WATCHDOG: How universities are rebranding DEI to skirt Trump's crackdown
This story is part of Fox News Digital’s investigative series Campus Radicals. Get the full series here.As universities across the country have been accused of trying to hide their diversity,...
By Fox News · Fox News
This story is part of Fox News Digital’s investigative series Campus Radicals. Get the full series here. As universities across the country have been accused of trying to hide their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts to avoid federal scrutiny, Fox News Digital spoke to a leading parents' rights activist about how serious the problem is and what can be done about it. " I look at… the responses to the Trump administration and the executive orders falling into three buckets," Nicole Neily, founder and president of the nonpartisan grassroots organization Defending Education, told Fox News Digital about the continuation of DEI activities despite the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate it. Neily explained, "The first bucket are the proud resisters. I put Princeton, Harvard, schools like that in that category, where they're just going to, you know, ‘hashtag resist’ and do their thing. The second bucket is, I think it's the biggest category, and I think they're the ones that are trying to put lipstick on a pig. They are renaming the departments. The DEI department is now the ‘belonging department.’ The coordinator, the DEI dean, is now compliance dean or something like that. But those people are doing the same damn thing and just trying to wait the Trump administration out." Fox News Digital has extensively reported on schools in the first two buckets as defined by Neily, including at Washington University in St. Louis, where one of the nation’s top medical schools was accused of moving the DEI office to a restricted floor rather than close it. EXPERT REVEALS HOW COMPANIES ARE REBRANDING 'TOXIC' DEI POLICIES TO SKIRT TRUMP-ERA BANS: 'NEW WRAPPER' Earlier this month, Princeton University was hit with a scathing federal complaint over a DEI agenda that allegedly involved female students to share "gender-neutral" restrooms with gaps in the stalls, as well as graduations segregated by gender identity. At the University of Utah and University of Virginia , F…