“DEI is Under Attack!” CNN, NY Times, Harvard Business Review and more media are in panic mode, trying to slow the pushback to DEI in colleges as society REJECTS this harmful ideology.

Dr. Franklin Tuitt has 25 years of experience as an academic and an administrator in higher education, with many of those years spent fostering diversity, equity and inclusion – commonly known as DEI.

Tuitt, now the University of Connecticut’s vice president and chief diversity officer, told CNN he sees historic parallels between the growing outrage over DEI and the backlash to previous efforts to integrate education and expand civil rights.

“Some of the tactics that are being used, whether it’s through legislation or through intimidation, are tactics that have been used previously,” Tuitt said.

But he argues this wave of attacks is more targeted than anything he has seen before.

“I think it is fair to say that we’re seeing a much more focused and intentional and strategic effort to limit the effects of diversity, equity and inclusion and it’s a very multilayered approach,” he said. “I do think that is new.”

“It’s taken on a greater level of focus than I’ve seen in my career in higher education,” he added.

As efforts to promote DEI in academia increasingly come under fire, defenders, like Tuitt, tell CNN they are trying to uphold American ideals while critics accuse them of advantaging some groups – like racial minorities – over others.

Signs reading “Say No To Critical Hate Theory” laid out during a Save Our Schools rally in Leesburg, Virginia, in September 2021.
Signs reading “Say No To Critical Hate Theory” laid out during a Save Our Schools rally in Leesburg, Virginia, in September 2021. Pete Marovich/The

Critics link DEI to ‘critical race theory’

Tuitt said, the goal of DEI programming is to create institutional environments that allow all students to access resources and achieve at the highest level regardless of their background.

But some of the most outspoken critics of DEI initiatives and polices have argued they are unnecessary, divisive, harmful and even, in the words of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, racist.

Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, who also opposes DEI, has led a yearslong crusade against “critical race theory,” or CRT, which recognizes racism in American society as systemic and institutional. He suggested in a December essay for the City Journal that institutions like Harvard have used DEI initiatives to indoctrinate students in CRT.

“The words that the acronym ‘DEI’ represent sound nice, but it is nothing more than affirmative action and racial preferences by a different name, a system that features racial headcounts and arbitrarily assigned roles of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ groups in America,” Williams said in an emailed statement. “If we continue to do democracy this way, it will only end in acrimony, strife, resentment, and American collapse.”

Erec Smith
Once a DEI officer in higher education, Erec Smith now says he thinks increasingly the focus of DEI has shifted to mean racial diversity only. CNN
DEI supporter turned critic Erec Smith said while he believes some institutions are taking the right approach to DEI, many are not, in part because these days “diversity means diversity of skin color and that’s it.”

Smith was a DEI officer at Drew University in New Jersey and chaired the diversity committee at Ursinus College outside Philadelphia, but he said he became disillusioned by what he saw as an increasing focus among DEI advocates on things like microaggressions and an us-versus-them framework.

“It is important to ask for operational definitions. When people say ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ ask ‘What do you mean by that?’” said Smith, now a research fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“I want to see a DEI that is undergirded by classical liberal values like individuality, equality, merit, right? Free speech and forgiveness.”

Caldwell said the DEI framework at SIU is heavily inspired by the words and ideals in America’s founding documents, like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

“American principles are DEI principles,” she said. “We seek to fulfill those promises made to groups that have been historically denied.

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