Credit...Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan and Danielle Del Plato

The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?

by · NY Times

Leaders of the University of Michigan, one of America’s most prestigious public universities, like to say that their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is inseparable from the pursuit of academic excellence. Most students must take at least one class addressing “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.” Doctoral students in educational studies must take an “equity lab” and a racial-justice seminar. Computer-science students are quizzed on microaggressions.

Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I. is encoded with left-wing ideologies. Michigan’s largest division trains professors in “antiracist pedagogy” and dispenses handouts on “Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” like “worship of the written word.” The engineering school promises a “pervasive education around issues of race, ethnicity, unconscious bias and inclusion.”

At the art museum, captions for an exhibit of American and European art attest to histories of oppression “even in works that may not appear to have any direct relation to these histories.” The English department has adopted a 245-word land acknowledgment, describing its core subject as “a language brought by colonizers to North America.” Even Michigan’s business school, according to its D.E.I. web page, is committed to fighting “all forms of oppression.”

A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.

When Michigan inaugurated what it now calls D.E.I. 1.0, it intentionally placed itself in the vanguard of a revolution then reshaping American higher education. Around the country, college administrators were rapidly expanding D.E.I., convinced that such programs would help attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty.

Today that revolution is under withering attack. Energized by backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement and the right-wing campaign against “critical race theory” in public institutions, at least a dozen states have banned or limited D.E.I. programs at public universities. After the Oct. 7 attacks, as campuses across the country erupted with protests against Israel, critics accused D.E.I. programs of fostering antisemitism. In the fever of the 2024 campaign, Republican influencers and politicians have recast D.E.I. as an all-purpose boogeyman — the root cause of defective airplanes, the collapse of a Baltimore bridge and the near-assassination of Donald J. Trump.

But even some of Michigan’s peer institutions have soured on aspects of D.E.I. Last spring, both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences said they would no longer require job candidates to submit diversity statements; such “compelled statements,” M.I.T.’s president said, “impinge on freedom of expression.”

Michigan hasn’t joined the retreat. Instead, it has redoubled its efforts, testing the future of an embattled ideal. A year ago, the university inaugurated what it calls D.E.I. 2.0. At Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus, the number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles increased by 70 percent, reaching 241, according to figures compiled by Mark J. Perry, an emeritus professor of finance at the university’s Flint campus and a D.E.I. critic. (The school’s own figures, which count the D.E.I. work force differently, show less growth over time and a much smaller staff as of last year.) When school began in August, brightly colored flags around campus promoted the goals of D.E.I. 2.0.

According to a confidential report I obtained, a committee appointed by Michigan’s provost — and stocked with professors with D.E.I.-related appointments — urged the school this summer to continue using diversity statements in hiring and promotion, arguing that eliminating them “would be seen as a capitulation to the winds of political expediency.”

In many respects, Michigan’s entire D.E.I. initiative can be understood as a sustained act of defiance against such pressures. Nearly two decades ago, voters in Michigan banned racial preferences in university admissions and hiring. When the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action across the land last year — stripping selective colleges of their most powerful tool for building racially diverse classes — Michigan’s president, Santa J. Ono, went on PBS’s “NewsHour” to offer his university as the model for achieving diversity in a post-affirmative action world.

But over months of reporting this year, I found a different kind of backlash building, one that emanated not from Washington or right-wing think tanks but from inside the university’s own dorms and faculty lounges. On Michigan’s largely left-leaning campus, few of the people I met questioned the broad ideals of diversity or social justice. Yet the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.

D.E.I. at Michigan is rooted in a struggle for racial integration that began more than a half-century ago, but many Black students today regard the school’s expansive program as a well-meaning failure. The university now has a greater proportion of Hispanic, Asian and first-generation students and a more racially diverse staff. But in a state where 14 percent of residents are Black, the school’s Black undergraduate enrollment has long hovered stubbornly at around 4 percent, before ticking up just past 5 percent this fall. (The figures are slightly higher if, as school officials strongly urged, you include students who identify as more than one race.)

Princess-J’Maria Mboup, the speaker of the university’s Black Student Union, told me that “the students that are most affected by D.E.I. — meaning marginalized communities — are invested in the work, but not in D.E.I. itself.” Mboup called Michigan’s efforts “superficial.” For all their spread and reach, she told me, the school’s D.E.I. programs betrayed “a general discomfort with naming Blackness explicitly.”

Princess-J’Maria Mboup, left, the speaker of Michigan’s Black Student Union, and Brooklyn Blevins, its former speaker. Mboup describes the university’s D.E.I. efforts as “superficial.”
Credit...Wayne Lawrence for The New York Times

Her discontent reflected a tension I found threaded throughout D.E.I. at Michigan, a pervasive uncertainty around whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. Like most schools, Michigan officially celebrates diversity of every kind and inclusion for all; the school’s own definition of D.E.I., which cites 13 distinct kinds of identity, is as sprawling as the university itself. On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.

Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.

Instead, Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion. On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was D.E.I. itself. “D.E.I. here is absolutely well intentioned, extremely thoughtful in its conception and design,” said Mark Bernstein, a lawyer and a Democrat who sits on the university’s Board of Regents. “But it’s so virtuous that it’s escaped accountability in a lot of ways.”

The rise of D.E.I. is entwined with the fall of affirmative action, a struggle that has wound through Ann Arbor since the civil rights era. Michigan was early to embrace racial preferences, thanks in part to one of its alumni: Hobart Taylor Jr., a Black lawyer who in 1961 coined the term “affirmative action,” inserting it into a Kennedy administration executive order to address workplace discrimination. Taylor cajoled his alma mater to enroll more Black students, who at the time made up less than 1 percent of the student body. Their numbers grew only slowly, however. Amid waves of strikes and protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Michigan pledged to aim for 10 percent Black enrollment.

But the original aim of affirmative action — to remedy generations of extraordinary discrimination against Black Americans — was already crumbling. In 1978, in Bakke v. University of California, the Supreme Court outlawed racial quotas in college admissions, while allowing a narrower form of racial preferences. Because there was a “compelling state interest” in diversity on campus, colleges could still consider race as one factor in an applicant’s admission. But that conception of diversity, Justice Lewis Powell wrote, “encompasses a far broader array of qualifications and characteristics of which racial or ethnic origin is but a single though important element.”

In effect, Bakke recast an instrument of racial justice into a program of educational enrichment. To defend what remained of racial preferences, universities began to adopt a new argument: Increased diversity benefited all students, not just those from historically marginalized groups. As the “diversity rationale” spread throughout academia and business, according to the scholar Frederick R. Lynch, the notion of diversity as a form of reparations began to broaden and blur. Schools now needed diversity to prepare citizens for America’s multicultural future; corporations needed diversity to serve an increasingly global customer base. Michigan again led the way. In the late 1980s, it unveiled what became the “Michigan Mandate,” promising to create a “multicultural community for our nation” in a state where almost everyone was either Black or white. By the mid-1990s, Black undergraduate enrollment reached around 9 percent.

Less than a decade later, the escalating national battle over affirmative action came to a head at Michigan, as the Supreme Court agreed to consider a pair of challenges to the university’s race-conscious admissions policies. Drawing on a growing body of post-Bakke research, school experts argued that students not only learned “in deeper, more complex ways” in a diverse setting but also emerged better equipped to thrive in a multiracial democracy, with a greater propensity for civic engagement and willingness to live in racially diverse neighborhoods. Critics attacked the pro-diversity research as plagued with questionable methodology meant to bolster affirmative action before the Supreme Court.

In June 2003, the court ruled against the existing admissions policies for Michigan undergrads, which awarded extra points to all applicants from underrepresented minority groups, but narrowly upheld the looser, “holistic” practices at Michigan’s law school, holding them consistent with Powell’s diversity rationale in Bakke. The university adopted similar practices for its undergraduates and, emboldened by the victory, moved to position itself as a national leader in diversity practices. It established a new center to “protect the future of diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education,” as the center’s website now puts it, and began to export its diversity training to other schools.

D.E.I. research flourished throughout academia, making the case that schools could harvest the benefits of diversity only if they intervened decisively in campus life and the classroom. D.E.I. programs exploded, moving up through university hierarchies and down into individual divisions and departments. Schools began creating central offices to manage their varied efforts; more and more appointed “chief diversity officers.”

The D.E.I. revolution was part of a much broader transformation unfolding across American higher education. Over the four decades following Bakke, according to a recent study from the Progressive Policy Institute, the ranks of full-time college administrators increased more than twice as fast as student enrollment. Their primary job was to enhance “student life” — and attract more customers. Schools built modern dorms and well-equipped gyms. They expanded career offices and offered wraparound mental health services. Government civil rights mandates, like Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination, spurred schools to hire yet more lawyers and administrators. The Ann Arbor campus grew to have nearly 16,000 nonfaculty employees, more than twice the number of full-time faculty members.

These growing bureaucracies represented a major — and profoundly left-leaning — reshuffling of campus power. Administrators were even more politically liberal than faculty members, according to one survey, and far more likely to favor racial preferences in admissions and hiring. They promulgated what Lyell Asher, a professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, has called “an alternate curriculum,” taught not in classrooms but in dorms, disciplinary hearings and orientation programs.

Some administrators discovered that student activists could be a potent campus constituency. The former president of one top research institution recalled for me how students once came to his office with demands, presented in a kind of theatrical performance, to enhance the university’s D.E.I. program. The former president, who asked for anonymity for fear of risking his present job, later learned that some of the program’s senior staff members had worked with and encouraged the students to pressure the administration on their behalf. “That was the moment at which I understood that there was a whole part of the bureaucracy that I didn’t control,” he said.

Just a few years into the D.E.I. boom, however, Michigan voters delivered what amounted to a rebuke of their own flagship state university. In 2006, they overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative, Proposal 2, banning all racial preferences in public education and employment. The referendum blocked the university from employing even the limited form of affirmative action left intact by the Supreme Court. Over the next several years, the proportion of Black undergraduates at Michigan plummeted from its mid-1990s peak. In fall 2013, students began a social media campaign, Being Black at the University of Michigan, renewing their demand that the school find ways to increase Black enrollment — regardless of the legal obstacles.

Under intense pressure to respond, university officials turned to one of the school’s leading academic psychologists, Robert M. Sellers. An expert in how African Americans navigate discrimination, Sellers was a veteran of Michigan’s long struggle over race. As a graduate student during the 1980s, he helped shut down a regents meeting after the campus radio station let a caller tell racist jokes over the air. Now, almost three decades later, a committee led by Sellers recommended that Michigan adopt its first strategic plan for diversity, equity and inclusion — a “natural experiment,” as Michigan officials would later describe it, in whether a university could “increase student-body racial and ethnic diversity by race-neutral means.”

D.E.I. 1.0, the school promised, would be rigorous and evidence-based. Each of the university’s dozens of “units,” from the medical school down to the university archives, was instructed to devise its own plan; many set up miniature D.E.I. offices of their own. The initial planning ultimately yielded nearly 2,000 “action items” across campus — a tribute to Michigan’s belief in the power of bureaucratic process to promote change. “It’s important to focus on our standard operating procedures and worry less about attitudes,” said Sellers, who was appointed Michigan’s first chief diversity officer. “Attitudes will follow.” (The university declined to make him available to be interviewed for this article.)

A new central Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion led by Sellers would monitor each unit’s progress and track how deeply D.E.I. was being integrated into coursework and budgeting. The university’s president at the time, Mark Schlissel, promised to make D.E.I. one of his top priorities. At a campus assembly in October 2016, he and Sellers pledged $85 million in new spending to transform the entire university.

Students’ attention, however, was elsewhere. It was a month before the 2016 elections, and Michigan, like other universities, was convulsed with fury and fear. Racist posters had begun showing up around campus, leading hundreds of students to protest. After Trump’s victory, the atmosphere boiled over. Two female students claimed to be the victims of hate crimes by white men — incidents that the police determined never occurred. Months later, someone scrawled “[expletive] Latinos” on the Rock, a landmark near campus; the dorm-room doors of three Black students were defaced with racist slurs.

No one seemed to know who was behind the provocations, but some students blamed Schlissel and Sellers for failing to deliver. Michigan had promised them more than an education; it had promised a life of seamless belonging. Each incident was now a test of Michigan’s commitment. At a meeting with students, Schlissel sounded frustrated. “There’s a person with a Sharpie who is trying to hurt us,” he told them, but “it’s not representative of who we are.”

Sellers urged students to have faith, vowing that the incidents would “only strengthen our resolve.” In the year or so after Trump took office, the school’s Bias Response Team examined more than 150 student complaints, sometimes confronting students or faculty members over supposedly offensive classroom comments or social media posts. It was unclear if Michigan was, in fact, becoming a more hateful place. A lawsuit filed by Speech First, a conservative advocacy group, charged that Michigan was subjecting students to expansive, subjective definitions of harassment and bias; in one instance, the team investigated students for making a phallic sculpture out of snow. Michigan ultimately settled with Speech First and reconstituted the team as Campus Climate Support.

The school’s D.E.I. staff grew rapidly, according to Perry’s count, with 69 employees by the end of 2017. Within a few years, every department, school and research center began incorporating D.E.I. benchmarks into faculty and staff performance reviews. Sellers also started a new initiative, Wolverine Pathways, offering enrichment and guaranteed tuition for students in several predominantly Black school districts in Michigan — the kind of measure permitted under Proposal 2.

Beneath Sellers’s office, the unit-level D.E.I. plans took flight. At the nursing school, for example, administrators began an intensive effort to recruit more men, that profession’s most underrepresented minority. They expanded the D.E.I. staff, bringing on an assistant with a background in “social-justice education” — a transgender student activist who had sharply criticized Schlissel in The Michigan Daily — for insights into how other students might view D.E.I. They also brought on a chief inclusion officer, a D.E.I. expert named Rushika Patel.

Patel found that she spent much of her time as a kind of roving equity coach. White teachers asked her how to deliver critical feedback to students of color. (“Sort of, ‘If I say this to the student, are they going to call me racist?’” she recalled.) Though she professed herself well versed in theories of oppression and privilege, Patel’s daily routine didn’t fit the caricature of D.E.I. administrator as race-obsessed commissar. Her work often dealt with practical obstacles to inclusion, like how to arrange class schedules to accommodate students who also worked the night shift.

On one occasion, she advised faculty members deciding how to handle a student on the verge of flunking out. The student worked more than one job and sometimes slept in her car. Patel told me she urged her colleagues to consider whether expulsion would align with the principle of equity — an ideal with different meanings for different people. “Some people say, ‘If the policy’s the policy, we have to implement the policy evenly — that’s equity,’” she said. “I’m not trying to shame anyone. I’m trying to get them to really do the hard moral, ethical work.”

Other administrators and D.E.I. leads, however, found Sellers’s program a distraction from such work. Some felt that the monthly meetings Sellers’s office convened were overly focused on the process of writing plans and reports. One-on-one discussion with his deputies could have the feel of a box-checking exercise. “I would put on a good show,” said one former dean, herself a woman of color. “I would say, ‘We had meetings with students, we did this, we did that, we made posters.’ We were jumping through hoops, and that’s what they wanted to see.” Like other current and former deans, she asked to remain anonymous because, as she put it, “no one can criticize the D.E.&I. program — not its scale, its dominance.”

On their private text-messaging group, deans across the university grumbled about the mountains of data they were required to submit each year. Their public progress reports and D.E.I. strategic plans were heavily vetted by the university counsel’s office and Sellers’s team; the resulting public documents, though meant to ensure accountability, were often both lengthy and vague. “No one knew what they were supposed to be doing,” the former dean said. “And no one would tell us. But we had to show that we were doing something.”

At the same time, Sellers and his allies began building what amounted to a parallel hiring system, giving them a more direct role in reshaping Michigan’s faculty. Proposal 2 expressly prohibited racial or gender preferences in hiring. But in 2016, Michigan began a new program called the Collegiate Fellows, reserved for postdoctoral scholars “in all liberal-arts fields who are committed to diversity in the academy.” Based at the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, Michigan’s largest division, the program provided additional budget dollars with each fellow hired, a further incentive to department chairs.

Collegiate Fellows was run by the National Center for Institutional Diversity, the D.E.I. advocacy center set up by Michigan after its Supreme Court win and led by a research psychologist named Tabbye M. Chavous. (Chavous and Sellers have collaborated on studies of the academic experience of Black adolescents; they married in 2003.) Mindful of Proposal 2, Chavous and her colleagues did not collect demographic information from applicants. Instead, they were asked to submit statements addressing how they would advance D.E.I. goals, whether through research into “race, gender, diversity, equity and inclusion,” “significant academic achievement in the face of barriers” or “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” Departments were invited to nominate candidates from an application pool created by the diversity center, which then oversaw further vetting.

In an interview, Chavous stressed that the program was carefully designed to comply with Proposal 2. “We wouldn’t even want to hire people because of their identities,” she said. “It’s about their skills and competencies.” Nevertheless, out of the 49 new faculty members subsequently hired through the program, 80 percent were people of color, according to a university spokeswoman. (In an interview last year, Chavous put the total even higher.) Their research interests included “the epistemic exclusion of diverse practitioners within the academy,” critical food studies and how Indian transgender activists “appropriate normative U.S.-centric conceptions of gender rights as human rights.” Last year, Sellers and Chavous helped create a $79 million equity-hiring program in the health sciences. Similar programs have spread throughout the university. According to the school, about three-quarters of all departments in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts now employ at least one collegiate fellow.

Contrary to the school’s disclaimers, it was almost universally understood among professors I spoke with that these programs were intended to generate racial and gender diversity without explicitly using affirmative action. At times, Chavous herself said as much. “One of the misconceptions about Prop 2 is that it inhibited our faculty searches by not allowing us to search based on race and gender or offer financial aid based on race and gender,” she said at a Michigan D.E.I. event last year. “We just had to pivot to be more creative.”

Michigan’s application for federal funding for the biosciences program, which I obtained through a public-records request, states openly that “a major objective” of the program is to “recruit outstanding faculty whose social identities” will “lead to diversification of the biomedical and health sciences.” Michigan’s experience with the Collegiate Fellows program, the school attested, showed “that a high percentage of fellows” with “demonstrated commitments to D.E.I. are likely to come from traditionally minoritized groups.”

Such reasoning extended well beyond the formal D.E.I. program. Professors across the university described to me how, in faculty meetings and on search committees, they had resigned themselves to a pervasive double-think around hiring. “The conversations would be had as if identity was not an issue,” the former dean said. “Even though everyone knew it was.”

By the spring of 2020, Michigan was reaching the final stage of its first 5-year D.E.I. plan. But in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white Minneapolis police officer that May, as protests erupted around the country and demands to root out racism echoed from campuses to corporate offices, none of the training and programming — the money and new hires and promises — seemed to matter. Scrambling to placate the most vocal students and faculty, Michigan would unveil a burst of new initiatives branded as “antiracist.”

But the anger had been building for years, from Ferguson to #MeToo, charged with the paranoia and isolation of Covid, nurtured and legitimized by Michigan itself. Now it turned inward. Every part of the university seemed to stage its own auto-da-fé, each playing out on Twitter and in The Daily. “There was a complete disconnect between the source of their anger and the target of it,” the former dean said. “It was insatiable.”

At the law school, which had a longstanding policy of not commenting on events “outside the Quad,” students demanded a public statement about Floyd’s murder. The Black Law Students Association issued further demands, including mandatory antiracism training, more mental health counseling and the hiring of a professor in critical race theory. Over 100 incoming first-year students signed a joint statement to the school they did not yet technically attend, insisting that it adopt the entirety of the association’s demands.

The law school’s dean, Mark West, released a note about “the senseless killing of yet another Black person, George Floyd” and “redoubling our clear commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.” Students blasted him on Twitter for not using the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” Few of the attacks appeared to come from Black students. “I will never know what it is like to be a Black student at MLaw,” one white student emailed West. “But even still, your message instantly came off to me as shallow, corporate, platitudinous drivel.” West, who is white, soon issued a revised statement. “We support you. We see you. We hear you,” it read. “Black Lives Matter.” (West, who still teaches at Michigan, declined to comment.)

With the school in turmoil, West hired a pair of D.E.I. consultants, Jerry Kang and Devon Carbado, who taught law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and had served as senior D.E.I. administrators there. In meetings, Kang and Carbado invited students and faculty to share their experiences of racism and discrimination at the university. Yet for all the heated public rhetoric, people with knowledge of the discussions told me, some of the examples seemed to them relatively minor. Some cited a professor who, some years earlier, had two students with the last name Xu — it sounds like “shoe” — who sat next to each other in class; he had once referred to them as “left Xu” and “right Xu.” In another class, a professor had asked a white student to read aloud from the landmark Supreme Court decision Cooper v. Aaron, which forced the desegregation of public schools in Little Rock, Ark. The 1958 decision contained the term “Negro,” which some students said was offensive.

More training followed. In early 2021, the entire law faculty was invited to a session provided through Michigan’s Spectrum Center, which serves the school’s L.G.B.T.Q. community. Many professors joined the Zoom, desperate for help navigating classroom moments that had become dangerously charged. Instead, the session was devoted to gender terminology, pronoun usage and sexual identity. The facilitator urged them to require students to declare their preferred pronouns and furnished a list of dozens of sexual orientations, some of which professors told me they had never heard of. Instead of asking students about their sexuality, they were advised, faculty should ask students to specify their “attractionality.” Some wondered why they should be asking students about their sex lives at all.

In the English department, in the days after Floyd’s murder, a student named Dylan Gilbert decided it was time to say something publicly about a fiction class she took the previous year with Scott Lyons, a professor there. Lyons had read aloud a paragraph from the William Faulkner short story “Barn Burning,” in which an embittered white tenant farmer utters a racial slur. The passage evokes how racial hatred bound impoverished whites to the wealthy elites who exploited them. Gilbert, who is Black, collected her belongings and left the room.

Lyons emailed Gilbert afterward, explaining his decision to teach the text but inviting her to discuss her concerns. “I don’t take issue with reading stories with the N-word in them,” she wrote back. “I understand the time period and that it’s a work of fiction. I do take offense when non-Black people say the N-word.” Lyons said he wasn’t sure what difference there was between reading the text and hearing it, but added that he took her point. “I simply am not in a place where I could keep my emotions composed when having a stressful conversation at the moment,” Gilbert replied. “I have really enjoyed your class and enjoyed having you as a professor. I would like you to consider that I have experience with that word coming from non-Black people.”

Her college years had been challenging, Gilbert told me. “After the Trump election, I was just angry so often,” she said. “People seemed so emboldened.” Drunk white frat boys had yelled the N-word at her, Gilbert told me; hearing her teacher utter the same slur was jarring and upsetting. After the class, Lyons assigned an article that discussed how some novelists employed slurs in their fiction to explore and critique bigotry. He also announced that, going forward, he and his students should refrain from speaking the N-word in class. Gilbert reported the dispute with Lyons to administrators, but was unhappy with how the school handled her concerns. After Floyd’s killing, she decided to detail her experiences on Twitter.

In relating the story to me, Gilbert recalled hearing Lyons “say the N-word again and again” and asserted that Lyons punished her for leaving by lowering her grade for the course. Lyons told me he uttered the word only once — the same number of times it appears in the Faulkner passage. (He gave a similar written account to the English department’s leaders at the time.) Though federal law bars Lyons from discussing Gilbert’s grades or class performance, he noted that she had twice declined to pursue a formal grade grievance.

Her posts caused an uproar. “I felt targeted in the environment, and I felt unsafe in the environment,” she told The Daily. Grad students and postdocs deluged Lyons with hate mail. “I was shunned by a lot of people,” he recalled.

Lyons, who is descended from two Minnesota tribes and formerly ran Michigan’s program in Native American studies, was already frustrated by what he viewed as academia’s panicked response to the Floyd protests. He had been fielding requests to help write land acknowledgments — statements that typically explain which tribes previously lived on the land now occupied by a college or company. He considered them empty virtue-signaling. (The acknowledgment eventually adopted by his own department celebrated how the native language Anishinaabemowin had “gifted the English language many words — including Michigan, meaning ‘great water.’” But according to Lyons, the word Anishinaabemowin connotes something more like a family of languages, including Ojibwemowin; “Michigan” comes from the Ojibwemowin term mitchi’gami, translating most closely to “great lake.”) His bigger concern, Lyons told me, was how political pressure was affecting the curriculum. “All Southern literature is now suspect,” he said. “Nobody teaches Huck Finn anymore.”

That September, the department convened a workshop led by Whitney Peoples, then the coordinator for critical race pedagogies at Michigan’s in-house teaching consultancy, known as the Center for Research on Learning & Teaching. The workshop was titled “Teaching Texts That Contain Racist Language,” but according to one person who attended, Peoples argued that literary works containing slurs should almost never be assigned in the first place. (Peoples did not respond to requests for an interview, but through a university spokeswoman disputed that characterization.) Someone else pointed out that her approach would exclude a large swath of books by Black authors.

The conflicts over inclusion were not limited to petitions and tweets. Increasingly, students and professors were turning to more formal remedies. In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates like Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan’s campus. By 2020, that number had more than doubled. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period. (The office itself has nearly quadrupled in size in recent years.)

To some extent, those increases reflected a newfound willingness to challenge behaviors that might once have been swept under the rug. Yet accusations of racism and sexism were easily wielded, some faculty members told me, in what they considered intellectual or personal disputes. In early 2021, Eric Fretz, who teaches a popular class on entrepreneurship, opened the semester with a written disclaimer. “What I apologize for in advance, …” it read. “Soft sexism. Born in the 1960s. The end of the era for all moms being at home, all textbooks showing only male scientists, etc.” While he would “try to do a good job being balanced with my examples and being sensitive to social justice issues,” Fretz wrote, students should “call me on it” if he failed. Fretz considered it a good-faith acknowledgment of his limitations.

Lily Cesario, then a student in his class, felt differently. His disclaimer “raised a red flag for me,” she wrote in an email to Fretz. In a subsequent meeting, according to a written account Fretz later submitted to school officials, Cesario told Fretz he had wrongly asked women in the class to educate their professor about sexism and had failed to fully acknowledge his privilege.

Afterward, in the class’s unofficial group chat, Cesario asked other students if they found Fretz’s statement “problematic,” according to screenshots I viewed. “He’s going out of his way to be inclusive,” one replied. Others liked his humility. In a subsequent email, Cesario told Fretz she was dropping his course. His disclaimer was “extremely disrespectful and ignorant of the struggles that women and girls continue to face on a daily basis,” his behavior “inseparably ingrained within a larger culture of harm that exists on this campus and within the wider world.” She then filed a Title IX complaint.

When I spoke to Cesario last spring, she sounded chagrined. As a female sciences student, she explained, she had often felt poorly supported; Fretz’s wording had touched a nerve. Though she still believed he should have used different language, she also wished she had handled the situation “more respectfully.” Though the Title IX office found no grounds for punishment, Fretz remains stung. “It’s this gotcha culture they have created on campus,” he told me, adding: “It’s like giving a bunch of 6-year-olds Tasers.”

Many such skirmishes, faculty members told me, unfolded in private and were quietly settled. Others blazed into public view, with more lasting consequences. The fall after Floyd’s death, for example, students in Michigan’s school of art and design complained to their D.E.I. adviser about a professor named Phoebe Gloeckner, a prominent cartoon artist who taught an introductory course in the field. Gloeckner had asked them to copy a cartoon by Robert Crumb, an influential underground cartoonist of the 1960s and ’70s, whose satirical art sometimes featured ethnic caricatures or heavily sexualized drawings of women. Though Gloeckner had picked a drawing of a fully dressed girl gazing out of a window, the students claimed the assignment had caused them harm. As the semester progressed, they compiled a dossier titled “Complaints Against Phoebe.”

The students later told school officials that she had mixed up two Hispanic students and misgendered a student. The Equity, Civil Rights & Title IX Office summoned Gloeckner for a meeting, then a hearing. Months later, after the investigation ended with no recommendation for further action, several of the students talked to The Daily. In June 2022, it published a 4,000-word article, “Daily investigation finds allegations of microaggressions against comics professor.” The students — all granted pseudonyms — accused her of showing them “racist cartoons” over their objections and inflicting “curriculum-based trauma.”

Gloeckner later published an essay about what she called her “cartoonish cancellation.” The misgendered student had used a different pronoun the previous semester; one of the “racist cartoons” was artwork satirizing Maoist repression that she had accidentally shared over Zoom during a class, and had planned to teach later in the semester with appropriate context. Many colleagues expressed sympathy, Gloeckner told me, but only in private. “The fear is creating a hesitancy to teach what we would normally teach,” she said. Some of her accusers were white women, she recalled. It echoed an observation I heard repeatedly from faculty at Michigan: The most strident critics were sometimes not the most marginalized students, but peers who claimed to be fighting on their behalf.

“They want to do something — be a part of the cause,” she said. “They are not part of the demographic that is being oppressed or victimized. But they can do this.”

In the Black Power fervor of an earlier era, members of Michigan’s newly formed Black Student Union chained themselves inside an administrative building to demand more vigorous recruitment of Black students and professors. Half a century later, in November 2022, the B.S.U. issued a scathing attack on D.E.I. 1.0 titled “More Than Four.” Despite the many millions spent on D.E.I. 1.0, the report noted, the percentage of Black students — then around 4 percent — was nearly as low as it was in 1970.

At the time, the Supreme Court was considering whether to scrap what remained of affirmative action. In an amicus brief describing its own challenge of increasing Black enrollment without racial preferences, Michigan explained that “the overall pool of potential minority applicants with competitive academic qualifications remains very small.”

But the B.S.U.’s critique went far beyond lagging enrollment. Michigan’s all-embracing D.E.I. program was, in a sense, too inclusive. It suffered from “structural flaws” that caused it to “systematically neglect” Black students — the very people who inspired D.E.I. 1.0 in the first place. The university “actively perpetuates systemic racism and oppression,” the B.S.U. charged, by “failing to directly denounce and combat anti-Blackness.”

Last spring, I met with Princess-J’Maria Mboup, then the B.S.U.’s vice speaker, and Brooklyn Blevins, its speaker at the time. Michigan couldn’t create a more welcoming environment for Black students because it didn’t enroll enough of them, Blevins told me; it couldn’t enroll more of them because the environment wasn’t welcoming.

In the 2022 campus survey, minority students — particularly those who are Black — rated the school’s “D.E.I. climate” worse than other students. Since the start of D.E.I. 1.0, they were less likely to report “feelings of being valued, belonging, personal growth and thriving.” When I asked Blevins and Mboup if they had experienced microaggressions, they exchanged knowing smiles. They described being left out of class group-chats that included everyone else, or white students laughing at statements that weren’t meant to be jokes. “That just gets isolating,” Mboup said. “So I know for me personally, after the school day ends, I find my community.” She often visited Michigan’s multicultural center, named for William Monroe Trotter, a Black newspaper editor and radical civil rights activist.

Yet even a multicultural center could manifest the unresolved conflict simmering within D.E.I., the way Michigan often seemed caught between D.E.I.’s civil rights-era roots and its fuzzier post-Bakke incarnation. When the center opened in 1971, it was called Trotter House, a Black Student Cultural Center. Later, it was reimagined as the Trotter Multicultural Center. During D.E.I. 1.0, Trotter was moved, with much fanfare, to a new building near the center of campus.

Some Black students I spoke to lamented that there was no longer a space dedicated solely to their use. In February 2022, a Black grad student wrote to the Board of Regents about white students “colonizing Trotter.” The student, Byron D. Brooks, had seen “white student organizations kicking Black and brown students out of spaces within Trotter because their white organizations reserved the space.” In The Daily, a university spokeswoman explained that Trotter was open to any group or student, since it was meant to be a “convener and coordinator of intercultural engagement and inclusive leadership education initiatives.”

A white student named Charles Hilu took up the invitation. Hilu, who wrote for a campus conservative outlet, The Michigan Review, sat down in Trotter to type out an essay calling Brooks’s views “racist” and hypocritical: If a student had demanded to exclude Black people from a campus space, he wrote, people would be outraged. The piece drew a spray of critical responses in The Daily. Hilu, who has since graduated, told me that he regretted the combative tone of his essay. He considers himself a Reagan conservative, not a provocateur. “If I were writing it again, I would just make the argument,” he said.

That same year, Chavous was promoted to chief diversity officer, succeeding her husband, who remains a professor at Michigan. In 2023, the university announced that it would expand Chavous’s Collegiate Fellows program. It would hire even more scholars “committed to diversity in the academy.” When I asked her how many of the fellows hired so far advanced right-leaning arguments about diversity or inequity, Chavous responded that the program favored “a commitment to broadening access, to engaging in equity in one’s discipline and field. So we’re not asking about any particular ideological or political stance.”

In practice, of course, those commitments can themselves be ideological stances. In a dissenting report to the committee urging Michigan to continue requiring diversity statements in hiring, Chandra Sripada, a professor of philosophy and psychiatry, argued that asking candidates to detail how they would advance equity inevitably required them to take particular positions about contested social issues. When Sripada asked Michigan colleagues to evaluate a hypothetical diversity statement that called for de-emphasizing “the axes of identity on which we differ” in classrooms and to make admissions a “level playing field,” one of them called it “career suicide.”

Officially, Michigan’s D.E.I. plan includes a pledge to increase political diversity on campus. When I asked Chavous if there were any programs aimed at achieving that goal, she described an effort by the new dean of the Ford School for public policy to ensure that its curriculum exposed students to a range of political perspectives. By most accounts, conservatives remain a small minority at Michigan, perhaps 10 or 15 percent of all students. There had always been social pressure to conform to the prevailing liberalism there, faculty members and students told me. But it seemed to intensify as D.E.I. expanded, as if the peer pressure had a kind of institutional sanction.

In 2022, after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, students at the medical school demanded that administrators cancel a speech by Kristin M. Collier, an internist and clinical professor there, at a ceremony welcoming new medical students. Collier directs the school’s program on health, spirituality and religion. She is also a Christian who has publicly discussed her opposition to abortion — a viewpoint the students considered disqualifying. A petition demanded that Collier, who was selected by student and faculty members of a school honor society, be replaced with someone who would inspire students “to be courageous advocates for patient autonomy and our communities.”

Though her speech went forward, Michigan assigned her a bodyguard. Security was heightened at the clinic where she delivered care. “I felt that I was being faced with an identity-based attack,” Collier told me by email. Michigan, she noted, had many programs that explored racial and ethnic identity, but few on religious identity, like hers. “This is D.E.I.,” she wrote. “I’ve often witnessed and heard from patients who are deeply religious — Muslim patients, for example — and how they don’t feel that their practices are respected when they come into a health care encounter.”

Mark Bernstein, the university regent, told me he began to hear more and more concern from students and professors. “The cocktail chatter is: ‘I can’t say anything in class anymore. I’m going to get run out of class.’ There’s an enormous amount of fear.”

Several months after the controversy over Collier’s speech, Bernstein began working with the university’s general counsel and a group of faculty members to draft a statement affirming support for intellectual diversity and freedom of expression. Every time they sent a draft to the administration, Bernstein recalled, it would come back with heavy markups from the D.E.I. office. “We would say, ‘Students should expect to encounter uncomfortable ideas on campus.’ And it would come back all sanded down and gobbledygook.”

For a large swath of students and professors, Michigan’s D.E.I. initiatives have become simply background noise, like the rote incantations of a state religion. In the campus survey published last year, most students said they rated the “D.E.I. climate” as better than at the program’s start. They also reported “limited engagement in D.E.I.-related activities,” like going to a D.E.I. talk or workshop or having a “D.E.I.-related conversation” with a peer. “The surveys are so weird,” one student told me. “They only ask, are we doing enough D.E.I.? Or should we do it more?”

Michigan has taken the struggles of its D.E.I. program as evidence of the need for more. In 2023, Chavous oversaw the rollout of D.E.I. 2.0. There would be more D.E.I. training, more “antiracism dialogue,” D.E.I. consultants for each university unit, a new raft of subplans and action items. The national backlash to D.E.I. was then in its early stages; presenting D.E.I. 2.0 to a campus assembly, Chavous waved off criticisms of D.E.I. as “a contested perspective.”

When we spoke this summer, though, such attacks had become a regular feature of national politics, and Chavous sounded flustered. No one at Michigan, she told me, had raised with her the kind of concerns I had been hearing. When I asked why Michigan’s surveys showed a decline in students’ sense of inclusion, Chavous recast it as a win. Students were holding Michigan to a higher standard, she argued, thanks to “the ways that we’ve engaged around awareness building and setting expectations.” The conflicts around race and gender might simply be the price of progress. “Raising an awareness of an inequality, raising awareness of something that someone wasn’t aware of can elicit feelings — it can elicit anger or displeasure,” she explained.

Toward the end of our interview, I asked if there were any aspects of Michigan’s D.E.I. plan that hadn’t worked as expected, or had to be discarded. “At the central level, we didn’t have programs that, you know, we felt were not worth continuing to invest in,” Chavous said. “I think we did some tweaks to programs.”

Even within the academy, though, some long-accepted precepts of D.E.I. are coming under closer scrutiny. Some researchers argue that teaching students to view the world chiefly through the lens of identity and oppression can leave them vulnerable instead of empowered. Psychologists have questioned whether implicit bias can be accurately measured or reduced through training. The notion that microaggressions are not only real but ubiquitous in interracial encounters is widespread in D.E.I. programs; a 2021 review of the microaggressions literature, however, judged it “without adequate scientific basis.”

For other critics, D.E.I. has come to subvert the spirit of intellectual pluralism envisioned in Bakke a half-century ago. Many faculty members I spoke to worried that Michigan’s press to ingrain D.E.I. into their scholarship — the diversity statements, the special fellowships, the clamor for research into contemporary social-justice issues — had narrowed its departments rather than broadening them. Disciplines and historical eras that couldn’t be jammed into an equity framework were being left to wither; even academics from minority backgrounds felt they had to present themselves as scholars of equity in order to advance.

Some evidence suggests that the steady expansion of D.E.I. into campus life is actually constraining student interaction across political and cultural divides. One recent analysis by the political scientist Kevin Wallsten found that the larger the D.E.I. bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students felt expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students.

D.E.I. programs have grown, in part, to fulfill the increasingly grand institutional promises behind them: to not only enroll diverse students but also to push them to engage with one another’s differences; to not merely educate students but also repair the world outside. Under the banner of D.E.I., universities like Michigan have pledged to tackle society-wide problems: The vast disparities in private wealth, the unequal distribution of public services, the poor quality of many urban schools.

In practice, though, such ambitions can exceed the reach of even a wealthy university. Most people I spoke to at Michigan, including people who criticized other aspects of D.E.I. there, praised Wolverine Pathways, the school’s premier pipeline for underserved Michigan public-school students. Yet this year, after substantial growth, Pathways supplied just 480 undergraduates out of the 34,000 on campus. In explaining why it was so challenging to boost Black enrollment, Chavous and other school officials argued that rapidly declining high school enrollment in Detroit — a trend that was itself the product of social and economic forces beyond the university’s control — had drained Michigan’s traditional pool of Black applicants even as the school’s overall enrollment was rising.

D.E.I. theory and debates over nomenclature sometimes obscured real-world barriers to inclusion. The strategic plan for Michigan’s renowned arboretum and botanical gardens calls for employees to rethink the use of Latin and English plant names, which “actively erased” other “ways of knowing,” and adopt “a ‘polycentric’ paradigm, decentering singular ways of knowing and cocreating meaning through a variety of epistemic frames, including dominant scientific and horticultural modalities, Two-Eyed Seeing, Kinomaage and other cocreated power realignments.”

Only one sentence in the 37-page plan is devoted to the biggest impediment to making the gardens accessible to a more diverse array of visitors: It is hard to get there without a car. (While the arboretum is adjacent to campus, the gardens are some miles away.) “The No. 1 issue across the board was always transportation,” said Bob Grese, who led the arboretum and gardens until 2020. “We were never able to get funding for that.”

Many conservatives now favor abolishing D.E.I. programs entirely, viewing them as little more than mechanisms to enforce left-wing ideology. “They’re not teaching or research functions,” said Jay P. Greene, co-author of the Heritage Foundation study of D.E.I. programs and a former professor at the University of Arkansas. “They’re contrary to academic freedom.”

But even some liberal scholars believe D.E.I. looms too large. Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues that modern D.E.I. is not, as some on the right hold, a triumph of critical theory or postcolonialism but of the corporatization of higher education, in which universities have tried to turn moral and political ideals into a system of formulas and dashboards. “They want a managerial approach to difference,” Khalid said. “They want no friction. But diversity inherently means friction.”

A decade on, Michigan’s grand experiment in D.E.I. met its crucible in the tumult that followed the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. A spate of unsettling events unfolded in Ann Arbor, eerily echoing the racist provocations at the dawn of D.E.I. 1.0. Someone painted a red X through a Star of David on the Rock; one Jewish student found “Yall R Jewish” scrawled on her dorm whiteboard, near the mezuza affixed to her doorway. Another Star of David was scrawled on benches outside the campus Hillel, this time with an equal sign and a swastika.

As the campus arguments grew more rancorous, Jews, Palestinians and their supporters all laid claim to Michigan’s promise of inclusion. The school’s formidable bureaucracy seemed both paralyzed and heavy-handed, scorned by many students and divided against itself. Pro-Palestinian students were infuriated when administrators — citing a violation of the school’s campaign rules — canceled voting on a campuswide resolution urging the school to “foster diversity, equity and inclusion” by issuing a statement condemning “apartheid regimes.” (The decision also halted voting on a pro-Israel resolution.)

Many Jewish students and alumni were astonished when, in January, a committee of Michigan D.E.I. leaders gave the school’s Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Award to a pro-Palestine student group and its leader, a senior named Salma Hamamy: The group had issued a statement on Oct. 7 justifying the murder of Israeli civilians. To critics, Michigan’s elaborate codes of speech and behavior — its ceaseless instruction around microaggressions and harm — had suddenly vaporized. Michigan’s provost rescinded Hamamy’s award only after she posted publicly in her Instagram stories in the spring calling for “death and worse” to “every single individual who supports the Zionist state.”

This June, civil rights officials at the federal Department of Education found that Michigan had systematically mishandled student complaints over the 18-month period ending in February. Out of 67 complaints of harassment or discrimination based on national origin or ancestry that the officials reviewed — an overwhelming majority involving allegations of antisemitism, according to a tally I obtained — Michigan had investigated and made findings in just one. Yet pro-Palestinian students also seemed to regard Michigan’s D.E.I. administrators as their enemy. At a rally against the school’s decision to clear an anti-Israel encampment, one protester held a sign reading “D.E.I. 2.0 = Funding Genocide!”

Classes, too, were derailed by arguments about Gaza and Zionism, or by protests and marches intended to disrupt day-to-day academic life. At the school of social work, some students complained that instructors were not talking enough about the unfolding war; others wanted them to weigh in less. Few felt safe talking to one another. Daicia Price, the school’s D.E.I. director and a clinical professor, was pressed to weigh in on behalf of the school. At one point, she recalled, a student lectured her that there was “a place in hell” for people who remained neutral about the war.

In Price’s mind, diversity and inclusion were for everyone, not one faction or ethnic group. “Social justice is not screaming, fighting, yelling at people, telling them they’re going to burn in hell,” she told me over Zoom. “That’s not inclusive. That’s not equity. That’s not antiracist. That is the exact opposite.”

Frustrated, she scheduled an event dedicated to the issue of how to talk about Gaza. The announcement referred to the war only obliquely, as “such a time as this.” The students who came were eager but uncertain, she said. It was as if they were trying to speak a new language. “Students were like: I think we do want to be able to talk with each other about these things in a way that’s effective,” Price said. “We just don’t know how to. We’ve never seen it.”

Additional research by Julie Tate.

Read by Vikas Adam

Narration produced by Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by Zak Mouton

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