Penna Dexter

Over decades, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — D.E.I. — has gained a foothold in higher education. It enshrines gender and identity politics and encourages non-white students to see themselves as victims. One university president explains this march to the left, stating: “Universities have drifted away from ideas to ideology.” Walter Wendler is President of West Texas A&M University, located in the Texas panhandle where most citizens are involved in producing food and fuel. Dr. Wendler says they want their university to graduate students capable of excelling in a “performance culture,” not woke activism. He does his best to accommodate that desire.

D.E.I. affects college administrations, academics, faculty training, and hiring. Potential hires are often required to sign Equity and Inclusion Statements, affirming their allegiance to certain tenants of leftist orthodoxy, including the principles of Critical Race Theory.

Dr. Wendler calls D.E.I. “a blunt instrument” that mandates a “hyperfocus on race” which, rather than improve racial relations, fosters discrimination, segregation, and distrust.

Can we, like Dr. Wendler, stand against and even push back against the Left’s hegemony over our universities?

Christopher Rufo thinks so. He has spent years exposing and battling Critical Race Theory. He’s in the thick of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s effort to completely transform the notoriously leftist New College in Sarasota into a classical liberal arts college, traditional in its brand of education and scholarship.

Governor DeSantis appointed Mr. Rufo and other talented conservatives to the school’s Board of Trustees. They acted quickly to fire the college’s president and replace him with a proven leader who resonates with the governor’s mandate for reform. They then abolished the campus D.E.I. bureaucracy. Chris Rufo says these actions have changed the dynamics at New College and in the state of Florida. He says they have “sent the entire higher education system scrambling.“

Universities exist for the pursuit of truth, but D.E.I. completely distorts that mission. May this recapture of a woke college inspire a nationwide effort to extinguish D.E.I.