They lie. They’re complicit. They are cowards!
How the right is trying to kill gains made during the civil rights movement, and university presidents are helping them
This isn’t about DEI. It’s about racism. Trauma is the tactic but rolling back each and every gain made during the civil rights movement in education and beyond is the goal.
“He lies. He’s complicit. He’s a coward.”
Those were the stark words of Ohio State University history professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries after OSU ended all of its diversity and inclusion programs in February. Ironically, Jeffries noted, the school also urged fans to renew their football season tickets on the same day. He quipped, “Black athletes, we want you all to stay. We like to watch you all run, jump, and tackle.” As for the non-athletes, Jeffries argued the university was sending a message to Black faculty, staff, and students (who don’t play entertaining and profitable sports) that they are “not wanted.”
OSU president Ted Carter addressed the situation by opining, “Protecting all our students, faculty and staff so that they can all be successful in their time at Ohio State will remain our North Star.” Jeffries was not convinced and Carter’s proclamation prompted him to respond, “He lies. He’s complicit. He’s a coward.”
Jeffries is not alone. To be sure, he is among a large contingent of Black university professors who feel abandoned by their predominantly white university presidents as diversity initiatives are attacked across the country in the name of killing “divisive, unfair, destructive, and wasteful DEI.” While attacks on DEI are largely based on canards, something larger and darker is amiss.
Late last year, Trump loyalist, Project 2025 contributor, Heritage Foundation worker, and current head of the office of management and budget, Russell Vought, coldly articulated the radical right’s strategy to beat those who oppose them into submission as they reshape America. He opined that their opponents needed to be “traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”
This trauma-based assault is not limited to federal workers or Democratic bureaucrats. It also explains what happened at Ohio State as well as the relentless Republican attacks on diversity in higher education in spaces like Kentucky with bills like HB4, even though Kentucky is already one of the least diverse states in the union. While these people are, at core, opponents of racial equality and access, they don’t frame their arguments in such terms. Instead, they taint and use codewords like “DEI.” But be clear, this isn’t about DEI. It’s about racism. Trauma is the tactic but rolling back each and every gain made during the civil rights movement in education and beyond is the goal.
A precious few universities are standing their ground, but many others are bending the knee. They are removing diversity websites, changing the names of diversity units, or shutting them down altogether. As Nadia Behizadeh and Sara Giordano wrote, many university leaders are engaging in “anticipatory obedience, preemptive compliance and overcompliance.”
From Georgia Tech to Louisville to Ohio State to Indiana and beyond, Republicans are “flooding the zone” with misinformation and casting professors and administrators as “the villains.” Sadly, they are succeeding. They have traumatized many of us to the point that it’s difficult to do our work in peace. Many of us are exhausted from the attacks and lies. We don’t want to go to our campuses because they have degenerated into stressful, fear-filled, hostile spaces where we feel unwanted and unprotected.
What’s galling is not the vicious lies pushed by ever-present American racists like the ones most recently barked in the now infamous and repugnant February 14th “Dear Colleague” letter from the now hijacked Department of Education (which is being run by a wrestling promoter). Those should be expected. What’s more troubling is the fact that many predominantly white university presidents are scraping, bowing, and allowing the perpetrators from state houses to Washington to get away with the mendacity, meanness, and retrograde agendas with little to no resistance.
These same presidents are the ones best positioned to clarify the fact that these people are lying, shield their students and faculty from the trauma, and stand up for the truth, which is what universities are supposed to pursue. They’re the ones who should be at the forefront in refusing to go quietly back to a pre-Brown v Board America. But they’re failing us by refusing to provide strong, visionary, moral, and truthful leadership when we need them most.
As a result, we will lose this battle. Diversity offices and initiatives will continue to die. Next, they’ll come for instructional offerings and Black Studies departments across the country will collapse as well. We will lose because we don’t have enough brave university presidents who are willing to fight back. We will lose because we don’t have enough interest from the public. We will lose because those of us who sounded the alarm years ago were called hyperbolic, disruptive, radical, and even racist. In the end, we too were cast as villains and simply ignored. Now it’s too late to listen.
The monsters are no longer at the door; they’re inside the house and destroying everything in their path. As Anand Giridharadas wrote, many university presidents and other leaders, either motivated by agreement or fear, are collaborating in the terror. “It is the university leaders who, instead of defending their faculty – one of the only bastions of protected thinkers who can actually tell the truth without fear because of tenure – are bending over backwards to please the wannabe autocrat. Campuses are now full of fear of a new McCarthyism. How does it feel to work for leaders who do not have your back?” he asked
Obviously, it doesn’t feel good . . . and it’s getting worse. It’s easier to break things than to build them. It will take educational institutions a generation or more to rebuild and recover from the coming losses, if they (or the country) can recover at all.
Unless something radically changes, university presidents will continue to nauseatingly proclaim, “we will comply with the law.” That’s what cowards and weak leaders always do – comply without question or a fight. They forget that complying with unjust laws like the ones now being pushed by the right helped shore up atrocities like American slavery, Jim Crow segregation, European colonization, and South African Apartheid. They dismiss the warning of Martin Luther King, Jr. that “We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.”
At this moment, Black faculty, staff, and students are seeking the aid and comfort of their university presidents. Sadly, none is forthcoming from most of them. Maybe we were stupid to ever expect anything more. They lie. They’re complicit. They are cowards. Such is reality in an America in the process of being made great (that is, openly racially stratified) again.
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Dr. Ricky L. Jones is the Baldwin-King Scholar-in-Residence at the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute and Professor of Pan-African Studies, University of Louisville. Follow him on Bluesky, Facebook, TikTok, X, and other platforms.