Smart people are thinking about what comes after DEI - and it's pretty good!

[summer_in_TX]

https://archive.ph/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/21/what-comes-after-dei

Colleges around the country, in the face of legal and political backlash to their diversity programs, are pivoting to an alternative framework known as pluralism.
In 2018, Allen and a group of colleagues published a report suggesting that viewpoint diversity and free expression are crucial components of inclusion and belonging on university campuses. But it was a hard time to push for viewpoint diversity, with Trump in office and the nation on the cusp of a racial reckoning. Conversations about “inclusion and belonging” effectively became limited to race, gender, sexuality, and disability, Allen said. “I’ve experienced some frustration, I will admit, as I watched that paradigm narrowing in the years post-George Floyd,” she told me. “All those identities matter, but what we need to do as a pluralistic society and as pluralistic campuses is broader than that.”
Recently, the mood in higher ed has shifted from introspective to panicked. In March, the Department of Education warned sixty schools that they had potentially violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by allowing “relentless antisemitic eruptions” on their campuses. The D.O.E. pulled four hundred million dollars in federal funds from Columbia University; in response, the university has reportedly pledged to overhaul its security protocols and review its Middle East-studies programs. The Trump Administration also froze a hundred and seventy-five million dollars in funding for the University of Pennsylvania, for allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. Other universities that depend heavily on federal money for scientific research, such as Johns Hopkins, have laid off workers and closed labs following deep cuts across federal agencies—cuts that were partly premised on objections to D.E.I.
All of this has prompted college presidents to take another look at the ideas that Allen and her allies have long promoted. Call it the pluralism pivot: a desire for a new paradigm that might ward off skeptical politicians and heal the bad vibes that have plagued higher ed. Though many college presidents were already trying to fix the cultural problems on their campuses, their hands may soon be forced by policymakers. Some of the universities that have most fully embraced pluralism are in politically purple or red states, such as Utah, where legislators have been moving to stamp out D.E.I. “I’m sorry—deeply, profoundly sad and sorry—that our sector had to start its reconsideration under these kinds of circumstances,” Allen told me. “That said, I’m glad to see that the pluralism concepts and frameworks are getting traction.”
As recently as a few years ago, the University of Utah—the state’s flagship public school, which has about thirty-six thousand students—seemed eager to advertise its progressive bona fides. In a 2022 issue of the alumni magazine, a feature on Taylor Randall, the recently installed president of the U (as people call it), listed some books he recommended, including Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist.” A web extra detailed the history of the U’s Black Cultural Center, which its then director described as “trying to fight anti-Blackness” through a “pan-African lens.” Letters to the editor praised a profile of an alum who performs as the ice-skating drag queen Denali Fox: “That’s our gurl out here slaying!”[/excerpt}

I'm pleased to see a framework that ensures universities remain inclusive and diverse.
Pluralism is concept that hearkens back to the early days of our Republic. That makes it harder for those against it, I would guess.