Trump’s Executive Orders Are Only The First Step In Defeating DEI

In just the first week of his second presidency, President Donald Trump has issued several monumental executive orders intended to roll back discriminatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs across the federal government.  

Even these extraordinary actions, however, will not win the battle against DEI by themselves.  

As a former professor, I know that academia remains the nerve center for the poisonous ideology behind DEI, and that classroom-based DEI indoctrination in universities will not end without additional outside pressure. In fact, Trump’s executive orders explicitly (and appropriately) exempted “academic instruction” in higher education from the new federal protections. The last thing we need is for the feds to establish national curricular standards for schools and colleges across all 50 states. But state governments, in keeping with their historical responsibility to oversee public education, have both the right and the duty to ensure that students in public institutions receive a rigorous and useful education. 

And too many public universities are choosing indoctrination over education. Last year, the advocacy organization Speech First published a report revealing that two-thirds of major American universities require students to take DEI courses just to graduate. Fifty-nine percent of the schools with DEI requirements were public, state taxpayer-funded institutions.  

These requirements provide a staggering subsidy to DEI-based indoctrination at public universities. The Goldwater Institute, where I work, analyzed the cost of these required DEI courses for students and taxpayers. Result: at least $1.8 billion and 35 million classroom hours spent on mandatory DEI courses over each four-year period.  

The Trump administration is aggressively going after discriminatory practices in higher education. Trump ordered the attorney general to identify and potentially investigate entities that engage in discriminatory DEI practices that could constitute civil rights violations, which could include “institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.”  

Yet DEI courses are exempted from such scrutiny, and campuses can freely continue to not only offer — but mandate — such coursework, giving this poisonous ideology massive funding and influence over millions of students. The rising generation of American society will continue being force-fed this anti-American creed.  

As a former professor, I would like to believe that universities themselves will respond to the spirit of Trump’s executive orders and take steps to reform these flawed curricula by eliminating DEI requirements. Unfortunately, I know better. 

The left’s long march through the institutions — and the use of tactics like “diversity statements” to screen out ideological diversity — has created an extremely lopsided faculty population. I taught at the honors college of the University of Kentucky, and I was the only faculty member in the entire honors college who was an unambiguous conservative.  

My university was probably more ideologically diverse than most units across the American academy. Jay P. Greene of The Heritage Foundation found only two faculty in the entire Ivy League who donated to Trump’s election campaign, compared to about 900 Ivy League faculty who donated to Kamala Harris.  

In part because of this ideological imbalance, universities will likely resist any suggestion that they make significant changes to the curriculum. During my time at the University of Kentucky, I repeatedly heard my fellow professors claim that the curriculum was the exclusive province of the faculty. As experts in their fields, no one outside of the university faculty — even the members of the board of trustees — could legitimately question the makeup of the curriculum.  

The problems with this view should be obvious. Although professors are hired because they have expertise in particular fields, they are by no means the only ones who are qualified to judge the quality of the education they provide. A homeowner may not know how to build a house, but she can surely judge whether the house meets her needs without knowing how to install drywall.  

This is especially true for public universities. These institutions are created by state governments, funded heavily by state taxpayers, and supported by student tuition payments, so the people of each state certainly have the right to ask whether certain curricular requirements — such as mandatory DEI courses — are truly appropriate.  

DEI requirements waste students’ time and tuition dollars while cultivating hatred, division, and distrust. It’s disgraceful that, even as the cost of attending college skyrockets, so many universities are forcing students to take courses that have such perverse outcomes.  

From personal experience, I know that universities do not have enough dissenters from the DEI orthodoxy to effect meaningful reform. Ending mandatory DEI indoctrination in the classroom will require deliberate action by state legislatures and university boards.  

Fortunately, Goldwater and Speech First have developed the Freedom from Indoctrination Act, a reform that prohibits public universities from requiring DEI courses as part of general education or major programs. Enacting this reform will prevent students from having to sit through lectures on academically unserious concepts like “microaggressions” and “preferred pronouns” to earn their degrees.  

Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has already successfully eliminated DEI courses from its general education catalogs, and in recent weeks, lawmakers in states ranging from Wyoming to Iowa to Oklahoma to Arizona have introduced legislation freeing their students from DEI course mandates at all levels of curriculum. These policies represent a reasonable and necessary response to universities, which have prioritized indoctrination in anti-American dogma over real education.

Along with the elimination of discriminatory DEI practices, reforming college curricula will push American universities back to their core missions: the pursuit of knowledge and truth and the preparation for thoughtful citizenship.

Timothy K. Minella, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy. He previously served on the faculty of the Lewis Honors College at the University of Kentucky and has also taught at Emory University and Villanova University.