Jonathan Zimmerman: The problems with DEI don't justify President Donald Trump's bigoted actions

Chicago Tribune

14-02-2025

Let's start with the easy part: The attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion by President Donald Trump's administration represent an enormous threat to freedom of speech in America.
Federal agencies have been required to remove references to 'gender' and 'environmental justice' — alongside 'diversity' and 'inclusion' — from their documents. At the National Science Foundation, staffers have also scrubbed the words 'disability,' 'women' and 'minority' from research projects, lest they run afoul of the White House.
That's what happens in authoritarian countries where citizens must say the correct words — and avoid the wrong ones — to get on the right side of their rulers. In a free society, that's unacceptable. Period.
But so are some aspects of DEI, which have also been hostile to open expression. And you can't demand freedom with one hand when you're dampening it with the other.
Consider the case of Hamline University art historian Erika López Prater, who was fired for behavior that the school's DEI leader called 'inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.' Her crime? Showing images of the Prophet Muhammad to her online class.
Prater gave students the opportunity to sign out of the class if they did not want to see the images. And she also provided a detailed rationale for sharing visual depictions of the prophet, noting that Muslims disagree with each other about the practice. 'I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture,' she said.
No matter. A student in the class complained that the images offended her sensibilities — 'as a Muslim and a Black person, I don't feel like I belong,' she wrote — and the school threw Prater under the bus. In an open letter, its president and DEI officer declared flatly that 'respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.'
We heard a similar argument from Tirien Steinbach, an associate dean for DEI at Stanford, where students heckled conservative federal Judge Kyle Duncan during a 2023 address. Noting that students felt harmed by Duncan's views on race and sexuality, Steinbach wondered aloud whether the benefits of free speech justified its costs. 'Is the juice worth the squeeze?' she asked.
For universities, there's only one correct answer: yes. Our founding principle is that everyone gets their say, even when it hurts. But our DEI managers say otherwise: If speech hurts, you need to restrict it.
Or, sometimes, they tell us what we should say. Witness mandatory diversity statements, another product of the DEI bureaucracy. When you apply for a job, you have to explain how your research and teaching will enhance diversity, equity and inclusion. That's what used to be called a loyalty oath, because it makes people affirm a set of ideas as a condition for employment. What if a candidate's diversity statement echoed some of the free-speech concerns in this column? We all know where their application would likely end up: in the trash.
But none of these problems justifies the bigoted fulminations of Donald Trump, who has made DEI into an all-purpose bogeyman. Without any evidence, he suggested DEI caused the tragic aircraft accident in Washington by elevating unqualified air traffic controllers. He called his remarks 'common sense.' I call them racist.
I also think there's a huge difference between a university official restricting speech and Trump prohibiting it. He's the president, after all, and — for now — his word is law.
But we share a censorious spirit with him. He scrubs words from federal documents; we promulgate lists of microaggressions that students and faculty should avoid.
I understand why 'You don't seem Black' could insult an African American or why some Asian American students might bridle at 'Asians are good at math.' But I don't understand why an institution ostensibly dedicated to free speech would establish an official index of tabooed phrases, especially when we lack solid evidence that the alleged targets of these terms consistently experience them as offensive or that repeated exposure to the words harms them.
Again, language policing is many times worse when the president of the United States does it. So I was glad to see that the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education and several other organizations had filed a lawsuit claiming that Trump's anti-DEI orders violate the First Amendment of the Constitution. If you tell people what words they can or can't use, about DEI or anything else, you're preventing the free exchange at the heart of democracy.
But we can't defend that ideal if we're undermining it at the same time. As Trump's attacks on DEI confirm, he doesn't really believe in free speech. Now we need to rededicate ourselves to it, by resisting the temptation to suppress it in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of 'Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools' and eight other books.