The Department of Justice has now launched an investigation into Arizona State University over its “diversity, equity, and inclusion” practices. The probe will examine whether ASU has subjected students to illegal discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin through its DEI policies in admissions, recruitment, scholarships, tutoring, and educational support.
That news did not surprise me.
Universities constantly speak the language of ‘inclusion,’ but they do not want disagreement. They want compliance.
For years, many of us who work inside higher education have watched American universities become captive to a worldview that divides human beings into permanent categories of oppressor and oppressed. These ideologies present themselves as enlightened and compassionate, but underneath the slogans is something much uglier.
They claim to fight racism, in effect, by being racist.
That is not rhetorical excess. It is the actual logic of these programs. If you are told that your moral standing is shaped by your race, if students are sorted into categories of guilt and grievance based on ancestry, if “equity” means treating people differently because of their race, then the old evil has simply been repackaged in new academic language.
I know this from experience.
The Arizona Supreme Court has now agreed to hear my case against Arizona State University and the Arizona Board of Regents over ASU’s required DEI training. My challenge began because ASU forced employees to take its “inclusive communities” training.
The training, in some cases produced by Starbucks (I kid you not), told employees how to think about race, guilt, power, and identity, and it required assent to predetermined “correct” answers. I could not in good conscience affirm teachings that judged people by skin color, ethnic identity, gender, religion, and geography.
The Arizona Supreme Court’s decision to hear my case goes to the heart of whether state universities can force employees into ideological training that violates state law and basic principles of equal treatment. Arizona law prohibits public schools, including universities, from using curriculum that engages in race blame.
The issue is technical in legal form, but simple in moral substance: When a public university imposes unlawful race-based ideology, does anyone have the right to challenge it?
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That question should never have had to be asked. But that is where our universities are.
The takeover has been so comprehensive that many campuses no longer even recognize dissent as legitimate. Faculty culture is overwhelmingly leftist (97% at ASU identify as left-wing). The ideological imbalance among professors is staggering. Conservatives, Christians, and others who reject the reigning orthodoxy are rarely hired, and when they are hired, they are often isolated or pressured into silence.
Universities constantly speak the language of “inclusion,” but they do not want disagreement. They want compliance.
When someone objects, the mask slips. The same faculty and administrators who preach compassion suddenly become contemptuous when the dissenter is someone outside the progressive fold. The slogans about empathy disappear and the sneering begins.
That is because DEI is not really about inclusion. It is about power.
Its basic framework is the old Marxist oppressor-oppressed dialectic, merely translated into race, gender, and sexuality categories. Students are taught to see the world through this lens from their first days on campus. The university no longer helps students pursue truth. It trains them to become activists for a ready-made ideology.
The ugly irony at the center of it all is that students are charged tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to sit in classrooms where they are instructed by self-appointed champions of the oppressed, many of whom enjoy comfortable salaries and taxpayer support while lecturing others about systems of injustice.
The university administrator or professor who denounces oppression does so while cashing a government-backed paycheck and enforcing ideological conformity inside a vast institutional bureaucracy.
That is not liberation. It is a racket.
The federal investigation into ASU is important not only for Arizona but for the whole country. The era of automatic deference to DEI bureaucracies may be ending.
If government investigators are asking whether ASU’s programs have crossed the line into unlawful discrimination, then other universities should be asking themselves the same question. How many scholarships, support programs, admissions initiatives, and training sessions around the country are doing precisely what civil-rights law was supposed to forbid?
The answer, I suspect, is many.
American universities have largely abandoned the idea that education is the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness. In its place they have installed a therapeutic political religion in which redemption comes through identity confession, public denunciation, and endless activism.
The categories of the system are fixed: Someone must be blamed, someone must be oppressed, and the institution itself must always pose as the righteous mediator.
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The ideology has spread far beyond the office door. It lives in the curriculum, in hiring, in faculty trainings, and in the language administrators use to describe their mission. It is the very institutionalized bigotry that it claims to oppose.
What is needed now is moral reform and clarity.
Public universities should not be in the business of teaching students or employees to judge one another by race. They should not use tax dollars to promote theories that blame individuals for the sins of categories. And they certainly should not punish or marginalize those who object.
The Justice Department’s investigation into ASU and the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision to hear my case are both signs that resistance is possible. But much more is needed.
Americans must recover the courage to say plainly what too many in higher education have forgotten: Racism does not become justice when wrapped in the language of equity, and discrimination does not become virtue when blessed by a university bureaucracy.
