Universities across America are brazenly defying President Donald Trump’s executive orders that banned diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and Congress needs to hold them accountable.
This week, undercover videos showed administrators at the University of Tennessee admitting that they are merely changing the name of their race- and gender-based programs to skirt Trump’s orders.
“It’s a chess game,” Will Eakin, a coordinator for UT’s “Access and Engagement” office, said in one video.
“We had to take our current programming and our future programming and make sure that it aligns so that we can do the work that we’re trying to do, while also catering to the Department of Education, the federal,” he said in the video, adding, “The biggest thing is using language as a tool for protection.”
In June, Accuracy In Media released a video depicting a University of North Carolina at Charlotte employee saying, “We’ve renamed, we’ve reorganized, we’ve recalibrated, so to speak.” She added that “if you’re looking for, like, an outward DEI position — not going to happen. But if you are interested in doing work that is covert, there are opportunities.”
Some members of Congress and the administration are on to them.
On Wednesday, during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution meeting on DEI, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, observed, “This is not unusual compared to what we saw in the Brown v. Board of Education era,” referring to the Supreme Court case outlawing “separate but equal” policies.
“We saw government officials openly defying those orders by rebranding, using different methods, and it took decades to root that out,” Dhillon said. “Hopefully, it doesn’t take decades to root this out, but we’ve seen similar defiance.”
Dhillon suggested the subcommittee subpoena leaders of institutions that are offenders of the Trump civil rights policy.
University administrators try to downplay the revelations, claiming they’re rogue employees — one-offs who aren’t authorized to speak to the media. But the middle managers are merely enacting the directives from the top.
At Belmont University, an administrator in the office of Hope, Unity, and Belonging acknowledged that it’s just a word game.
“We’re always going to keep doing what we’re doing,” the staffer said in the video. “The work never stops. We just change how we talk about it.”
“We’re doing the work,” he said in the video. “We just may not be as loud as other people are about it.”
“If you’re navigating in the shadows, nobody’s paying attention to Belmont.”
But even students know the school is just trying to be clever.
“Every student at Belmont knows that it’s the DEI program or the DEI office,” Belmont senior Mya Goodmanson said. “It’s no secret.”
The Trump administration is on to the arrogant defiance.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Belmont of “obstruction” of immigration law after the person in the video admitted the university was protecting students who are illegal immigrants.
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“President Trump campaigned on immigration enforcement,” Noem said during a visit to Nashville. “The American people voted for immigration enforcement.”
Congress must hold these universities accountable. Subpoena leadership, expose the truth. We taxpayers elected Trump to clean up this rotten ideology. Don’t let bureaucrats and ideologues undermine the Trump agenda.
Tudor Dixon is a former Republican gubernatorial nominee, executive in Michigan’s steel industry, breast cancer survivor, and working mother of four girls. She is the host of The Tudor Dixon Podcast.