The fight over academic freedom on campus increasingly comes down to a fight over three letters—DEI—which goes a long way to explaining the fissures now tearing higher education apart.
For progressives committed to social justice advocacy, academic freedom must shield the prevailing academic consensus on race and gender from outside political pressure. Nowhere is that academic consensus better represented in the modern university than in the campus Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, which exists to advocate for students and faculty who identify as brown or queer, often by monitoring the campus culture for “whiteness” and “cisheteropatriarchy”—the social dominance of white, heterosexual men….