Trump Administration is Exposing the Hubris of Institutional DEI

Harvard University was likely in violation of civil rights law in the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and the school practically said so, proudly, on their public website. Now they are under federal investigation.

The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reported Monday that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency created to enforce civil rights law, launched an investigation into Harvard in late April over whether the school was (or continues to be) unlawfully hiring based on race and sex.

They reportedly discovered this information based not on some deep investigation into the workings of the school, but from Harvard’s own public website.

“In public documents now deleted from Harvard’s website but still publicly available on web archives, Harvard admitted that in a span of ten years, it went from 59% of ‘all ladder faculty’ being white men to 49%, comparing that decrease in white men to an increase in the ‘total women, nonbinary, and faculty of color’ (i.e., all faculty other than white men) from 41% in 2013 to 51% in 2023,” the EEOC reported.

It wasn’t just a case of apparent discrimination in their recent hiring practices, the EEOC claims.

According to the report, “Harvard touted its success in changing its faculty demographics, noting in 2023 that its numbers of women and ‘people of color’ tenured was up 24% and 33% over ten years, with the percentage of each group tenured since 2022 (just one year) at 46%.”

The report included a long list of potentially discriminatory student training programs too.

The EEOC noted that these practices didn’t come to an end in 2023. Again, why do they think this? Harvard straight up said so on their website.

This is the global elite smart set’s version of the gangbanger who sticks up a business and later posts pictures of himself on social media holding the gun in front of all the stolen goods.

Harvard has some ‘splainin’ to do. And it couldn’t come at a worse time as the Trump administration has not only put a hold on billions of dollars in federal grant money over civil rights violations but has even threatened to pull the university’s tax-exempt status.

The Daily Signal reached out to Harvard for comment about the investigation. A apokesperson for the school pointed to a statement by Harvard President Alan Garber.

“Employment at Harvard is similarly based on merit and achievement. We seek the best educators, researchers, and scholars at our schools,” Grabar said. “We do not have quotas, whether based on race or ethnicity or any other characteristic. We do not employ ideological litmus tests. We do not use diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in our hiring decisions.”

What’s remarkable about this investigation is how unremarkable Harvard’s actions were.

For the last decade at least, elite institutions of all kinds have been leaning into diversity, equity, and inclusion to the point of openly saying this is a key metric for hiring decisions. This trend only accelerated during the George Floyd riots and the Great Awokening. Besides a few outlets like The Daily Signal, there was relatively little criticism of this practice by the legacy media. The Biden administration seemed to outright encourage it as it engaged in its own, vast federal DEI initiatives and hiring practices.

Apparently, few institutions questioned whether this was strictly legal and assumed the federal government would always support discriminatory hiring in the name of racial justice.

Even law firms were apparently unconcerned about the potential repercussions of DEI hiring.

The EEOC on Monday, according to the Federalist, launched a complaint against nearly 50 of the country’s top law firms accusing them of discriminating against white applicants to a summer fellowship program in the name of diversity.

Again, this didn’t come from any kind of deep investigation. It came from a public website where Sponsors for Educational Opportunity bragged that they were “the nation’s only summer internship program for pre-law students of color.”

The Trump administration made it clear virtually from day one that it considered these practices illegal and that the Justice Department would investigate “unlawful discrimination related to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) in the workplace.”

That produced a counterrevolution overnight.

Many businesses were quick to drop DEI the moment they thought it was safe to do so. The study that provided the foundation for most DEI hiring practices has already been soundly debunked. The advantage DEI gave businesses is that it kept well-funded left-wing activists and the federal government off their backs. Remove those fears and add to it the potential for lawsuits and it’s easy to see why Big Business has been quietly extinguishing DEI.

Big Business was quickest to bail out when it became clear the political winds were changing. That process became a stampede after President Donald Trump was elected as even the wokest companies have begun dropping DEI quotas after openly touting them for years.

Higher education is a special case, especially the most elite universities. They don’t just embrace DEI as an ideology to stay on the good side of a regime. They are the originators of the idea, the home of the true believers who would rather find increasingly clever ways to discriminate rather than follow the law.

But it seems the new administration won’t just let them get away with it. The reckoning is coming for higher education and the elite institutions that betrayed America’s commitment to merit. They are paying the price for embracing the “racism in the cause of antiracism” ethos of Ibram X. Kendi and their own hubris.

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