuit of truth; these values had to be abandoned or redefined, whenever they came into conflict with the new orthodoxy.
Said another faculty member, who preferred not to be named out of a fear of retaliation: “[A]t Princeton concerns about identity are all around. In many conversations about hiring or graduate admissions, race and/or gender are introduced. People will assert that ‘this job must go to an A or B,’ in spite of federal law and merit. Many of the Princeton institutions to which I pay attention have made inappropriate statements.” For years, this professor said, the faculty hiring process has been permeated with quasi-covert racial/gender preferences.
Students Rage Against the Machine
In “How Academic Freedom Died at Princeton,” Abigail Anthony, a 2023 graduate and journalist who now sits on the Princetonians for Free Speech board, weighed in as well. “In recent years, Princeton has embraced the imperatives of diversity, equity, and inclusion, making it an unwelcoming space for anyone – conservative or liberal, religious or secular – who happens to dissent.”
Anthony, a self-described conservative, continued: “Princeton’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are misnamed: They divide, exclude, and ostracize students of all political affiliations by rendering it socially dangerous to express any criticism of progressive mantras. Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees, which could explain the land acknowledgements in syllabi and the deluge of departmental anti-racism statements that inform students what can and can’t be said in class.”
“Princeton’s diversity bureaucracy functions as an ideological surveillance system that regulates the social and academic cultures,” she added. “Freshman orientation has compulsory events that include ‘diversity and inclusion’ in the session’s title, as well as mandatory programs on LGBTQ identity, ‘mindfulness,’ socioeconomic status, and the university’s ‘history of systemic racism.’”
Matthew Wilson, a 2024 graduate also wrote about the “stifling” effects of such ideological surveillance.
“Princeton maintains a highly sophisticated bias-reporting apparatus that incorporates elements … from anonymous reporting to third-party hosting software … overseen by the university’s DEI office, known as the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity,” he wrote. “The DEI office accepts two types of bias reports – those made in-person, by email, or through an online form by identified complainants; and those made anonymously. Both faculty members and students can be the subject of bias reports.”
His bracing account of the realities of modern campus life paints a portrait of a climate more akin to a police state than a liberal academic environment.
“Along with reports of fraud, theft, and sexual misconduct, members of the campus community … submit anonymous reports alleging bias or discrimination,” he noted. “Student data … can be handed over to government authorities or private parties upon request. … Princeton also keeps its own documentation of bias reports. In an email, Princeton spokesman Michael Hotchkiss [implied] to me that Princeton files away all bias reports – including complaints sent in anonymously and those which are judged to be frivolous or baseless – in order to use their contents to justify further interventions into academic affairs and student life by DEI administrators. …
“[E]ven when Princeton determines that reported bias constituted protected speech, or did not occur at all, accused persons can still be subject to what are known as ‘No Communication’ and ‘No Contact’ orders. … No-communication and no-contact orders were originally intended to shield victims of sexual assault and harassment from their assailant. But Princeton has recently deployed them as weapons to silence student journalists and heterodox voices on campus.
“All of this creates an atmosphere of mutual mistrust and repression and Princeton’s labyrinthine bias-reporting apparatus … poses dueling significant risks to free speech and student privacy. By encouraging students to tell on peers whose speech they find offensive and facilitating a campus culture of anonymous reporting, no-contact orders, and self-censorship, Princeton’s bias-reporting system utterly fails to uphold the university’s stated commitment to ‘protect and promote free expression.’”
DEI surveillance explicitly undermined academic freedom in at least one incident, with President Eisgruber’s full support. As PFS reported in January 2022, Michele Minter was brought in by Firestone Library’s chief librarian Anne Jarvis to excise the work of two eminent 19th century Jewish artists from a planned exhibit on the grounds that these artists had Confederate ties. The exhibit’s creator and Princeton major donor Leonard Milberg (class of 1953) canceled the exhibit in protest. (President Eisgruber made the Orwellian assertion that in censoring the exhibit’s content, Minter and Jarvis were exercising their free speech rights.)
The Trump administration has, of course, exuded across-the-board hostility to such programs, as PFS cofounder Ed Yingling noted on Jan. 24: “[A]mong the many Executive Orders signed by President Trump are three that, while not specifically addressing campus free speech or academic freedom, show the intention to move aggressively on these and related issues,” he wrote. “The first relates to DEI policies in government and the second relates broadly to government censorship of speech at the federal level. The third, most important for higher education, aims to end discriminatory policies and restore merit-based opportunities throughout the country.”
Counter-Revolution
“I thought the academic DEI juggernaut was unstoppable,” wrote Lawrence Krauss in the Wall Street Journal. “Then a week after President Trump’s inauguration, I got an email with an announcement from the Department of Energy: ‘The Office of Science is immediately ending the requirement for Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) Plans in any proposal submitted. …
“[This]is seismic. The major source of physical science research support in the country has sent a message to universities: Stick to science. It may be the death knell of what appeared to be an invulnerable academic bureaucracy that has been impeding the progress of higher education and research for at least a decade.”
Litigation over the scattershot, sometimes perverse Trump offensive will no doubt continue for years. On Feb. 21 a Baltimore-based federal judge blocked Trump’s bid to deprive federal funding from programs that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives. U.S. District Court Judge Adam Abelson ruled that Trump’s policy likely violates the First Amendment because it penalizes private groups based on their viewpoints and is written so vaguely that it chills the free speech of federal contractors.
The ever-increasing polarization of university faculty and (especially DEI) administrators into what now amounts to an overwhelming majority who are left of center and a shrinking handful who are right of center has damaged the ability of faculty and students to even think for themselves. The same would be true if the right were as dominant as the left is now. To borrow from FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff: “
deological bubbles and echo chambers are where free expression and the free exchange of ideas go to die.”
Jonathan Rauch, an uncommonly wise author and journalist who skews neither left nor right, makes a similar point: “In a room where everyone agrees with everyone else on fundamentals that don’t get questioned, you will not be learning. You will be making mistakes, and you will be unaware of those mistakes.”
Rauch continues: “Consider the data collected by Pew Research when it asked Americans whether they agree with the proposition, ‘Colleges have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country.’ During the decade spanning 2012 and 2022, the percentage expressing agreement went from 26 percent to 45 percent. Almost half of Americans now think that colleges have a negative effect on the country.”
Rauch cites six factors for this collapse in confidence.
The first factor Rauch cites is the entrenched ideology that claims that facts themselves are deemed “merely a colonialist, sexist construction; and that we should not put stock in the concept of objectivity, as it’s just a power play. This ideology has seeped in deeply, including a variant that says intellectual inquiry and the very idea of fact endangers the safety of minorities.”
A second factor, he notes, is “emotional fragility,” in which students are taught that if you expose people to ideas that offend them or surprise them, you are somehow “committing a form of violent assault.”
Third comes homogeneity: “[T]here is the dramatic change in the political leanings of American professors … since the Cold War period. As recently as the mid-1990s, the percentage of university faculty members self-reporting centrist political views was only slightly lower than the percentage self-describing as left or liberal; and conservatives still amounted to roughly one-fifth of university academics. Then, beginning in the late 1990s, you see a massive shift. And within the space of just two decades, about 60 percent of faculty were on the left, and only about 12 percent were conservative.
“As for Harvard University faculty’s political leanings, a 2021 Harvard Crimson poll found that about 3 percent of participating academics self-reported as conservative; 19.5 percent were “moderate”; and the rest – 77.6 percent – described themselves as liberal (about 48 percent) or “very liberal” (about 30 percent). When you’re in a community as politically homogeneous as this, it becomes hard to question orthodoxy and, thus, to do good science.”
Fourth, says Rauch comes politicization, and the need to “toe a certain line” to get funding, or a promotion, or a job, including in the natural sciences.
Fifth, there is discrimination: “Consider survey research published by Eric Kaufmann in 2021. He asked academics in Canada, the United States, and the UK whether they engaged in discrimination against conservatives. In all three countries, a significant number of professors and PhD students reported that they’d discriminated against right-leaning ideas or scholars when evaluating papers, grant applications, and promotions. And remember that Kaufmann’s data … tracks only those academics who admit discriminating. …
“Understandably, as Kaufmann’s results demonstrate, conservatives perceive a toxic environment on campus. When asked whether their academic department presented a ‘hostile climate towards people with your political beliefs,’ only 3–5 percent of leftist academics answered in the affirmative. Among conservatives, the corresponding figure was about 70 percent.”
Finally, Rauch cites the increased bureaucratization. “At Ohio State University, to take one well-known example, there were no fewer than 189 full-time DEI staff as of 2023 – up from 88 just five years earlier. And while the head count roughly doubled during that period, the total compensation paid to DEI staffers tripled, to more than $20-million per year. … [M]any of these newly hired people aren’t academics by training. They don’t do science. They don’t do research. They may not have ever stepped in a classroom as a teacher. Yet at many universities, these are now the people who are telling tenured professors what to do and how to do it – whether in or out of the classroom.”
“When you put those six factors together,” Rauch concludes, “and then allow them to reinforce each other, the result is to distort and chill academic life.”
In a more recent (Jan. 11) article, headlined “How the rise of woke ‘educrats’ is destroying higher education,” the Manhattan Institute’s Ilya Shapiro, Princeton ’99, wrote: “The statistics on the growth of nonteaching staff are mind-boggling. In the 25 years ending in 2012, the number of professional university employees who don’t teach grew at about twice the rate of students. In the same period, tuition at public colleges more than tripled.
“What all this really means,” Shapiro added, “is that students are paying more and more to fund an expanding cohort of well-compensated bureaucrats, without getting anything in return. And this isn’t just a budget issue. Administrators are more radical than professors, and not steeped in norms of academic freedom, all of which detract from the educational environment.”
The racial affirmative action preferences in admissions that the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional last year have been championed by the same university administrators who promote expanding DEI programs. So far, the decision has produced surprisingly minimal effect on Princeton’s admissions.
Not much has changed since 2021, when the university announced that 68% of U.S. citizens or permanent residents in the newly admitted class of 2025 “self-identified as people of color, including biracial and multiracial students.” Or 2024, when 31.3% self-identified as white. In stark contrast, the 2001-02 school year, 63.5% of enrolled freshman students (752 out of 1195) were white. Such numbers have caught the eye of Trump insiders, who assume that Princeton might be hearing from federal civil rights enforcers.
There are also anecdotes about how racial preferences work. A Princeton student reported to a source of mine that she and other Jewish students had complained to a Princeton admissions officer that the number of admitted Orthodox Jews had shrunk to the point that it is hard to have a well-attended minyan ritual. The response was that admitting another white Jewish kid would not help Princeton’s diversity numbers. See also “Teen hired by Google was rejected by 16 colleges. Now he’s suing for discrimination.”
And while Eisgruber claimed in last year’s State of the University letter that such “inclusivity enhances excellence,” University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne countered that “there is a tradeoff between excellence and [racially preferential] diversity.”
Bill Hewitt, a 1974 Princeton grad, recently argued in the Princeton Alumni Weekly that “the pursuit of diversity through measures that diminish meritocratic standards undermines academic rigor” and that “race-based measures work against Martin Luther King Jr.’s goal that individuals be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.”
Wallstein observed that the rise of DEI bureaucracies coincided with the beginning of a “Free-Speech Crisis on College Campuses.” This is hardly happenstance. He notes that by 2016, Jonathan Haidt was pointing out that universities were now attempting to simultaneously pursue “two incompatible sacred values” – truth and social justice.
“It was clear from the start that, regardless of what was on their websites, DEI bureaucracies were more likely to suppress than encourage free expression on college campuses,” Wallstein wrote.
In a 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed, headlined “How ‘Diversity’ Turned Tyrannical,” Lawrence Krauss wrote that DEI had created “a climate of pervasive fear on campus” that was shutting down vitally important discussions. According to Krauss, “The DEI monomania has contributed to the crisis of free speech on campus.”
Abigail Fisher, a Texan who challenged the use of race in college admissions, walks with her lawyer Bert Rein, outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
A document circulated by California Community Colleges, headed “DEI in the Curriculum: Model Principles and Practices,” counsels: “Take care not to ‘weaponize’ academic freedom and academic integrity as tools to impede equity in an academic discipline or inflict curricular trauma on our students, especially historically marginalized students.”
Wallstein summarizes:
“DEI and free expression have now become the antithesis of each other.”
As the above-mentioned article by Princeton professors Londregan, Klainerman, Reynolds, and Haykel concludes: “If nothing is done to revive universities by recentering their core mission around the faculty power, campus visits may soon differ little in substance from trips to see the T-Rex at the Museum of Natural History.”
Stuart Taylor Jr. is president of Princetonians for Free Speech.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/03/23/look_at_princetons_dei_structure_amid_trump_trashing_dei_152543.html
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