Heather Mac Donald Columbia’s President Resigns, But the DEI Battle Is Just Beginning The campus diversity regime, at the Ivy League school and elsewhere, won’t go down without a fight.
With the resignation of Columbia University’s interim president, the academic-diversity complex seems to have sent out a warning shot: cooperation with the Trump administration will be punished. Outgoing president Katrina Armstrong claimed in her resignation letter, submitted Friday, March 28, that she had always “planned” to return to her various bureaucratic positions in Columbia’s medical schools. Quite possibly true. But the question is: For when was that return planned?
The timing suggests that the decision was forced by external pressure. Armstrong had been facing a faculty revolt for over a week, as well as a lawsuit from eight Columbia students. The faculty objected to Armstrong’s decision to comply—more or less—with a set of Trump administration demands issued as a precondition for avoiding a $400 million cut in federal funds.
The Columbia faculty, or at least its most left-wing, pro-Palestinian bloc, had also revolted against Armstrong’s predecessor, Minouche Shafik. According to her critics, Shafik had failed in Congress to sufficiently defend Columbia’s pro-Hamas campus protests,. Then she failed to protect those illegal protesters from arrest.
Now the faculty appear to have taken another scalp.
Th irony is that Armstrong had outmaneuvered the Trump administration in some of its demands. Contrary to press reports, that outmaneuvering was not a concealed stratagem; she merely used clever drafting. In so doing, she had served a reminder that the president’s team had better start reading the fine print if it wants to secure its counterrevolution. Other recent developments in academia confirm how wily the Trump administration’s diversity-industry opposition is.
On March 21, the Trump administration announced that Columbia University had complied with nine preconditions for avoiding the loss of $400 million in federal funding. Among those preconditions, set out on March 13, was the demand that Columbia proscribe the wearing of masks “intended to conceal identity or intimidate others.” An exception could be made for health or religious reasons, but even then, the mask-wearer must have his school ID visible at all times on the outside of his clothing.
That same day, March 21, Columbia’s Office of the President published a document outlining its purported compliance with the Trump administration demands. Titled “Advancing Our Work to Combat Discrimination, Harassment, and Antisemitism at Columbia,” it was widely portrayed as signaling Columbia’s total capitulation. The Trump administration seemed to agree. A March 24 press release from the White House Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism heralded Columbia’s compliance with the March 13 preconditions, including its commitment to “enforcing a strict anti-masking policy that includes appropriate enforcement mechanisms for violations.”
Columbia’s leadership had made no such commitment. According to the university’s “Advancing Our Work” document, facemasks would not be allowed “for the purpose of concealing one’s identity in the commission of violations” of university policies or state laws. But if someone were not intending to violate university policy or state law, she could presumably still don a mask. Indeed, Columbia stated that individuals who “wear face masks or face coverings” during “protests and demonstrations” must, when asked, present their identification. These two clauses were carefully drafted to ensure that Columbia’s overwhelmingly female Hamas groupies could continue to swaddle themselves in Palestinian headscarves and large sun glasses. And whereas the White House had demanded that even those masked for health or religion reasons display their school identification at all times, Columbia holds that masked protesters, a category that the White House no longer permits, must show identification only if asked.
It should have come as no surprise, then, when a leaked recording of a faculty meeting showed then-president Armstrong reassuring the faculty that the school had not banned masks. It had not—as anyone who had actually bothered to read the presidential letter could have discovered. Yet the White House was caught off guard.
Other private and public entities are also calibrating their language to preserve as much of the pre-Trump status quo as possible. It was widely reported, for example, that the University of California had, in the words of the New York Times, “retire[d] a diversity tool.” The allegedly retired “tool” was a requirement that faculty applicants document their past and future contributions to diversity in order to be considered for a job. Such diversity statements have become common across academia. At the University of California’s ten campuses, only some departments at some campuses required them; in other UC departments, they were optional.
But the University of California has not “retired” such statements. The university will continue to welcome accounts of a faculty candidate’s diversity efforts, according to a March 20, 2025, campus-wide email from the UC System Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs. Prospective and current employees may wish to “share how they have contributed to inclusive excellence,” according to System Provost Katherine Newman, and will get “due recognition” for those contributions.
The best of all possible contributions to “inclusive excellence” has always been to be inclusively diverse oneself; the second-best contribution is to be committed to the idea that strong efforts are needed to assist the victims of America’s systemic racism. Rewarding either form of “inclusive excellence” through preferential treatment is the essence of any diversity regime, and that regime is apparently still in place at the University of California.
Rebranding a diversity office constitutes another category of, at best, complying with the letter but not the spirit of the new anti-diversity protocol.
The University of Pennsylvania law school has created a new Office of Equal Opportunity and Engagement. How is this office different from the school’s previous Office of Inclusion & Engagement? It is not. It is led by a “familiar” team, according to a March 24 email from the law school dean to the law faculty. The Office of Equal Opportunity and Engagement “will focus on the Law School’s enduring commitment to fostering a collegial campus environment that is free from bias, discrimination, and harassment,” according to Dean Sophia Lee.
If a bureaucratic entity is dedicated to fostering an environment free from discrimination, it embraces the false structure of belief that the Trump administration is trying to combat. No one at Penn’s law school is being discriminated against, at least as the outgoing Office of Inclusion & Engagement or the incoming Office of Equal Opportunity and Engagement would understand discrimination. To be sure, white males are the last to be considered in admissions and hiring, but it will be a long time before any diversity outfit, no matter its name, treats white males as a protected class.
Case Western Reserve University has just completed an almost identical rebranding. It replaced its Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Engagement with an Office for Campus Enrichment and Engagement. The head of the “new” Office for Campus Enrichment and Engagement is the same black male who served as vice president for the “old” Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Engagement. In his previous capacity as vice president for the “old” Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Engagement, Robert Solomon posted a video of himself reading from the book, You Sound Like A White Girl: The Case For Rejecting Assimilation. The video was part of the office’s Hispanic programming. You Sound Like A White Girl posed the burning question: “How does my non-white, non-black identity contribute to the power of white supremacy in America?” Solomon is unlikely to have concluded in the interim that white supremacy no longer needs fighting.
Every other aspect of Case Western Reserve’s Office for Campus Enrichment and Engagement is a throwback to the Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Engagement. It will offer training, in the words of its website, to “ensure you feel welcome, respected and valued.” These terms, which gained currency a decade ago in diversity circles, apply to “marginalized” students’ allegedly vulnerable identities. The idea is that an affirmative effort is needed so that such students don’t feel unwelcome, disrespected, and undervalued. But no adult on a college campus today shows disrespect to students based on their identity; well-meaning, liberal faculty and administrators bend over backward to be “inclusive.” And it is not the function of a university, in any case, to make any group of students feel “welcome, respected and valued.” The only student “feelings” the schools are responsible for is a deserved feeling of academic mastery. Until that mastery is attained, students should feel humbled, frightened, and inadequate before the responsibility of taking on knowledge.
Case Western Reserve’s Office for Campus Enrichment and Engagement will also “celebrate the wide range of cultures on our campus.” A separate bureaucracy is not needed for that function. Scholarly study is celebration enough.
Colleges are exhausting their list of DEI synonyms, repurposing many terms already in circulation (such as “Belonging” and “Engagement”) and echoing one another’s rebranded sinecures. The University of Akron renamed its DEI office the Office of Community Engagement, Opportunity and Belonging in January, echoing Case Western Reserve’s Office for Campus Enrichment and Engagement and the Penn law school’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Engagement. The haste of the effort to preserve the diversity enterprise has left some telltale editing errors.
The University of California, San Diego, has not even gotten around yet to renaming its Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion—whether out of defiance or cluelessness is hard to say. But it sent around a school-wide notice on March 21 for the 2025–26 Leadership Academy/La Academia de Liderazgo of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities. The program is “open to all”—the usual workaround that race-specific programs have added in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision, SFFA v. Harvard, which ostensibly banned racial preferences in college admissions. The opinion has been interpreted as signaling a wider prohibition on identity-specific initiatives. Yet the aim of La Academia de Liderazgo, according to Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Becky Petitt, is increasing “representation in leadership roles by preparing senior administrators at colleges and universities for top leadership positions.” Increasing “representation” of whom or what? Petitt does not say.
UC San Diego’s Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities presumably just lopped off the word “Hispanic” from before “representation” in its description of the program’s aims, in the hope of not triggering a DEI alert with the federal government. The application form for La Academia de Liderazgo asks for applicants’ race and ethnicity, an irrelevancy if being Hispanic were no longer the program’s main focus.
The war on straight white males in honorary positions will be harder to document and eradicate, since there are not easily available benchmarks in large numbers. UC San Diego just announced that its three new fellows elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science were all female. The chance of that sex ratio happening randomly is almost zero, given the proportion of females in engineering, math, and medicine at UC San Diego and nationwide. Not surprisingly, one of the awardees is officially listed as being “passionate about gender equity.” Nevertheless, absent incriminating evidence to the contrary, the decision-makers can claim that their decision was made on grounds specific to each individual.
By contrast, recently obtained data from New York University offer nearly explicit proof of race-norming in undergraduate admissions: the average SAT score for Asian admits in 2024 was 1,485 on a 1,600-point scale, the average white score was 1,428, the average Hispanic score was 1,355, and the average black score was 1,289. This was a year after SFFA v. Harvard. NYU appears to have ignored the ruling like its many fellow scofflaws.
Replacing one worldview with another in so short a time was never going to be easy. Though President Trump’s executive orders seem sweeping, his tools are limited. The administration can flag certain words and phrases essential to the antiracist project. It can eliminate them from official executive branch pronouncements. But the professional antiracists in faculties and bureaucracies won’t cede power without a fight, since uprooting the diversity ideology constitutes an existential threat.
Katrina Armstrong’s resignation shows how turbulent the academic world has become. After this first round of executive orders and funding decisions, the Trump administration will have to get even more creative in combating a poisonous worldview. The battle is just beginning.
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