Project 2025: End DEI and CRT in Higher Education
Project 2025’s recommendations, if implemented, will destroy DEI programs and leave the effects of continuing discrimination in place.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
The attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)[1] and critical race theory (CRT) programs in schools and universities has been relentless and somewhat successful. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “DEI Legislation Tracker,” 14 states have passed anti-DEI legislation pertaining to colleges and universities.
These new laws prohibit a range of activities such as spending public funds to support DEI offices and staff, mandatory DEI training, requiring DEI statements of new or current personnel, and identity-based preferences for hiring and admissions. All these laws have been passed in states where Republicans control a majority in the legislature and, usually, where a Republican serves a governor. None have passed in Democratic-controlled states. Typically, anti-CRT prohibitions are included in anti-DEI legislation.
Project 2025’s recommendation regarding DEI, CRT, and related programs is clearly stated in the Forward by Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation.
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”[2]
The chapter on education refrains from directly stating Project 2025’s reasons for opposing DEI and CRT training and employment programs. Nevertheless, Chapter 18 on the Department of Labor lays out the case for prohibiting DEI and CRT training. As far as the authors are concerned, such training and managerial policies “advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects.”[3] Further, “[t]he Biden Administration has pushed ‘racial equity’ . . . and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race.”[4]
This attack, along with the parallel prohibition of teaching CRT in the public schools[5], has now been extended to colleges and universities that depend on public funding to remain open.
Accreditation
Rather than directly discuss DEI and CRT, Lindsey Burke, principal author of the Chapter on Education, objects to any federal government funding that supports DEI policies. Accordingly, she strongly opposes requirements by accreditation agencies that colleges and universities should include concerns for diversity in their hiring, management, and academic programs. Her point is that the Department of Education (ED) can withhold funding in the form of student loan money and direct grants from any institution that is not accredited. Her view is that this practice unlawfully coerces universities to implement DEI and CRT programming.
Politically, Burke’s focus on accreditation instead of DEI or CRT directly is a clever strategic move. She leaves the argument about any alleged harm caused by DEI and CRT to be developed by other chapters (although none cite any scholarly literature for either DEI or CRT, preferring to leave both terms as catch-all phrases for whatever readers choose to imagine). But she leaves no doubt about Project 2025’s opposition to “a higher education establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel.”[6]
The several accreditation agencies – which assure the public that member institutions of higher learning meet or exceed minimal standards regarding administrative capacity, academic quality, financial and physical stability, student life programming and services, etc. – are voluntary associations whose institutional members establish standards for quality review. These standards can vary significantly from one regional agency to another.
Colleges and universities must meet the standards of their regional accrediting agency to remain eligible to receive student loan funds, extend government student loans to enrolled students, and receive federal funding through other grant programs. Failure to do so might result in having access to federal funds cut off.
Most accreditation agencies encourage some degree of adherence to matters of diversity and inclusion. The standards that institutions must meet, however, vary by region. For example, the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE) states that each institution must “address its own goals for the achievement of diversity, equity, and inclusion among its faculty and academic staff.”[7]
By contrast, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Commission on Colleges states, “While there are no specific benchmarks regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts for SACSCOC member institutions, all are encouraged to continue to regularly engage in thoughtful discussions about diversity, to intentionally cultivate and sustain inclusive and equitable processes, and to implement strategies to create and maintain respectful and supportive learning environments in which to learn and work.”[8]
Note that in neither example are institutions required to adhere to any particular standard of DEI or its implementation. Rather, they are encouraged to establish their own policy and live up to it. Burke utterly ignores the reality of such flexibility.
Mainly, Burke objects to compelling compliance through the threat of loss of federal funding. Indeed, this is the heart of the chapter’s concern.
“Of particular concern are efforts by many accreditation agencies to leverage their Title IV (student loans and grants) gatekeeper roles to force institutions to adopt policies that have nothing to do with academic quality assurance and student outcomes. One egregious example of this is the extent to which accreditors have forced colleges and universities, many of them faith-based institutions, to adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that conflict with federal civil rights laws, state laws, and the institutional mission and culture of the schools.”[9]
This statement is grossly misleading. DEI and CRT have everything to do with academic quality and student outcomes. Further, even NECHE’s accreditation standard (the most stringent in the nation) merely requires institutions to develop their own language for addressing DEI. And SACSCOC’s “position statement” merely calls for discussion and reflection; there is no required standard for DEI from SACSCOC.
Consistent with the lie, Project 2025 recommends sweeping elimination of all federal agencies’ support for DEI/CRT hiring, training, or management. Further,
“Revamp the system for recognizing accreditation agencies for Title IV purposes by removing the [Education] department’s monopoly on recognition by (1) authorizing states to recognize [other] accreditation agencies for Title IV gatekeeping purposes and/or (2) authorizing state agencies to act as accreditation agencies for institutions throughout the United States.”[10]
This latter recommendation would completely gut the entire system of higher education accreditation and would create a replacement system that would foster gross corruption and abuse by the several states. We are already too far down the road toward polarization in which institutions in “blue” states promote the goals of DEI and CRT while institutions in “red” states maintain an approach that ignores the special needs of persons of color, women, the financially disadvantaged, and those of varying gender identity.
Through it all, the movement to eliminate DEI and CRT programs from state-supported universities continues unabated, as Lindsey Burke’s appointment to the Board of Visitors of George Mason University[11] shows.
Education for a Multicultural Society
Deplorably, the entire Project 2025 document, including the Chapter on Education, expresses no concern whatsoever for rectifying the consequences of present and past racial, sex, or gender-identity discrimination. It is as if such discrimination against Black, Hispanic, Asian, LGBTQI+ persons, and women does not exist and never has existed. Educational institutions, in Project 2025’s view, should not concern themselves with assisting those who have suffered from discrimination to realize their educational and life dreams.
I have written previously in this newsletter about how first-generation students, many of whom have faced racial or class discrimination, need additional assistance to succeed academically. The need for such assistance is so prevalent that the disproportionately few faculty and staff members of color often face burnout. That is largely why most colleges and universities have created and maintained robust DEI programs on their own initiative. And it is why accrediting agencies and the U.S. Department of Education encourage and monitor such activities.
We live in the first explicitly conscious and legally supported multicultural society in history. Foundational to that commitment is the widely accepted principle of equal opportunity. But that principle remains empty rhetoric for many who, due to inadequate resources or continuing discrimination, are unable to take advantage of formally available opportunities.
As critical race theory – which is taught, if at all, in universities and law schools – demonstrates, persons of color continue to find their real opportunities unduly restricted by the effects of past discrimination such as diminished intergenerational wealth, unavailability of housing, and conscious or unconscious bias against them.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs attempt to address such challenges directly to increase the prosperity of all and to create a society of mutual regard and respect. Project 2025’s recommendations, if implemented, will destroy such efforts and leave the effects of continuing discrimination in place.
In other words, the freedom from laws and regulations that promote DEI, as touted by Project 2025, is the “freedom” of conservative white and religious persons to maintain their positions of privilege at the expense of others who are not like them. It’s really that simple.
Please be sure to like, share, and comment on issues raised in this series. Project 2025’s threat to higher education needs to be more widely known and understood.
Next up in this series, Project 2025’s take on student financial aid.
NOTES
[1] I am aware of the variations of “DEI” such as diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) or diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ). My use of “DEI” here is intended to include these variations as well.
[2] Kevin D. Roberts, “Forward” in Paul Dans and Steven Groves, eds., Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2023), pp. 4-5. Hereafter cited as “Project 2025.” https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf.
[3] Project 2025, p. 582.
[4] Project 2025, p. 582.
[5] Project 2025, p. 5.
[6] Project 2025, p. 320.
[7] New England Commission on Higher Education, “Standards for Accreditation,” p. 15. https://www.neche.org/standards-for-accreditation/
[8] Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Commission on Colleges, “Position Statement: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” p. 15.
[9] Project 2025, p. 352.
[10] Project 2025, p. 353.
[11] Alex Walters, “Could George Mason U. Be Republicans’ ‘Test Case’ for Project 2025? The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 July 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/article/could-george-mason-u-be-republicans-test-case-for-project-2025?.