Last week, the Case Western Reserve University community received an email from President Eric Kaler with a momentous announcement: the Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Engagement (DEI) is now permanently closed and has been replaced with the Office for Campus Enrichment and Engagement. The stated aim is to ensure compliance with specific executive orders from President Donald Trump, but as good academics, we should fully interrogate the motives and consequences of this decision.
Consider the following two statements (the first is from the website of the now-gone DEI office, and the second is from its replacement’s website):
“Case Western Reserve University aspires to be an inclusive environment, believing that the creative energy and variety of insights that result from diversity are a vital component of the intellectual rigor and social fabric of the university.”
“Case Western Reserve University is composed of thousands of individuals who each bring their unique backgrounds, experiences and ideas to our campus and make it such a rich, robust and inspiring place to learn, work and live.”
What do you notice about the preceding two statements? Their message is essentially the exact same: Diversity isn’t just a byproduct of admitting qualified students from around the world but rather is the fundamental essence of what makes a university interesting and enriching. But the second statement is carefully crafted to avoid any buzzwords that would raise alarms.
Why focus on buzzwords rather than essence? Well, because that’s how the Trump administration (especially the Department of Government Efficiency) is making its cuts. In recent weeks, a leak from the National Science Foundation revealed that there is now a list of banned words, the presence of which causes an automatic flag for review in a grant proposal. So now institutions are walking on eggshells to avoid offending powerful groups with the ability to censor anything they don’t like.
This phenomenon is connected to the high-profile events taking place at Columbia University. For most colleges, the federal funding uncertainty of the past two months has come about as a consequence of juvenile attempts at making the government “more efficient.” But Columbia’s loss of funding has explicitly been explained as a punishment for the university’s failure to silence its student protests. Another incident is the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, the former lead negotiator at Columbia’s student protest encampment. Despite evidence that he is a legal permanent resident, representatives of the Trump administration equate protesting against the U.S. government as a noncitizen with supporting terrorism and, thus, justify his deportation.
Columbia is being made an example for the rest of us—the fact that the Columbia administration is actively negotiating with the Trump administration to restore its funding is proof enough of this. Attempting to fight a person who has the most powerful job in the world—and is driven primarily by personal grudges—is not a good decision for long-term survival. And this culture is already dominant at Columbia. In the past few months, all protests have been low-profile and tightly regulated, partially due to the identification and reporting of protesters by certain groups, in an effort to reduce their chances of employment. This is why the current debate at Columbia is centered around banning students from wearing masks to protests—an act that would allow them to avoid this life-destroying scenario.
To bring this back to CWRU, it’s difficult to tell what’s next for us. The Board of Trustees’ motives are opaque, and we have no way of knowing what the response will be if we are met with similar demands. However, this latest decision about the DEI office and its replacement tells us that the administration does sincerely care about diversity. Although they’re unlikely to sacrifice federal funding to protect us, it’s comforting to know that they are attempting to protect diversity despite not being allowed to use the word itself.
Another big uncertainty is not knowing the lengths to which the Trump administration is willing to go. To what extent are they actually committed to rooting out social progressivism in colleges? Will they go so far as to sack all the sociology professors who insist on teaching about Karl Marx’s vital contributions to the field? Or will they be satisfied as long as colleges aren’t defiant against the new social order? For the time being, I think my money is on the latter. I think what we’ve seen over the past decade is that facts and consequences mean nothing to these people, and appearances are everything. If we weave a convincing appearance of surrender, we may very well be able to hold onto the things that we love. Never forget that the mob’s first principle is that they want their villains to go away by any means necessary, whether those villains are Muslims, immigrants, gay people, trans people, Marxist professors or student protesters. There’s real strength in biding your time until a day in which defiance once again becomes a path forward.