The DEI empire in American higher education is collapsing faster than a diversity consultant’s LinkedIn profile. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, 439 campuses across 48 states have now gutted, closed, or “rebranded” their DEI offices. Four hundred and thirty-nine. That’s not a trend. That’s a surrender.
Somebody get these people a support group. Oh wait — they probably already had one. It was called the Office of Inclusive Healing and Restorative Belonging, and it just got defunded.
President Trump’s executive orders threatening to yank federal funding from schools that kept their DEI bureaucracies lit the match, and 14 state laws banning DEI offices in public universities poured the gasoline. But here’s the part that makes this story genuinely delicious: it wasn’t just the government that killed DEI on campus. The students did it too.
A Tufts University professor named Eitan Hersh wrote in the Boston Globe that the newest generation of undergrads finds “performative politics cringy.” He said a few years ago, a student would interrupt his lectures to scold him for saying “Latino” instead of “Latinx.” Today? That same move would get “more eye rolls than snaps.” The kids don’t want to be the “illiberal, woke caricature” anymore. They’re embarrassed by it. The revolution is eating itself, and Gen Z is filming it for TikTok.
Now let’s talk about the money, because this was always about the money.
The University of Michigan had 163 people — staffers, administrators, grad students, interns — whose entire job was promoting DEI. Their DEI payroll exceeded $30 million a year. That’s more than some of their actual academic departments. The University of Virginia was spending $20 million annually on DEI employees. UC Santa Barbara was offering up to $430,000 for a single position: “Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” The University of Maryland’s DEI vice president was pulling down $358,000 a year — more than double what the average full professor makes.
Across American universities, the average school had 45 DEI staffers. Want to know what’s really insane? That’s 1.4 times more DEI personnel than tenured history professors. We had more people teaching kids to be offended than teaching them what actually happened in the past. And we wonder why nobody knows anything anymore.
The total bill? DEI course mandates alone cost students and taxpayers $1.8 billion every four years. That’s before you count the salaries, the trainings, the retreats, and the consultants who got paid six figures to explain that “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” are characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” (Yes, that’s real. Objectivity. As in, the thing that makes science work.)
Here’s where the comedy gets even better. A bunch of these schools didn’t actually close their DEI offices. They just renamed them. Eighty-seven universities swapped the nameplate on the door and kept right on going. St. Louis University closed its DEI office and opened — on the same day, same building, probably same coffee mugs — the “Office of Belonging.” Kansas State went with “Office of Access and Opportunity.” George Mason picked “Office of Access, Compliance, and Community.” The University of Calgary went full corporate buzzword bingo with the “Office of Institutional Commitments.”
They’re playing the same game they always play. Change the words, keep the grift. It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of a fugitive putting on a fake mustache.
Ohio already sees through it. The state legislature has proposed a bill that would specifically ban “rebranding” — making it illegal to just rename your DEI office and pretend you complied. Once that passes (and it will), watch it spread to Texas, Florida, and every other red state that already passed DEI bans. The next phase of this fight isn’t closing DEI offices. It’s catching the ones hiding under new names.
But the bigger story is what happens to the thousands of DEI administrators who just lost their jobs. These are people who spent their careers in a field that no longer exists. Their skill set is “facilitating conversations about systemic oppression” and “centering marginalized voices.” Try putting that on a resume at a company that just watched this whole industry implode. They’re going to do what bureaucrats always do — burrow into HR departments and compliance offices under new titles, hoping nobody notices. The smart universities will watch for that. The dumb ones will wake up in two years wondering why their “Human Resources and Community Engagement Specialist” is running the same DEI trainings under a different PowerPoint template.
And here’s the part that should make every conservative genuinely optimistic. This didn’t just happen because Trump signed executive orders or because Ron DeSantis passed a law. The culture moved. The kids — the actual college students who were supposed to be the DEI generation — looked at the people screaming about microaggressions and said, “This is embarrassing.” When a Tufts professor tells you his students think woke politics is “cringy,” that’s not a policy win. That’s a cultural earthquake. Policy can be reversed by the next administration. But you can’t un-cringe a generation.
Mark my words: DEI is going the way of every other campus fad that got too big for its britches. These offices started as “multicultural affairs” programs in the 1990s, rebranded to DEI in the 2010s, and now they’re trying to rebrand again to “belonging” and “access.” Each time the name changes, the empire gets a little smaller. Give it five years and the whole thing will be a punchline — something professors mention in passing the way they talk about pet rocks and the Macarena. Except pet rocks didn’t cost taxpayers $1.8 billion.
Four hundred and thirty-nine campuses down. The kids think it’s cringy. The money’s drying up. And the bureaucrats are running out of synonyms for “diversity.” Couldn’t happen to a nicer grift.
