Final 12 months, Chris Rufo, the influential right-wing strategist who spearheaded the marketing campaign in opposition to range, fairness and inclusion, or D.E.I., initiatives, advised me about his ambitions for a second Trump presidency. He hoped, he mentioned, to see Donald Trump’s administration aggressively examine Ivy League establishments that, in keeping with Rufo, observe “rampant” discrimination in opposition to white, Jewish and Asian college students and school members, notably via D.E.I. packages, which purpose to spice up the illustration of teams deemed underprivileged. In the event that they had been discovered to have violated the regulation, he wished the faculties put underneath a federal consent decree, “in order that the federal authorities can get them into compliance by power.”
Extra broadly, he imagined an entire transformation of American academia. “In case you have the total weight of the White Home, the total weight of the Division of Training and a platoon of right-wing attorneys attempting to make use of all the statutory and government authority that they must reshape increased schooling, I feel it could possibly be a factor of large magnificence,” he advised me.
The mannequin for such a multipronged assault, mentioned Rufo, was Florida, the place Gov. Ron DeSantis created an “monumental enchancment within the tradition.” One place to see what this seems like in observe is New Faculty of Florida, the place DeSantis made Rufo a trustee. As soon as a progressive redoubt, it at present affords courses like “The ‘Woke’ Motion,” whose course description says, “What has change into identified colloquially because the ‘woke’ motion is greatest understood as a type of cult.”
Now Rufo, who met with Trump’s schooling group on Inauguration Day, is seeing his imaginative and prescient begin to change into actuality. With certainly one of his first government orders, Trump arrange sweeping investigations into D.E.I. within the non-public sector, instructing federal companies to establish as much as 9 investigative targets amongst main establishments, together with faculties and universities “with endowments over $1 billion,” a class that features all of the Ivies.
