Dishonest college and university officials are rebranding and renaming their “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) departments and programs to deceive donors and in some cases even authorities, according to a law professor tracking the scheming.
As The Newman Report has been documenting, more and more state governments are passing laws banning government-funded institutions from wasting public money on DEI. Numerous state schools responded by announcing that they were shutting it all down.
Florida authorities were clear. “DEI really is a cover for discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination,” explained Florida Board of Education Chairman Ben Gibson. “That has no place in our state colleges at all, and our state colleges need to be focused on learning.”
However, as Critical Race Training in Education shows at the website CriticalRace.org, many of the announcements trumpeting an end to DEI appear to have been a deliberate effort to defraud taxpayers.
Florida State University, for example, simply rebranded its program, changed the title names, and reclassified positions of employees working on DEI to give them different roles without even firing a single DEI bureaucrat, according to a report by CriticalRace.org.
In place of the DEI bureaucracy, FSU created the so-called “Office of Equal Opportunity Compliance and Engagement.” This was born in October 2023 and simply took over the functions of the DEI machine.
“These findings highlight how deeply embedded CRT and DEI concepts are in higher education, with entrenched ideological commitment that is resistant to change,” said CriticalRace.org founder William Jacobson, a law professor at Cornell.
The University of Alabama did the same thing. After disbanding its DEI office, it replaced it with the “Division of Opportunities, Connections, and Success. The “new” division is led by the same bureaucrat who served as “Associate Provost for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” CriticalRace.org found.
According to the information compiled in Jacobson’s massive database, many other institutions that supposedly abolished their DEI schemes rebranded them with names like “Office of Access and Engagement” and “Division of Access, Opportunity, and Diversity.”
But, as the evidence shows, they are the same as the DEI programs, often with the same staff and the same mission. Other institutions trying to scam taxpayers this way include University of Iowa, University of Northern Iowa, Oklahoma State University, South Dakota State University, University of South Dakota, University of Tennessee, University of Utah, Utah Valley University, and more.
“Many education groups have moved on from CRT/DEI to other issues because the politics also have shifted to other topics such as gender theory,” Jacobson told Fox News. “At CriticalRace.org we are keeping our focus on CRT/DEI precisely because others have lost their focus, and because CRT/DEI poses a threat to our core rights to equality and equal protection of the laws.”
Jacobson, who is also taking legal action through EqualProject.org against the tax-funded discrimination being documented by CriticalRace.org, urged members of the public to send in tips about discriminatory programs and scholarships.
Former University of Michigan economics professor Mark Perry has also been waging war on colleges and universities that are defying U.S. civil rights law by discriminating against males and students of European or Asian ancestry.
He is urging everyone to get involved, as The Newman Report highlighted this summer. “As recipients of federal financial assistance, U.S. colleges and universities are legally required to enforce federal civil rights laws,” Perry explained, adding that it was easy to join the fight.
Clearly these tax-funded DEI ideologues will stop at nothing. Lawmakers should start putting teeth into laws banning the use of taxpayer funds for hateful and discriminatory DEI programs, including the possibility of criminal penalties for cases of obvious fraud.
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