Inside the anti-dei crusade in America
In late 2022, a group of conservative activists and academics set out to abolish the diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Texas’ public universities. They linked up with a former aide to the state’s powerful lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who made banning DEI initiatives one of his top priorities. Setting their sights on well-known schools such as Texas A&M, they researched which offices and employees should be expunged. A well-connected alumnus conveyed their findings to the A&M chancellor; the former Patrick aide cited them before a state Senate committee.
The campaign quickly yielded results: In May of that year, Texas approved legislation banishing all such programs from public institutions of higher learning.
Gathering strength from a backlash against Black Lives Matter and fueled by criticism that doctrines such as critical race theory had made colleges engines of progressive indoctrination, the eradication of DEI programs has become both a cause and a message suffusing the American right. In 2023, more than 20 states considered or approved new laws taking aim at DEI, even as polling has shown that diversity initiatives remain popular.
Thousands of documents obtained by The New York Times cast light on the playbook and the thinking underpinning one nexus of the anti-dei movement: the activists and intellectuals who helped shape Texas’ new law, along with measures in at least three other states. The material, which includes casual correspondence with like-minded allies around the country, also reveals unvarnished views on race, sexuality and gender roles. And despite the movement’s marked success in some Republican-dominated states, the documents chart the activists’ struggle to gain traction with broader swaths of voters and officials.
Centered at the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank with close ties to the Donald Trump movement and to Gov. Ron Desantis of Florida, the group coalesced roughly three years ago around a sweeping ambition: to strike a killing blow against “the leftist social justice revolution” by eliminating “social justice education” from American schools.
The documents — grant proposals, budgets, draft reports and correspondence, obtained through public records requests — show how the activists formed a loose network of think tanks, political groups and Republican operatives in at least a dozen states.
They sought funding from a range of right-leaning philanthropies and family foundations, and from one of the largest individual donors to Republican campaigns in the country. They exchanged model legislation, published a slew of public reports and coordinated with other conservative advocacy groups.
In public, some individuals and groups involved in the effort joined calls to protect diversity of thought and intellectual freedom, embracing the argument that DEI efforts had made universities intolerant and narrow. They claimed to stand for meritocratic ideals and against ideologies that divided Americans. They argued that DEI programs made Black and Hispanic students feel less welcome instead of more.
Yet as they or their allies publicly advocated more academic freedom, some involved privately expressed their hope of purging liberal ideas, professors and programming wherever they could. In candid private conversations, some wrote favorably of laws criminalizing homosexuality.
In a statement for this article, Claremont said it was “proud to be a leader in the fight against DEI, since the ideology from which it flows conflicts with America’s founding principles, constitutional government and equality under the law. Those are the things we believe in. Without them there is no America. You cannot have those things with DEI.”
The institute added, “Repeatedly, and in public, we make these arguments to preserve justice, competence and the progress of science.”
Rise of diversity programs
In recent decades, amid concerns about the underrepresentation of racial minorities on campus, American universities have presided over a vast expansion of diversity programs. These have come to play a powerful — and increasingly controversial — role in academic and student life. Critics have come to view them as tools for advancing left-wing ideas about gender and race, or for stifling the free discussion of ideas.
In response, officials in some states have banned DEI offices altogether. Others have limited classroom discussion of concepts like identity politics or systemic racism. A growing number of states and schools have also begun eliminating requirements that job applicants furnish “diversity statements” — written commitments to particular ideas about diversity and how to achieve it that, at some institutions, have functionally served as litmus tests in hiring.
But in early 2021, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and Trump’s reelection defeat, the Claremont organizers were on the defensive. The documents show them debating how to frame their attacks: They needed not only to persuade the political middle but to energize conservative politicians and thinkers, many of whom they regarded as too timid, or even complicit with a liberal regime infecting U.S. government and business.
Thomas Klingenstein, a New York investor who is both Claremont’s chair and a top Republican donor, offered a glum perspective in March that year.
“Rhetorically, our side is getting absolutely murdered,” Klingenstein wrote to Scott Yenor, a conservative Idaho professor who would come to lead the anti-dei project for Claremont, and another Claremont official. “We have not even come up with an agreed-on name for the enemy.”
One problem, Yenor reported to his colleagues, was that many lawmakers were reluctant to take on anything called “diversity and inclusion.” Terms like “diversity,” he argued, needed to be saddled with more negative connotations.
“I obviously think social justice is what we should call it,” he wrote. “We should use the term that is most likely to stigmatize the movement that is accurate and arises from common life.” While nobody wanted to seem in favor of discrimination, he argued, “social justice” could be “stigmatized so that when people hear it they can act on their suspicions.”
At the time, a like-minded activist, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, was popularizing an alternative catchall with his attacks on “critical race theory” — a once-obscure academic framework that examines how racism can be structurally embedded in seemingly neutral laws or institutions.
In short order, Republican officials and activists around the country set out to ban critical race theory — or anything that could be successfully labeled “CRT” — from schools. But Yenor believed such bans were not far-reaching enough. To combat leftism in America, conservatives would need to wage a much broader war. The Claremont group kept tinkering.
By 2022, as Claremont and allies such as the Maine Policy Institute and a Tennessee group called Velocity Convergence rolled out early research, the approach had changed. Their public reports began to borrow from Rufo’s rhetoric, attacking “critical social justice” or “critical social justice education.”
When Claremont and the Texas Public Policy Foundation turned to the state’s public universities in 2023, they circled back to “diversity,” but with a twist.
“Academics and administrators are no longer merely pushing progressive politics but are transforming universities into institutions dedicated to political activism and indoctrinating students with a hateful ideology,” warned a report on Texas A&M. “That ideology is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).”
Liberals dominated the world of higher education, the Claremont proposals said. What was needed was a frontal attack on public university systems in states where conservatives dominated the legislatures.
Claremont officials would partner with state think tanks and with the hundreds of former fellows scattered through conservative institutions and on Capitol Hill. They would catalog the DEI programs and personnel honeycombed through public universities. Then they would lobby sympathetic public officials to gut them.
The Claremont effort seemed to diverge from others on the right who had long urged academic institutions to renew their commitment to ideological diversity. In one exchange, some of those involved discussed how to marshal political power to replace left-wing orthodoxies with more “patriotic,” traditionalist curricula.
“In support of ridding schools of CRT, the Right argues that we want nonpolitical education,” Klingenstein wrote in August 2021. “No we don’t. We want our politics. All education is political.”
Yenor appeared to agree, responding with some ideas for reshaping K-12 education. “An alternative vision of education must replace the current vision of education,” he wrote back, adding, “In the shortterm, state legislatures could get out of the business of banning and get into the business of demanding — demanding (that) certain conclusions about American history be delivered.”
State legislatures, he proposed, could strip “educational professionals” of the power to decide what to teach and even shorten the school day so that young people would spend less time in class. They might pass laws letting private citizens sue school board members with financial ties to the “education industry.”
Since 2021, the network’s anti-dei campaign has spread to at least a dozen states, according to the documents.
In Tennessee, where Claremont partnered with Velocity Convergence, one of the anti-dei reports they produced reportedly circulated among Republican state lawmakers as they worked to pass a bill limiting how universities could teach or train students about “divisive concepts.” A spokesperson for the University of Tennessee said in a statement that the report’s conclusions “seem to be based on subjective criteria, made-up definitions and the opinions of the authors” who obtained information from online searches and public records but “made no attempt to understand the information through questions or interviews.” Tennessee’s governor signed the new law in April 2022.
Susan Kaestner, Velocity’s founder and a veteran Republican operative in the state, said that “the obsessive focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is effectively reducing viewpoint diversity on Tennessee campuses.”
Last year, Claremont organizers forged connections with the Arkansas Senate’s Republican leader. In Alabama, they partnered with a group called Alabamians for Academic Excellence and Integrity. Jeff Sessions, a former U.S. attorney general and a supporter of the Alabama group, was among those who provided funds for a Claremont report, “Going Woke in Dixie?,” that focused on Auburn University and the University of Alabama.
After it was released last summer, according to another email, Samuel Ginn, a wealthy Auburn alumnus and donor to the school and Claremont, confronted the university’s president, Christopher Roberts, and pressed him to address the report’s findings.
“The president then told him, ‘Things will change,’” a Claremont fundraiser wrote to Yenor and other officials there.
An Auburn spokesperson said in an email that Roberts “has no recollection of the comment that was attributed to him.” Efforts to contact Ginn were unsuccessful.
The anti-dei campaign has gained ground in more Republican-leaning states. Claremont has claimed credit for helping pass the most wide-ranging bans in Florida as well as Texas. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued an executive order banning “indoctrination and critical race theory in schools.” In North Carolina, Republicans passed a law banning public universities and other agencies from requiring employees to state their opinions on social issues, a move Democratic lawmakers said was aimed at DEI programs more broadly.
Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, issued a similar executive order in December.
Last year, Claremont officials also courted Desantis, then a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination and the governor most closely associated with anti-dei policies. The institute dispatched Yenor to Florida to run a new office in Tallahassee, appointing him as its “senior director of state coalitions.” (On Sunday, Desantis suspended his presidential bid.)
But as Desantis’ presidential bid sputtered and conservative campaigns against left-wing education began to lose traction in some parts of the country, people involved in the anti-dei effort began to retool once again. In June, the American Principles Project circulated a memo detailing the results of several focus groups held to test different culture war messages.
For all the conservative attacks on diversity programs, the group found, “the idea of woke or DEI received generally positive scores.” Most voters didn’t know the difference between equality and the more voguish term “equity,” oft-mocked on the right, which signifies policies intended to achieve equal outcomes for different people, not simply equal opportunities.