Dear Columbia: It’s Time to Rethink DEI

The University’s DEI framework is a dangerous overcorrection for historical inequality.

Civil rights leaders meet with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

One of the more irksome claims of DEI advocates is that they are merely striving for a return to “American values.” Politicians, universities, and nonprofits alike justify their defense of DEI policies by invoking the Founding Fathers or the Constitution. They point to phrases like “equal protection under the law” or references to “all” people, arguing that they justify equity and inclusion programs. Therefore, not only is DEI embedded within our nation’s founding, but any defense of DEI is also a defense of American values.

However, DEI is not in fact some kind of sacred American tradition. Nor is it consistent with the formal origin of affirmative action as established 1961. And while one could argue the university culture wars trace back to the 1980s, DEI does not.

DEI policies in the context of “anti-racism” are a more recent type of institutional language that university administrators aggressively adopted in response to the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020. In contrast to Kennedy-Johnson civil rights era legislation, the post-2020 DEI landscape is neither American nor worthy of our reverence. Instead, these recently institutionalized policies represent an ideological shift that distorts American values and history, redefining education around arbitrary metrics of identity rather than principles of citizenry.

The United States was a different place in the 1960s. The administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson sought to correct racial injustices and grant black Americans equal rights and opportunities. Kennedy signed an executive order on “affirmative action” in 1961. “It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color,” he said in his 1963 “Address to the Nation on Civil Rights.”

In 1964, Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act. In his remarks at the signing, he stressed that his intention was to “close the springs of racial poison” and “lay aside irrelevant differences.”

In other words, Johnson and Kennedy’s legislative efforts were a push for non-discrimination. Their policies were premised on the belief that minorities should be treated as potential employees, students, and citizens, “without respect to their race.” The policies were a response to the Civil Rights Movement, but they also encompassed gender, religion, and class. In education, this meant eliminating the idea of the “black” student or the “female” student and instead judging all students by the same intellectual standards.

Today, DEI initiatives at American universities do not even pretend to support this mission. Across the country, university administrators prop up affinity spaces and other identity-based initiatives that are inherently exclusionary. For example, Princeton’s Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project advocates for the creation of affinity groups “centered around a shared racial or religious background,” which can function as an “emotionally safe space to gather and process work or school experiences.”

At Columbia, these “safe spaces” are housed under the Office of Multicultural Affairs and Intercultural Resource Center. The office boasts an impressive workshop series on “Identifying Unconscious Bias in Practice” and “CU Safe Zone.” They also support initiatives like Indigehouse, “a special interest community for Indigenous students,” or the Audre Lorde Community Space, a home for “identity-conscious community building.”

The justification for these spaces is simple: Because the experience of X identity group at Columbia is so psychologically distressing, Columbia must atone and expiate its guilt through the creation of “safe spaces.” These spaces, in the words of former Dean of Undergraduate Student Life Cristen Kromm, are crucial to our “work as a collective towards racial and social justice.”

However, initiatives like these assume the very worst of my classmates. They suggest that my peers are so emotionally fragile that they cannot handle day-to-day life without the support of a “safe space.” The message is clear: It is inconceivable for minority students to experience campus life normally, encountering and overcoming the usual academic and social challenges of the college experience. Instead, the assumption is that by virtue of being a member of X identity group, a student necessarily has a categorically different experience. Accordingly, they must be coddled and encouraged to self-segregate.

Such rhetoric produces students who view themselves as members of their race, gender, or sexuality before they view themselves as citizens. Gradually, many will see themselves at odds with anyone who does not share their identity and with Columbia’s broader campus culture.

These spaces also reinforce the pernicious idea that, despite strides towards social progress, inequality is an incessant state of being. Students now believe there is something immutably different in how a black student thinks, feels, or reacts compared to a white student. Now, the minority has been labeled as a perpetual pariah.

While in the 1960s, racist forces invoked identity to exclude minorities from full citizenship, today, some minority groups willingly embrace exclusionary hyper-racialization. Johnson fought to extinguish these “irrelevant differences.” Yet now, our “irrelevant differences” are of utmost significance.

In the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling, the justices clarified the meaning of equality and diversity in the American tradition: Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized that without a measurable end goal, the consideration of race in college admissions risked becoming permanent. Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion warned that the vision of America as a unified nation is incompatible with the continuous siloing of American society into racial castes. In other words, diversity means that we observe differences, but in our national consciousness they should remain secondary to our shared identity as Americans. Equality means that those differences should never justify permanent markers on any person of any background.

What we are seeing now at elite universities is a perversion of history used to enforce strict adherence to discriminatory policies. The Orwellian “linguistic obfuscation” of modern DEI programs is apparent in how advocates define diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the case of Columbia’s Office of Multicultural Affairs’ initiatives, “diversity” is now a stratification of society based on one’s identity markers. Equality has been replaced by “equity,” which lowers standards for certain groups. And “inclusion” is now about coddling students through exclusionary spaces. None of these interpretations are consistent with Kennedy and Johnson’s policy intentions, but DEI advocates continue to claim that the 1960s are the formal origin of their programs.

“How dare you roll back 60 years of progress,” DEI advocates claim. Yet good-faith critics of DEI are not challenging 60 years of racial progress, nor our nation’s 248-year journey of advancing equality for all. Rather, much of the recent wave of reactions against DEI is from critics challenging cultural shifts that have emerged over the past five years.

Our nation's racial reckoning in 2020 pressured our institutions to overcorrect to compensate for historical racism. For example, Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program proclaimed that using standard written English (SWE) as the default academic expectation for students carries a “a history of White supremacy.” Similarly, former University President Lee Bollinger declared that our mission at Columbia was to be anti-racist.

Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter summarizes this new era of DEI well: “This new, prevailing DEI is based on a core assumption that battling the power of whiteness be not just one goal, but the central goal of our institutions,” he wrote in a February article in Persuasion.

No longer was this assumption a fringe theory percolating through niche academic circles or select departments like the Office of Multicultural Affairs or the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (CCCCT). The modern logic of DEI asserts that a restructuring of our institutional identity must come at any cost—whether through lowering standards, stereotyping minorities, or defenestrating every other traditional mission of the University. The problem with such a radical restructuring is that it takes our community’s justified outrage at racial injustice in the summer of 2020 and idolizes it at the expense of previous progress.

The rhetoric that began in 2020 transformed reactionary political slogans into timeless “Columbia values.” As a result, our post-2020 institutional identity rejects the vision of Kennedy and Johnson, the ideals of the Founding Fathers, and even the original meaning of diversity, equality, and inclusion.

Now, as the Trump administration targets Columbia—and DEI criticism gains cultural momentum—the University appears to be quietly shifting course. Columbia has begun retracting DEI-related web pages, an implicit admission that these initiatives are either politically inconvenient or morally indefensible. Remarkably, in March former Interim University President Katrina Armstrong defined Columbia as, first and foremost, a free speech university.

And yet, there has been no institutional reckoning—no repudiation of Bollinger’s redefinition of Columbia as an “anti-racist” institution. The principle of “anti-racism” and institutional guilt still lingers in certain programs and aspects of campus culture, even as the formal policies begin to fade away.

Are we, as Armstrong claimed, a university committed to free speech? Or are we still the ideological outpost Bollinger envisioned? We can’t have it both ways.

I agree with Armstrong. Our ultimate goal at Columbia is free inquiry, robust debate, and upholding the liberal arts tradition. That has always been our mission, unbeholden to the political moment, the whims of University leaders, or the public sentiment. If we seek to truly honor that mission and uphold the true American ideal of equality, then we must renounce the performative and identitarian zealotry of the post-2020 era. Only then can we get closer to a vision of the University that is rooted in shared citizenship and principled non-discrimination.

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Ms. Chaudhry is a senior editor for Sundial and a junior at Columbia College studying history.