The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is delighted that the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia has unanimously voted to dissolve the University’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) and Community Partnerships, end illegal discriminatory practices at the school, eliminate illegally discriminatory programs, and transfer non-discriminatory programs to other University offices. Now that the Trump administration’s Education Department (ED) has taken the initiative at the federal level to declare all such programs examples of illegal discrimination, every state should take up this work at once. The Board of Visitors has acted in an exemplary fashion by acting so promptly; and we indeed hope that it’s example will be followed across the nation.
We must follow these words of praise with words of caution: the Board of Visitors, and its peer institutions in the state of Virginia such as the State Board for Community Colleges, must follow up on this resolution with thorough, sustained effort at every publicly funded college and university in Virginia to put it into effect. Bluntly, virtually every college and university administrative unit plans to put fig leaves on their DEI work and carry on business as usual. The Board of Visitors, and their peers, must make sure that the bureaucrats are not allowed to sabotage the removal of DEI from Virginia’s public universities.
University of Virginia’s Division for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion still (as of the time of this comment’s publication) has its webpage up. Certainly the University of Virginia’s administrators have not been swift to comply with the Board of Visitors’ resolution. Virginia Tech transparently has folded its Office for Inclusion into Diversity into a new Office for Inclusive Strategy and Excellence. The possibilities of camouflaging euphemisms are endless. Might the Student Opportunity, Success and Achievement Center at Piedmont Valley Community College, whose purpose is “To foster an environment of inclusion through exposure to academic, cultural, and career-based opportunities for those populations,” be a DEI center in thin disguise?
Education reformers will need to establish oversight mechanisms, above all mechanisms to terminate the employment of DEI personnel. Unremoved DEI personnel will almost certainly continue to perform the same function under a different name.
There are not enough education reformers available to check every aspect of university administration. We suggest, however, some priorities that may be useful as a way to ensure that removing DEI from our colleges and universities proceeds in more than name.
- The United States Education Department has created a “submission form … for students, parents, teachers, and the broader community to report illegal discriminatory practices at institutions of learning. The Department of Education will utilize community submissions to identify potential areas for investigation.” Virginia’s Governor Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares should create a similar form, so that the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia can investigate college and university violations of these laws.
- Virginia’s public universities should assemble comprehensive lists of every individual employed for diversity efforts between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2024, either formally within offices of diversity or on committees to forward diversity efforts. It should correlate these lists with these individuals current employment, and committee service, at any Virginia public university. The Board of Visitors and equivalent supervisory institutions should scrutinize the administrative units where these individuals are currently employed, to see if these camouflage continuing diversity efforts.
- The Board of Visitors and equivalent supervisory institutions should scrutinize hiring procedures, to make sure that no administrative unit, such as Human Resources, is allowed to intervene to impose DEI requirements.
- The Board of Visitors and equivalent supervisory institutions should scrutinize administrative units that issue policies on key words such as inclusive language, land acknowledgments, and access. While there are an infinite number of euphemisms for DEI, some are more obvious than others. Education reformers can use some common terms as shorthand ways to determine where DEI efforts are being hidden.
What we recommend to Virginia’s officials, we recommend to all state government officials overseeing public higher education. DEI can and should be eradicated from our public universities, state governments play a crucial role in this campaign—and to do so, they must make sure that they enforce their initial resolutions.
We are delighted that the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia has declared that DEI must go from UVa, and we congratulate them for doing so. We know that it will take painstaking work to give force to that declaration. We urge them to begin that work at once—they, and all their peers in Virginia, and across the nation.
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