by A2Independent staff

First, in Oct. 2024 the New York Times ran a 9,200 word expose that revealed since 2016 the University of Michigan had spent $260 million and employed 240 staffers in pursuit of elusive institutional DEI goals. In that expose, The New York Times reported:

“A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.”

The New York Times revealed this startling fact:

“The university now has a greater proportion of Hispanic, Asian and first-generation students and a more racially diverse staff. But in a state where 14 percent of residents are Black, the school’s Black undergraduate enrollment has long hovered stubbornly at around 4 percent, before ticking up just past 5 percent this fall. (The figures are slightly higher if, as school officials strongly urged, you include students who identify as more than one race.)”

On Feb. 14, 2025, The Chronicle of Higher Education turned its focus to Michigan’s DEI 2.0 and reported that the enrollment numbers of Black students has remained virtually unchanged. Not the outcome expected from a program that has spent a quarter of a billion dollars over the past nine years.

On Feb. 17, 2025, the U.S. Dept. of Education sent a letter to every college and university in the U.S. in which institutions of higher learning were threatened with the loss of federal funding should institutions continue to “consider race in most aspects of student life.”

The letter — sent to postsecondary educational institutions, as well as state educational agencies that receive financial assistance from the federal government — included a controversial interpretation of federal law following the 2023 Supreme Court decision that gutted affirmative action.

“Federal law thus prohibits covered entities from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life,” wrote Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights for the Education Department.

The letter went on to attack DEI programs such as the one at the University of Michigan, “Other programs discriminate in less direct, but equally insidious, ways. DEI programs, for example, frequently preference certain racial groups and teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not. Such programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes.

“Consequently, they deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school. The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions. The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.”

Legal experts expect the Dept. of Education policy to be challenged in federal courts.

The Washington Beacon, a right-leaning news site founded in 2012, on Feb. 13, 2025 published its own expose in which the news site revealed the fact the University of Michigan’s School of Nursing had “rebranded” its DEI Dept. as “Community Culture.”

Then, when a retired professor complained to the Regents in a Feb. 8, 2025 letter, the School of Nursing disappeared its “Community Culture” webpages, but did not fire its DEI staffers.

Mark Perry, a retired professor of economics at the university’s Flint campus, looked into the “rebranding” more closely.

It turns out the new “Community Culture” pages “link to the same DEI materials as the old ones, including a ‘DEI 2.0’ strategic plan that is in effect through 2028. And lo and behold, the office of ‘Community Culture’ employs all the same staff as the former diversity office,” reported the Beacon. “The title of just one official, Patricia Coleman-Burns, has changed from ‘DEI Strategic Planning Co-Lead to ‘Strategic Planning Co-Lead.’ The new office’s description also uses many of the same buzzwords associated with DEI, albeit not the acronym itself.”

Retired professor Mark Perry told the Beacon: “These changes might serve as a blueprint for other schools to follow with similar deceptive changes. Schools at Michigan like Nursing are now attempting to maintain the ‘DEI status quo’ while hiding their DEI programming and services from the regents, media, taxpayers, federal and state government, and the public.”

Meanwhile, President Trump and the U.S. Dept. of Education have said universities will be investigated as part of the crackdown on DEI. A tipline was created: DEIAtruth@opm.gov.

University of Michigan Regent Mark Bernstein, a Democrat and lawyer, told the New York Times in Oct. 2024, “D.E.I. here is absolutely well intentioned, extremely thoughtful in its conception and design, but it’s so virtuous that it’s escaped accountability in a lot of ways.”

The New York Times reported in Oct. 2024, “In June 2024, civil rights officials at the federal Department of Education found that Michigan had systematically mishandled student complaints over the 18-month period ending in February. Out of 67 complaints of harassment or discrimination based on national origin or ancestry that the officials reviewed — an overwhelming majority involving allegations of antisemitism, Michigan had investigated and made findings in just one.”

Accountability, or the lack thereof, is at the heart of the Ann Arbor Independent’s scrutiny of DEI programs and DEI staffers countywide.