College Courses Stay as DEI-Obsessed as Ever – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

As public opinion turns against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and as the Trump administration wields its sword against such initiatives, many universities are publicly stating that they will back down from DEI in certain respects.

Yet the nation’s top universities are retaining a wide spectrum of courses for the upcoming fall semester that are entrenched in DEI principles — courses like: “Black Performance Theory,” “Queer Indigenous Studies,” and “Comparative Settler Geographies.” It appears that, at least when it comes to teaching, academia is just as steeped in DEI and the broader framework of radical critical theory as ever before. (RELATED: Is Georgetown on the Verge of a Financial Breakdown?)

The same ideological professors who thrived during the height of progressive radicalism — and who have dominated faculty hiring in recent years — are continuing to teach variations of the same courses they have long taught. In fact, the tenor of the course descriptions offers no indication that the national climate has shifted. (RELATED: Higher Education’s 7 Deadly Sins)

Consider, for instance, some of the courses that will be offered at Princeton University this fall.

One course, “Intro Topics in Race and Public Policy: Race and Inequality in American Democracy,” aims to, in the style of the much-discredited 1619 Project, “examine[] the nature of race & racism at the heart of the American project.” The course description says that instruction will be based on “(post) colonial studies, critical race theory, and whiteness studies,” and it promises that, therefore, students “will gain historical knowledge required for leadership in a 21st century, multi-racial democracy.” In addition to the 1619 Project, course materials will include The White Card: A Play. The fact that such theoretical frameworks are being rejected in dramatic fashion by the federal government and U.S. society goes unmentioned.

However, another course at Princeton appears to acknowledge the changing environment. Even still, it seeks to inject DEI principles back into 2025. In the course, “Racial Climate and Multiracial Democracy,” students will participate in building “the first democracy index of the United States.” This index will rank different regions of the country on “the quality of democracy due to racial climate.”

Other Princeton courses simply traffic in progressive gobbledygook. This includes “Queer Becomings,” which will explore “the relationship between queerness and larger forces such as culture, coloniality, [and] global capitalism.”

Courses at many other universities this fall will also fall into the category of progressive gobbledygook.

For example, the University of Pennsylvania will offer “‘In the Dark We Can All Be Free’: Black Queer, Feminist & Trans Art(s) of Abolition” and “Black Performance Theory.” The description for the latter reads, “In examining blackness through a number of performance mediums, we will consider the politics of black creative labor and the processes of racialization produced through black bodies.”

At Brown University, the disconnect between academia and broader American society feels especially stark.

One such course that will be offered at Brown University this fall peddles the crackpot theory that Native American societies prior to colonization had individuals who had a transgender-esque identity. The description for the course, “Queer Indigenous Studies and Two-Spirit Critique,” reads like a fever dream. I’ll include the entirety of it simply because it is so surreally insistent on insanity:

The structures of settler colonialism are designed to wholly dispossess, erase, and eliminate the fullness of Indigenous life. As such settler colonialism is heavily invested in both heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity as regulatory schemes oriented toward extraction and conquest. Through a series of theoretical readings, poetry, and literature, this Senior Seminar will explore the unruly “queerness” of Indigeneity. During this course students will develop a keen understanding of the ways concepts such as relationality and (in)humanness are co-constitutive of a queer Indigenous analytic, while also learning how settler colonialism has impacted contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality. Students will explore the complexities of two-spirit identity through memoirs and reflective media, while also cultivating knowledge of two-spirit organizing efforts and theoretical interventions within the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies.

Brown University must struggle with academic quality because that’s far from the only patently insane course that will be on offer this fall. Also in the classroom will be “Nonbinary Thought and Elemental Media Practices” (“Readings in Black feminist thought, transmedia, tidalectics, decolonial method, poethics, and new materialisms will accompany our engagement with artworks that challenge the habits and limits of screenal, embodied, or narrative forms”); “Eco-Identity: Representation in Nature” (“Beginning with settler colonialism and the frontier myth and ending with notions of queer ecology and the supercrip narrative, this course builds upon the canon of eco-arts”); and “Sapphic Arts: From Poetry to TikTok” (“[T]he Sapphic has emerged as an elusive disruptor; an umbrella term that welcomes lesbians, wlw, nonbinary and trans femmes and mascs”).

Brown may be the worst, but Yale is also bad.

One course, “Comparative settler geographies,” is based entirely on the theory of “settler colonialism,” which is used almost exclusively to claim that Israel has no right to exist. Another course, “Managing Blackness in a ‘White Space,’” claims in its description that black people “encounter racialized disrespect and other forms of resistance” in “predominantly white” spaces. Also on offer are “Feminist & Queer Ethnographies: Borders and Boundaries,” “Pop Sapphism,” and “Black Feminist Theory.”

Interestingly, the University of North Carolina System sent a memo in February stating that universities in the system should cease mandating DEI courses. It explained that such mandates would violate rules the Trump administration had set forth for federal contractors in the executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Yet students at Chapel Hill are still required to take a course to fulfill the “Power, Difference, and Inequality” requirement; most of the courses that do so are based on DEI ideology. Examples of such courses on offer, according to the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, include “Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice,” “Identity and Sexuality,” “Feminist Geographies,” and “Global Whiteness.”

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It will take a major reckoning for American higher education to cease spending endless resources on delusional progressive fantasies — and even a sweeping federal effort won’t be enough to set it off.

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