Most American colleges and universities require the completion of courses that emphasize Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)-related topics to graduate, according to a new report surveying public and private institutions.
Speech First, a group advocating for First Amendment rights on US campuses, released an investigation on Thursday that found 165 of 248 selected institutions — from American University to Williams College — mandate DEI-related classes to meet general education requirements.
The classes “place students into identitarian groupings based on racial, sexual, and political characteristics to create a rigid framework amongst students where they only see each other as either the ‘oppressor’ or the ‘oppressed,’” the executive summary of the 33-page report states.
Speech First looked for trainings and courses that included an “anti-racist” approach, which often denounces “whiteness” or “white supremacy,” as well as the existence of forced “DEI Statements” in which faculty pledge to promote the ideology if hired.
The group also searched for the use of terms like “intersectionality,” “toxic masculinity,” “critical gender theory,” “ableism,” “implicit bias,” “systemic racism” and “social justice.”
“Consequently, this erosion of merit-based principles and build-up of anti-American sentiment has had detrimental impacts on the quality of education and has fostered an environment where conservative voices are systematically marginalized, discredited, and silenced,” the report states.
“As DEI departments have grown on campuses, we have seen an increase in campus policies that regulate, monitor, and restrict student speech,” it adds. “The inquiry revealed that students are subjected to courses advocating far-left ideological perspectives and pushing far-left political advocacy.”
Last year, the Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions practices at Harvard University, a private institution, and the University of North Carolina, a public institution, ruling that the universities’ affirmative action policies violated the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees US citizens “equal protection under law.”
Chief Justice John Roberts declared in the decision that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it” and “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”
Both Harvard and UNC made the Speech First list, along with Cornell, Dartmouth, and Princeton of the Ivy League.
Prominent flagship state schools that made the list include the universities of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Notable private institutions shamed by Speech First included Boston College, Brandeis, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Fordham, Georgetown, MIT, Purdue, Syracuse, Vassar and Wellesley.
Every university surveyed came from at least one of four groups: Spring 2023 NCAA Division I institutions, schools ranked among the best in the nation in 2023 by US News and World Report, those with endowments above $1 billion and those in the top 100 of undergraduate enrollment nationwide.
The 67% of schools with DEI offices and programs included at least one institution in every US state and the District of Columbia — several of which have recently outlawed the practices, such as GOP-led Florida and Texas.
Some anti-DEI legislation is also pending in Democratic-controlled states like Illinois, the report shows, and states where power is evenly divided between the major political parties like Pennsylvania.
To be counted, the universities or colleges needed to have mandatory DEI courses or sensitivity training, DEI electives that are required for graduation, or general education learning outcomes that include DEI language.
The report suggests that the banning of DEI and critical race theory courses and the adoption of free speech programs during freshman orientation would change the leftward drift of America’s higher education institutions.
It also advocated for a return to the study of the nation’s founding principles under the Constitution as a part of general education requirements nationwide.
“Obviously, a commitment to free speech on campus requires academic freedom for professors within their classrooms,” Cherise Trump, the group’s executive director, said in a summary of the report.
“But American universities are increasingly institutionally stacking the deck by requiring students to sit through classes that, rather than impart knowledge or build saleable skills, infuse an ideological worldview that is in many instances hostile to key tenets of the American way of life,” she added.
“Taxpayers may well wonder why they subsidize academic institutions that require training in a hostile ideology as a graduation requirement.”
