ACTA Applauds University of Michigan Board of Regents and Leadership for Shuttering DEI Bureaucracy

March 28, 2025—The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) applauds the University of Michigan, which yesterday joined a growing number of higher education institutions in announcing the elimination of many of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. In a university-wide email signed by multiple University of Michigan officials, including the president, Santa Ono, the university stated that it will immediately discontinue its DEI 2.0 Strategic Plan and shutter both its Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and its Office for Health Equity and Inclusion. University officials also announced that previously adopted plans to abolish mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring and promotions will now be applied across the entire university and that “statements related to a person’s commitment to DEI will no longer be solicited or considered in admissions, hiring, promotion, awards, annual reviews or other assessments for faculty and staff.”

ACTA President Michael Poliakoff issued the following statement in praise of the decision:

“As a university of Michigan graduate (Ph.D. 1981), I am very, very proud that my alma mater, The University of Michigan took a courageous step by eliminating all DEI screening and programs. The real problem with DEI is that while ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ are good things in the abstract, in practice DEI offices have applied a very narrow definition of these terms. When diversity has been reduced to grossly simplistic categories like race and gender, where is the diversity that matters, namely, intellectual diversity?

Since 2016, the university has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into DEI and has one of the largest and costliest DEI bureaucracies in the country. But even aside from the exorbitant costs, DEI, like all forms of discrimination, represents a virulent cancer that has eaten away at the very essence of education, which is the unfettered pursuit of truth. Truth will elude us when the DEI apparatus of bias incident response teams, lists of microaggressions, compelled speech, ideological litmus tests, and forbidden words holds minds captive. Half a century ago, Yale University’s C. Vann Woodward Committee admonished that intellectual growth depends on ‘the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.’”

The outrages of DEI programs have been widely apparent. If they do not terminate DEI initiatives, our storied institutions of higher education, like the University of Michigan, will no longer be engines of achievement and progress but a failed experiment in social engineering.”

ACTA’s Paul & Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom Steven McGuire added: “The University of Michigan has long been a citadel of the DEI movement in higher education. Its decision to rollback its diversity bureaucracy is a momentous one that will have a profound and positive impact not only in Michigan but across American higher education. Ensuring access and supporting students are important values, but too much of what is done under the DEI banner is antithetical to the proper spirit of the academy. Discriminating based on identity and subjecting faculty, staff, and students to ideological litmus tests should have no place at a world-class institution such as the University of Michigan. Once again, Michigan’s regents are leading the way in higher education reform, and they should be commended.”