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“This is the beginning of the end for DEI in America’s institutions,” conservative activist Chris Rufo posted on X, formerly Twitter, just after the news broke Tuesday. “We will expose you. We will outmaneuver you. And we will not stop fighting until we have restored colorblind equality in our great nation.”
Their claim is that Gay rose to her position through efforts to diversify Harvard’s upper ranks, with critics tethering the plagiarism allegations to her race. “She got her job not through merit, but because she checked a box,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) wrote Thursday on X. “The real story of Harvard is not Claudine Gay’s firing but this: You are ruled by thousands of people who are just as mediocre.”
Gay defended her work in an op-ed published in the New York Times, writing that she had never misrepresented her research findings or claimed credit for the research of others. “Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.”
What’s clear, she warned, is that “the campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader.”
Conservatives agree, saying her resignation — the result of a coordinated effort by activists and university donors — shows that any effort to elevate someone based on their identity can be presented as faulty.
The past few years have seen growing backlash against DEI, a loosely defined term that refers to efforts by corporations and academic institutions to diversify their staffs and student bodies, and help create more inclusive environments for underrepresented groups. But the recent pushback is far more expansive — and effective — playing out as a series of multifront campaigns in the courts, boardrooms and state houses.
Those efforts have only gained traction since the Supreme Court struck down the use of race-conscious college admissions in June. The ruling against Harvard and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill overturned more than four decades of precedent protecting affirmative action in higher education. Soon after, white-shoe law firms like Morrison Foerster and Perkins Coie dialed back their diversity fellowships after being sued by conservative activist Edward Blum, the driving force in the Harvard case. Dozens of companies, including giants like Meta and Pfizer, are fighting lawsuits over their DEI efforts.
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has barred spending on DEI at public colleges and universities in his state, declaring that “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die.” In December, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) signed a similar measure.
These attacks are mounting even as America’s top institutions continue to struggle with diversity: People of color and women held less than 14 percent of C-suite roles across Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies as of 2023, according to data from executive search firm Crist Kolder Associates.
In the field of law, which has faced several suits over diversity fellowships, less than 5 percent of practicing attorneys are Black, even though Black people make up roughly 15 percent of the U.S. population, according to the American Bar Association. About 10 percent of practicing attorneys fall into other minority groups.
Jarvis Sam, former chief DEI officer at Nike and founder of the Rainbow Disruption, a DEI consultancy, said that DEI work is being used “as a direct pawn in the political landscape in a way we’ve never seen before.”
While DEI has often been “shrouded in a lack of comprehension,” Sam said, now it’s become “the antagonist in this broader story.”
When it comes to recent onslaughts on DEI, the list goes on and on, spanning a range of industries, government programs and academic institutions. Gay’s departure serves as yet another galvanizing event, one conservative activists highlight as a crowning achievement.
The “political right has learned how to fight more effectively,” Rufo wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday, highlighting strategies that put the “squeeze” on Harvard and its president: donors withholding billions of dollars, the airing of the plagiarism allegations against Gay and political pressure from lawmakers like Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).
“While her resignation is a victory, it is only the beginning,” Rufo wrote.
Many observers, regardless of political leaning, agree. “We’re in the early innings of a long fight to chisel out DEI from our institutions,” said Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, a nonprofit that has worked to end the use of environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations in the business and investing world. “The momentum is clearly on our side,” he said in an interview.
Alvin Tillery, political science professor and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, agreed that conservatives are “winning right now.” But Tillery, who is also the founder and chief executive of the 2040 Strategy Group — which consults with Fortune 500 companies on DEI issues — also expects blue states and liberal activists to start filing lawsuits of their own, charging that many companies have not adequately promoted equal opportunity and lack diversity.
“There’s a lot of other issues that are going to drop,” added Tillery, who said he knew Gay when they both attended Harvard in the 1990s but did not remain close to her.
Gay’s resignation and its implications for DEI this week spilled into public discourse among billionaires and civil rights activists alike.
In a lengthy post on X, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman said Gay’s resignation was “an important step forward.” A Democrat and Harvard graduate, Ackman was among those pushing for Gay’s resignation amid rising frustrations over how universities deal with antisemitism. He also is calling for the resignation of Harvard’s board, which he said should “not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI,” which he described as “an inherently racist and illegal movement.”
In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.
I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military…
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 3, 2024
Ackman did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post.
Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton, who has stood by Gay, led a picket Thursday outside Ackman’s Manhattan office to protest his comments, according to multiple news reports. Gay’s resignation, Sharpton said in a statement, “is an assault on the health, strength, and future” of DEI, “at a time when corporate America is trying to back out of billions of dollars in commitments.”
Other business leaders also sparred this week over DEI. On Wednesday, Elon Musk wrote on his social media platform X that, “Discrimination on the basis of race, which DEI does, is literally the definition of racism.”
That prompted a reply from Mark Cuban, the billionaire part-owner of the Dallas Mavericks, defending the values of DEI: “Good businesses look where others don’t, to find the employees that will put your business in the best possible position to succeed.”
DEI evolved from earlier efforts to counter discrimination and inequality in education and the workplace, such as the affirmative action policies of the ’70s and ’80s. If identity-based discrimination wasn’t so widespread, “policies focused on advancing equity and justice wouldn’t have been necessary,” according to Daniel Oppong, founder of DEI consultancy the Courage Collective.
DEI efforts surged after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police in 2020, sparking a national reckoning about race and inequality. Companies scrambled to hire DEI experts and beef up their programs, ultimately making $340 billion in commitments to improve racial equity between May 2020 and October 2022, according to data from the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility. But in the past year, swaths of big companies began easing off initiatives and cutting DEI teams amid widespread layoffs as they braced for an economic downturn.
“Given that DEI has become increasingly polarizing and is no longer viewed as the ‘positive PR move’ it was in 2020, we’re seeing which companies were truly invested for the right reasons and which ones were just in it for optics,” Oppong said.
Heightened scrutiny on corporate policies is also adding momentum to the battle over DEI. America First Legal — a nonprofit backed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller — has filed scores of complaints about DEI policies at companies such as Kellogg’s, Nordstrom, IBM and Activision Blizzard.
Gene Hamilton, AFL’s general counsel, said DEI is “antithetical” to American ideals of equal treatment under the law.
“‘DEI’ will die — in academia, in the corporate world, in government, everywhere — as more Americans recognize it for the rot that it is,” Hamilton said in a statement emailed to The Post.
In July, 13 Republican attorneys general sent a letter urging Microsoft and other Fortune 100 companies to reexamine their DEI policies in response to the Supreme Court’s Harvard and UNC decision. The letter threatened “serious legal consequences” for companies that rely on race-based employment preferences, including “explicit racial quotas and preferences in hiring, recruiting, retention, promotion and advancement.”
At least six major firms, including JPMorgan Chase, Yum! Brands, American Airlines, Lowe’s and BlackRock have altered language in their DEI policies after being threatened with legal action in recent months, according to reporting from Reuters. The changes involve “removing language that said certain programs were for underrepresented groups” and “modifying executives’ goals for increased racial representation in the workforce,” Reuters reported.
Similar changes are unfolding in the legal industry, where three big firms — Perkins Coie, Morrison Foerster and Winston & Strawn — opened fellowships aimed at students of color to students of all races and backgrounds after facing lawsuits that claimed the programs discriminated against White applicants.
After receiving an Oct. 9 letter threatening litigation, a fourth law firm, Adams and Reese, ended its diversity fellowship.
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