Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are at the forefront of the ongoing culture war, and the stakes are highest on college campuses. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based preferences in college admissions are unconstitutional, and the Trump administration has issued specific policies that extend the principle of anti-discrimination to other university functions. But some universities are scrambling to protect the DEI apparatus on campus—sometimes even circumventing the law in the process.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) today released a new trustee guide entitled, Achieving Common Dignity: A Trustee Guide to Ensuring a Discrimination-free Campus. The guide is designed to help university leaders understand what the law requires and ensure that their institutions’ programs and policies treat all community members with equal dignity. It is essential to ensure that programs focused on expanding opportunity and fostering respectful dialogue do not stifle debate, enforce conformity of thought, or punish individuals who hold contrarian views.
The guide makes several recommendations to help governing boards achieve this goal, including:
“While ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ are noble goals in the abstract, DEI offices are the very opposite in practice,” said ACTA President Michael Poliakoff. “They are exorbitantly expensive bureaucracies that eat away at the very essence of education, which is the free exchange of ideas. Engaged trustees, watching over their institutions, are the key to moving past the failed experiment of DEI.”
ACTA Chief of Staff & Senior Vice President of Strategy Armand Alacbay stated, “This guide is a valuable resource for trustees to ensure that authentic, holistic diversity—not only of race or other identity categories, but also diversity of thought and belief—is respected once more on campus.”
Achieving Common Dignity will be distributed to 23,000 trustees at 1,600 public and private institutions across America. By re-centering institutional practices on enduring principles—including freedom of expression, intellectual diversity, and respectful disagreement—governing boards can safeguard the university’s core mission to drive the pursuit of knowledge through rigorous, open intellectual engagement.
American society is characterized by its diverse cultures. But diversity alone, especially when narrowly understood as a matter of race and gender, does not define the American identity or that of a university. The American identity emphasizes merit, individual liberty, self-governance, and civil engagement. These are all the more essential to the mission and identity […]
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