The flag of the University of Michigan

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Jaryn Crouson

The University of Michigan’s (UM) multi-million dollar diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program may soon be dismantled.

The university’s board of regents has reportedly asked UM president Santa Ono “to defund or restructure” the DEI office amid growing criticism and public pressure, according to emails shared on X. The board is expected to vote on the matter on Dec. 5.

“I write to share information with you about impending threats to the University of Michigan’s DEI programming and core values of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Rebekah Modrak, faculty senate chair, wrote in an email to faculty senate members. “It has been confirmed by multiple sources that the Regents met earlier this month in a private meeting with a small subgroup of central leadership members, and among the topics discussed was the future of DEI at UM, including the possibility of defunding DEI in the next fiscal year.”

Calls for the university’s DEI program to come to a close surfaced after The New York Times exposed its failures and the vast amount of money being thrown at it.

“In recent years, as D.E.I. programs came under withering attack, Michigan has only doubled down on D.E.I., holding itself out as a model for other schools,” the NYT wrote in an October article. “By one estimate, the university has built the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any big public university. But an examination by The Times found that Michigan’s expansive — and expensive — D.E.I. program has struggled to achieve its central goals even as it set off a cascade of unintended consequences.”

Despite UM investing $250 million into DEI since 2016, students and faculty have reported a deteriorating campus climate since the program began and are less likely to interact with people of a different race, religion or political ideology, though these are “the exact kind of engagement[s] D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster,” the article stated. Attempts to create a more diverse campus also fell flat, with black enrollment at the university remaining a steady 5%.

The program also created a “culture of grievance,” with the office’s conception coinciding with an “explosion” of complaints on campus involving race, gender and religion, the NYT reported. Meanwhile, nearly 250 university employees were engaged in some form of DEI efforts on campus.

Modrak in her email referenced the article, calling it a “tendentious attack” that was “not well researched,” and claiming that the author “cherry-picked” examples of UM’s failures.

DEI staff cost the university approximately $30.68 million annually, with the average salary reaching $96,400, according to Mark Perry, an American Enterprise Institute scholar. Several DEI employees are paid more than $200,000 a year, while the department’s head makes upwards of $400,000.

“I think that across the ideological spectrum both regular citizens and policymakers have really shifted on issues of identity politics,” John Sailer, senior fellow and director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I think a lot of people who would have at some point, probably just as a matter of knee-jerk reaction, supported diversity initiatives, have started to really reconsider what these initiatives are actually doing, and reconsider whether everything that falls under the name of DEI is actually something that they support. And so there was already the slow burn.”

The major catalyst of this change, Sailer explained, was the series of fiery protests that ravaged college campuses across the country after Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which were “absolutely a big part of the story.”

“A lot of people were already skeptical of DEI,” Sailer said. “A lot of people were already of the opinion that these policies, even though they purport to be about diversity, in practice really have been about a particular ideological vision for higher ed. Then on October 7, I think a whole different part of the American electorate and a whole different constituency, many more people from the professional world looked at universities and thought, What on earth is going on? What is the problem here?”

The University of Michigan, like many other schools, was overwhelmed by violent protests that resulted in several arrests and criminal charges being filed against 11 students and alumni.

“It became clear that a part of the problem was we have these massive bureaucracies that should ostensibly promote treating people well,” Sailer continued. “And it was in fact a lot of people most involved with the DEI complex who were supporting these kind of radically anti-Israel, radically anti-West, at times, rudely antisemitic demonstrations.”

The reelection of former president Donald Trump on Nov. 5 likely played no small role in this shift either.

“I think now every elected official is aware that there’s something of a popular mandate to reform higher education, and that mandate existed before Trump was elected in 2024, but there’s also a kind of popular rebuke of the progressive identity politics,” Sailer said. “I have to think that the conversation that the University of Michigan’s regents are having about DEI would be different if there had not been this nationwide rebuke of identity politics that the election of Trump seems to represent.”

Trump has promised many reforms to the education sector, including abolishing the Department of Education entirely. The president-elect has also vowed to bring peace to Israel and Gaza and said that such efforts would help curb the rise in antisemitism in the U.S.

While several other schools have begun to dismantle DEI offices across the country, some in response to state laws barring the departments and policies, the case at the University of Michigan is unique. Most efforts thus far have been led by Republican lawmakers, such as in Texas and Florida, but in the blue state of Michigan, the university’s highest governing body is comprised almost entirely of Democrats.

“The fact that University of Michigan is an institution controlled by elected Democrats, the fact that its Board of Regents would consider doing something like this, I think it signals a broader shift,” Sailer said. “It’s a huge deal for the University of Michigan to even have this kind of reform on the table. It’s a huge deal because the University of Michigan is the exemplar when it comes to DEI. If the University of Michigan makes this decision, that marks a big shift.”

This move by the university could signal others to follow suit.

“It could be just a massive step towards broader higher education reform,” Sailer told the DCNF.

UM and the Board of Regents did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Walmart, America’s largest employer, says it will remove sexualized and transgender products targeted at children, review all funding of pro-LGBT ‘pride’ initiatives, end ‘racial equity training,’ and stop participating in the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.

The campaign to “de-woke” corporate America has claimed its biggest win yet, with the news that retail giant Walmart is abandoning a broad range of “diversity” initiatives it had previously invested heavily in.

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck reported that Walmart executives detailed to him a range of policy changes the company has committed to, amid left-wing cultural causes falling more out of favor with the general public.

The company plans to stop participating in the LGBT pressure group Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, to “identify and remove inappropriate sexual and / or transgender products marketed to children” via third-party sellers on its website, to “Review all funding of Pride, and other events, to avoid funding inappropriate sexualized content targeting kids”; to “not extend the Racial Equity Center which was established in 2020 as a special five-year initiative”; to stop factoring identity quotas into arrangements with suppliers; and to discontinue “racial equity training” as well as use of the terms “LatinX” and “DEI.”

“Remember, Walmart is the #1 employer in America with over 1.6 Million Employees and they have a market cap of nearly $800B,” Starbuck said. “This won’t just have a massive effect for their employees who will have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected but it will also extend to their many suppliers.”

“Our campaigns are now so effective that we’re getting the biggest companies on earth to change their policies without me even posting a story outlining their woke policies,” he added. “Companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back. The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are now the trend, not the anomaly.”

Walmart is the biggest corporate scalp Starbuck has claimed yet, but by no means his first. With past campaigns, he has successfully pressured Jack Daniel’s, John Deere, Tractor Supply, Lowe’s, Toyota, and Coors to drop similar policies.

In recent years, left-wing activists have used “diversity, equity, & inclusion” (DEI) and “environmental, social, & governance” (ESG) standards to encourage major U.S. corporations to take favorable stands on political and cultural issues such as homosexuality, transgenderism, race relations, the environment, and abortion.

Political and customer backlashes to such activism has translated to business woes for companies such as Disney, Bud Light, and Target. Former President Donald Trump’s defeat this month of outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris for the White House has also been seen by many as further evidence of the general public rejecting woke ideology, which may have further influenced Walmart’s decision.

Exit polling by the pro-Democrat firm Blueprint found that the statement “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” was the third-biggest reason for why overall voters chose not to vote for her, and the number one reason why swing voters rejected her and voted for Trump instead.