In just the first week of his second presidency, President Donald Trump has issued several monumental executive orders intended to roll back discriminatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs across the federal government.  

Even these extraordinary actions, however, will not win the battle against DEI by themselves.  

As a former professor, I know that academia remains the nerve center for the poisonous ideology behind DEI, and that classroom-based DEI indoctrination in universities will not end without additional outside pressure. In fact, Trump’s executive orders explicitly (and appropriately) exempted “academic instruction” in higher education from the new federal protections. The last thing we need is for the feds to establish national curricular standards for schools and colleges across all 50 states. But state governments, in keeping with their historical responsibility to oversee public education, have both the right and the duty to ensure that students in public institutions receive a rigorous and useful education. 

And too many public universities are choosing indoctrination over education. Last year, the advocacy organization Speech First published a report revealing that two-thirds of major American universities require students to take DEI courses just to graduate. Fifty-nine percent of the schools with DEI requirements were public, state taxpayer-funded institutions.