Now you see it, now you don’t.

by James A. Bacon

The push is on around Virginia and the U.S. as a whole to eliminate Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in higher education. The first line of defense among DEI preservationists is to give new titles to employees, rename departments, and shuffle around boxes on the org chart. Advocates of dismantling DEI content say such an exercise is disingenuous. There’s more to DEI than that. But what, exactly?

Any discussion quickly breaks down in arguments over semantics. Bureaucrat X, we hear, engages in “community outreach,” not DEI. Apparatchik Y runs a program ensuring that members of disadvantaged groups feel a sense of “belonging.” Functionary Z oversees programs for dormitory residents that teach them about their “identity.”

DEI means whatever the people running universities want it to mean, and it excludes whatever they want to exclude.

In 2023 University of Virginia President Jim Ryan defined DEI as equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. And he couldn’t understand how anyone could think otherwise.

“I have no idea where this notion came from, but it ought to be rejected out of hand,” he wrote in an essay published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “I know of no college that guarantees equal outcomes. A more accurate and appropriate definition of equity is an effort to ensure equal opportunity, not equal results.”

The term “equal opportunity,” he asserted, “recognizes that not everyone starts in the same place or is in the same circumstances, so treating people exactly alike is not always fair — and not always consistent with providing equal opportunities. How far a college goes to remove barriers to success will always be subject to debate, but the basic idea should not be controversial.”

“Removing barriers to success” is not terribly controversial. But it bears little resemblance to how DEI is actually practiced at the University of Virginia — or any other public university in Virginia. DEI is the name given to a bureaucratic apparatus charged with executing a social-justice philosophy inspired by critical theory and the oppressor-oppressed paradigm. If you remove the apparatus, the underlying philosophy remains, and the practices continue.

Now you see it, now you don’t.

As put into practice, the animating philosophy behind DEI stultifies free expression, squelches diversity of thought, stokes alienation by herding students into racial, ethnic, and religious “identities,” and assigns shame and virtue according to those identities. The DEI philosophy enforces social-justice norms by applying double standards to members of the UVA community depending upon their identity status. In the real world, Ryan’s admonition that “treating people exactly alike is not always fair” takes on an ominous meaning.

In the real world, UVA has presented zero data showing that DEI accomplishes its officially stated aim of making so-called “marginalized” minorities feel more welcome at UVA.

And, by the way, DEI bureaucracies cost millions of dollars in payroll to administer, and that doesn’t include the multimillions set aside for minority grad-student and faculty recruitment.

Few people understand how deeply embedded DEI is at the University of Virginia. Ryan’s acolytes, including those with DEI in their titles and those without, have systematically reworked every policy, practice, and guideline according to social-justice principles at every level. You name it. Hiring. Firing. Promotions. Granting tenure. Admissions. Orientation. Dormitory life. Greek life. The Honor Code. The Student Code of Conduct. Disciplinary proceedings. Training. Advising. The curriculum. Faculty endowments. Special accommodations in testing. Grading. Student clubs. Residence on the Lawn. Graduation ceremonies. Research. Community outreach.

Absolutely everything.

The Trump administration has ordered UVA to dismantle DEI and end racial preferences. The Board of Visitors transmitted those orders in March to Ryan. Governor Youngkin declared that “DEI is dead,” although follow-up action in April by the Board to tighten oversight over Ryan suggests that Board members — and perhaps even Youngkin, without whose blessing the Board does nothing — are beginning to understand that eliminating DEI may not be a simple proposition.

Neither Trump’s Office of Civil Rights, the Youngkin administration, nor the Board of Visitors has defined DEI — the thing that they want to get rid of. No one should be surprised, then, if Ryan operates with his own definition in mind.

Actually, the problem runs deeper than Ryan now that he has transformed UVA’s organizational culture. The question is not just how Ryan thinks about DEI, it’s how his administrative minions do.

You can shut down the DEI offices and eliminate the jobs of every staffer who had DEI in his or her title, but you’ve done nothing to change the social-justice mindset of thousands of faculty and staff. You won’t un-do the years of “training,” the struggle sessions over microaggressions, the winnowing of faculty members whose political or philosophical views mean they don’t fit in, and the hiring of faculty who may be diverse demographically but share a narrow range of partisan or ideological propositions.

You won’t undo the machinery that applies one set of standards to Morgan Bettinger (who was ostracized and administratively punished for alleged statements she was later proven not to have made) and another for her chief tormenter Zyahna Bryant (whom Ryan elevated to a position on his Council on UVA-Community Partnerships).

You won’t dismantle the machinery that disciplined med-school student Kieren Bhattacharya for challenging the thinking behind microaggression theory in a public forum. Bhattacharya was hounded out of med school (albeit under complicated circumstances). His accusers suffered no blowback.

You won’t undo the harm done to Matan Goldstein, an American-Israeli student subjected to abuse for his defense of Israel in the Hamas-Israel conflict. Not one of his abusers has been subjected to a disciplinary hearing.

You won’t reverse the injustice done to Matthew Carroll, an employee put on administrative leave and banned from Grounds for shutting down a group of Central American students who had set up a table and blasted loud music that disrupted nearby classes. Not one of the students who called him a racist and doxed his family in social media were sanctioned for violating University rules.

UVA’s Board of Visitors apparently hasn’t figured it out: Ryan is running out the clock. He will play semantic games over the meaning of “DEI” while doing nothing to change the University’s social-justice culture. Come January, Virginia will have a new governor. If that governor is Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat and a UVA graduate, the correlation of political power will look very different than it does today.

The Board (and UVA critics such as The Jefferson Council) need to understand the nature of the challenge. Rather than fight a negative, I would suggest, they need to articulate what they’re for. They need to espouse a positive vision for UVA that prioritizes color-blind merit, free speech, and intellectual diversity — a place where a wide range of ideas is propagated, and where no one feels intimidated about speaking their mind.

Finally, the Board needs to make it clear that such a vision of merit-based excellence is not code for turning the clock back to 1955. I hope to flesh out that vision in a future column.

James A. Bacon serves on the executive committee of The Jefferson Council.