Confessions of a Former DEI Officer

For the last five years, if you walked onto almost any American college campus, you would have found an office and staff dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion. DEI in higher education grew out of civil rights-era efforts in the 1960s and ’70s as a well-meaning attempt to recruit more diverse faculty and students—but the movement exploded after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. DEI officers at higher education institutions tripled after July 2020. At the University of Michigan alone, DEI staff grew to 241 people at an annual cost of over $30 million. And it wasn’t just universities. There was a moral panic about structural racism in nearly all of our most important institutions. What followed was a cultural shift that permeated into job interviews, mission statements, and email signatures across the Western world. At face value, those missions––diversity, equity, inclusion––seemed pretty noble. But what did it look like for those words to be implemented? Critics would say: A new rubric emerged, where people’s value was determined by the historic suffering of their identity groups and not individual merit. Eventually, the tide turned on DEI. In 2023, the Supreme Court ended race-based affirmative action. And when the second Trump administration took office in January 2025, it moved aggressively against DEI. Today, over 300 colleges and universities have eliminated DEI requirements, closed DEI offices, or altered their DEI policies. So what actually happened inside those offices? My guest today, Michael Yassa, was a professor of neuroscience at University of California, Irvine when, in 2020, his university asked him to serve as associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at UC Irvine’s School of Biological Sciences. In this episode of Confessions, Yassa and I discuss how DEI initiatives became performative and failed to realize their promise. We agreed on some things (that land acknowledgments are performative), but not everything, and that’s why I hope you’ll watch. Yassa still believes in “good DEI,” though he tells me he wouldn’t use those words anymore. We debated the data on class versus race as a proxy in admissions, what DEI offices actually did, and whether there’s a need for DEI offices to be reformed rather than gutted.