All of this anguished activity has been accompanied by the plaintive cry of, “How could this happen?!”
The answer is simple: Over the past decade, schools and colleges carelessly embraced an agenda that was out of step with mainstream American values. Education leaders blithely went along for the ride as ideologues, grifters, and opportunists transformed sensible intuitions about fairness and opportunity into toxic dogmas—and then into the lingua franca of American education.
Colleges went all in. By 2022, nearly half of large institutions used DEI when awarding tenure. In practice, that typically entailed mandatory “DEI statements,” loyalty oaths that 56 percent of moderate faculty (and 90 percent of their conservative peers) describe as “ideological litmus tests.” Last spring, progressive Harvard University law professor Randall Kennedy condemned DEI statements as “pledges of allegiance” that screen out conservatives and those who “show insufficient enthusiasm for the DEI regime.” Indeed, many institutions looked at diversity statements before bothering with actual qualifications. At the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, DEI statements alone were used to reject as many as three-quarters of professorial applicants.
DEI dogma was omnipresent in K–12, too. Parents shared tales of third graders who were ashamed of their “whiteness” or who tut-tutted their parents for using outdated gender terminology like “boys” and “girls.” The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History featured an online guide for “Talking about Race” in K–12 that rejected “hard work,” “self-reliance,” and “be[ing] polite” as habits of “white culture.” The famed KIPP charter schools ditched their 25-year-old mantra “Work Hard. Be Nice” as a legacy of “white supremacy” culture that threatened efforts to “dismantle systemic racism.” In January 2025, a national survey of high schoolers reported that over a third have teachers who “often” or “almost daily” tell them America is a fundamentally racist nation.
Formerly mundane teacher-training workshops offered a striking illustration of how far things had gone. The Equity Collaborative taught educators that “independence,” “individual thinking,” and “self-expression” are racist hallmarks of “white individualism.” Teachers in Seattle learned that we live in a “race-based white-supremacist society,” in Buffalo that they should embrace “queer-affirming network[s] where heteronormative thinking no longer exists,” and in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ [gender] identities.” A raft of similar examples were available pretty much anywhere someone filed a Freedom of Information Act request.
——-
“the grant made me do it”
