The University of Michigan has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on the promotion of DEI over the past decade, building the largest DEI bureaucracy at any school in the country. So what has it gotten for all of that investment? Not much according to a lengthy report by Nicholas Confessore. What it has produced is a campus overrun with DEI language.

Leaders of the University of Michigan, one of America’s most prestigious public universities, like to say that their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is inseparable from the pursuit of academic excellence. Most students must take at least one class addressing “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.” Doctoral students in educational studies must take an “equity lab” and a racial-justice seminar. Computer-science students are quizzed on microaggressions.

Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I. is encoded with left-wing ideologies. Michigan’s largest division trains professors in “antiracist pedagogy” and dispenses handouts on “Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” like “worship of the written word.” The engineering school promises a “pervasive education around issues of race, ethnicity, unconscious bias and inclusion.”...

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.

Given the amount invested, DEI should have blossomed into its final utopian form at UMichigan, but that hasn't happened. On the contrary, students say the climate on campus has become less positive.

Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.

So what has all the funding the the hiring of DEI administrators produced? Grievances. Lots of grievances and lots of ways to pursue those grievances.

Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion. On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was D.E.I. itself. “D.E.I. here is absolutely well intentioned, extremely thoughtful in its conception and design,” said Mark Bernstein, a lawyer and a Democrat who sits on the university’s Board of Regents. “But it’s so virtuous that it’s escaped accountability in a lot of ways.”...

In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates like Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan’s campus. By 2020, that number had more than doubled. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period.

Case in point, a professor at the school named Eric Fretz was called out by one of his students after he admitted in advance that he was from a different generation and asked students to hold him accountable on how he used examples in class.

Lily Cesario, then a student in his class, felt differently. His disclaimer “raised a red flag for me,” she wrote in an email to Fretz. In a subsequent meeting, according to a written account Fretz later submitted to school officials, Cesario told Fretz he had wrongly asked women in the class to educate their professor about sexism and had failed to fully acknowledge his privilege.

Afterward, in the class’s unofficial group chat, Cesario asked other students if they found Fretz’s statement “problematic,” according to screenshots I viewed. “He’s going out of his way to be inclusive,” one replied. Others liked his humility. In a subsequent email, Cesario told Fretz she was dropping his course. His disclaimer was “extremely disrespectful and ignorant of the struggles that women and girls continue to face on a daily basis,” his behavior “inseparably ingrained within a larger culture of harm that exists on this campus and within the wider world.” She then filed a Title IX complaint...

Though the Title IX office found no grounds for punishment, Fretz remains stung. “It’s this gotcha culture they have created on campus,” he told me, adding: “It’s like giving a bunch of 6-year-olds Tasers.”

That's a nice metaphor for DEI on campus. Give everyone a tool to sting others without consequences and then act shocked when a bunch of people get hurt. But according to the author, the university hasn't learned anything from all of this. Indeed, their take is that the only possible problem with DEI at Michigan is insufficient commitment to DEI at Michigan. The school is doubling down once again.

And yet, there are reasons to think DEI doesn't work and will never work because so much of it is junk science behaving like a new religion.

Some researchers argue that teaching students to view the world chiefly through the lens of identity and oppression can leave them vulnerable instead of empowered. Psychologists have questioned whether implicit bias can be accurately measured or reduced through training. The notion that microaggressions are not only real but ubiquitous in interracial encounters is widespread in D.E.I. programs; a 2021 review of the microaggressions literature, however, judged it “without adequate scientific basis.”

This isn't something that will ever collapse on its own. It's going to have to be pulled down with deliberate effort. Doing that will probably take years and a lot of lawsuits.