Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are fading under pressure from the Trump administration. Florida and Texas have dismantled DEI offices, while Georgia has barred mandatory DEI training and eliminated diversity statement requirements. Similar substantive and symbolic efforts, such as renaming, defunding, and slowly demolishing the DEI infrastructure, are underway in many other states. Although some read these legislative measures and administrative rollbacks as a sign that the DEI movement is in terminal decline, reports of its demise are premature.
Most substantive changes are occurring in public universities in red states and in a few Ivies targeted by the federal administration. Those who believe the movement has run its course mistake dormancy for termination; they overlook the resilience of the DEI infrastructure — the interconnected network of administrators, accrediting bodies, publishers, faculty, incentives, and professional norms that sustains it.
At the University of California, Berkeley, DEI has morphed into DEIB with the addition of “belonging,” a thinly veiled effort to mask a politically charged acronym while preserving the underlying mission. After a ban on mandatory DEI statements, a faculty search workshop advised departments to elicit voluntary statements and continue evaluating DEI-related commitments by reclassifying them from “required” to “preferred” qualifications tied to job duties. Participants were told that such unsolicited but preferred statements “should continue to receive due recognition and be included in the assessment.” The result is a procedural workaround that preserves DEI as a screening signal while insulating the search process from legal challenge.
No longer confined to the academy, the DEI movement has penetrated the academic publishing industry, the principal gatekeeper to scholarly prestige and tenure. Springer Nature, declaring DEI central to its mission, required all 9,000 employees to complete mandatory unconscious-bias training. The influence of identity-based DEI initiatives extends even to the editorial policies of the highly regarded Science journals published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which “welcome statements pertaining to diversity and inclusion” within a manuscript’s acknowledgments section under the heading “Diversity, equity, ethics, and inclusion” and invite authors to discuss their positionality that denotes the authors’ identification with underrepresented groups.
In 2020, editors of the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, published by the University of Chicago Press and long regarded as one of the field’s leading empirical journals, issued a statement declaring that, “at its core,” research in social work should focus on how racism and inequality undermine the well-being and mobility of marginalized populations. The statement also pledged to prioritize scholarship grounded in “antiracist,” “anti-oppressive,” and “intersectional” frameworks, encouraging authors to submit research “using a racial justice lens that focuses on how racism and white supremacy contribute to disparities in health, education, criminal justice, child welfare, and other domains.” The editorial perspective prescribes both the questions to ask and the interpretive framework for understanding the answers. In this sense, the shift is not merely thematic; it is epistemological. The familiar academic maxim has shifted from “publish or perish” to publish DEI or perish.
The academic publishing industry is not the only external authority reinforcing the DEI agenda. Universities are subject to periodic reviews by external accrediting organizations that certify academic standards. Institutional accreditors have helped translate the DEI doctrine into an administrative obligation. In social work education, the Council on Social Work Education accredits programs at approximately 770 colleges and universities across the United States. The accreditation standards reference “equity” or ADEI (anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion) 42 times in a 38-page document. Among other requirements, programs must “recognize the pervasive impact of White supremacy and privilege and prepare students to have the knowledge, awareness, and skills necessary to engage in anti-racist practice.” Unlike several institutional accreditors, the Council on Social Work Education has not yet removed or substantially softened the explicit DEI provisions in its accreditation standards.
DELOITTE PAID $21.5 MILLION. IBM PAID $17 MILLION. WHO’S NEXT ON TRUMP’S DEI HIT LIST?
Education Department mandates have recently sought to curtail the DEI requirements of a few major accrediting bodies, including the American Bar Association, which accredits the nation’s law schools. These efforts to limit the use of accreditation to enforce DEI objectives should not be mistaken for a wholesale repudiation of the underlying commitments. The explicit DEI terminology is being replaced with softer, less politically charged language addressing belonging, climate, and disparities in student outcomes. Yet, the administrative practices that endorse those concepts — data classified by race, ethnicity, gender, equity reviews, and institutional reporting — remain largely intact. Accreditation policy has entered a period of strategic retrenchment rather than ideological reversal. Its future direction is likely to depend less on a serious reconsideration of institutional policies and educational objectives than on the prevailing political climate, leaving the faint DEI dictums available for renewed expression when the political winds change.
Dismantling the climate bureaucracy is no simple task. Six-figure DEI administrators who have spent years designing admissions protocols, organizing identity-based initiatives, and training faculty in equity-minded grading are firmly invested in preserving their institutional sinecures. And it is almost impossible to uproot tenured faculty whose careers have been built on the premise that unequal outcomes stem from systemic oppression and require preferential treatment. Academic activists whose professional interests and economic well-being are bound up with the DEI enterprise will not go quietly into the night. Political pressures may have driven DEI underground, but dormancy is not extinction. Once an ideology acquires budgets and careers, it develops a powerful instinct for self-preservation.
Neil Gilbert is a distinguished professor of social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley.