Last year, the influential right-wing strategist, Chris Ruffo, who led the campaign against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, told me about his ambitions for a second Trump presidency. He hopes, he said, a Donald Trump administration will see aggressive investigations of Ivy League institutions that, according to Rufo, practice “rampant” discrimination against white, Jewish and Asian students and faculty members. , particularly through DEI programs, aimed at promoting its representation. Groups are considered marginalized. If they violated the law, he wanted the schools to be placed under a federal consent decree, “so that the federal government could force them into compliance.”
More broadly, he envisioned a complete transformation of American academia. If you have the full weight of the White House, the full weight of the Department of Education and a platoon of right-wing lawyers trying to use all the legislative and executive authority that they have to restructure higher education. “What a thing of great beauty,” he told me.
A model for such a multi-pronged attack was Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis created “a lot of culture improvement,” Ruffo said. One place to see this in action is New Florida College, where DeSantis made Ruffo a trustee. Once a progressive redoubt, it currently offers classes such as “Woke’ Movement,” which the course description states, “what is referred to as ‘wake’ movement, is a type of Considered as Sect. “
Now Ruffo, who met with Trump’s education team on Inauguration Day, is seeing his vision become a reality. With one of his first executive orders, Trump expanded investigations into DEI in the private sector, directing federal agencies to identify nine investigative targets at large institutions, including colleges and universities. It includes a category for “owning more than $1 billion,” including universities. All Ives.
