Institutional Racism in the Age of Anti-DEI
Why Oregon’s public universities can’t hide behind DEI anymore
Higher education has long presented itself as the great equalizer—an institution where merit, not origin, determines one’s fate. That promise has never fully been realized. What is new is that the federal government has now formalized that failure.
On January 20 and 21, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Orders 14151 and 14173, dismantling federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across agencies, contractors, and institutions of higher education. These orders revoked Executive Order 11246, which had mandated affirmative action in federal contracting since 1965, dissolved federal DEI councils, and required universities receiving federal funds to certify that their programs do not advance what the administration describes as illegal discrimination.
Institutions moved quickly. Florida and Texas campuses closed DEI offices, the University of North Carolina system rolled back diversity programs, Ohio State dissolved its diversity office, and Columbia stripped DEI language and diversity statements from its hiring processes. These developments are not a correction to an overreaching experiment in equity. They extend a long-standing pattern in which universities substituted symbolic diversity initiatives for structural change: celebrating the language of inclusion while maintaining the conditions that make genuine inclusion impossible. The federal rollback has merely stripped away the symbols, leaving the underlying structure exposed.
At Portland State University, the 2025 Climate Survey quantified what faculty and staff of color have long documented: a 21-point racial inclusion gap between administrators and the broader campus community, accompanied by a significant loss of trust in institutional leadership. These disparities predate Trump’s executive orders, concealed beneath strategic plans, diversity committees, and public statements of commitment. What has changed is that the institutional alibi—the performance of equity—can no longer obscure the persistence of institutional racism in Oregon’s public universities.
The National Pattern: When Diversity Hiring Is Just Theater
National data on faculty representation expose a persistent failure. As of the 2022–23 academic year, 26 percent of tenure-track faculty were people of color, up from 21 percent in 2016–17. This apparent progress is driven largely by increases in the numbers of Asian American and Hispanic faculty. Over the same period, the percentage of Black full professors rose from only 3.3 percent to 3.5 percent, a gain of 0.2 percentage points. In the most recent data, Black women saw their pay relative to white men fall at both the associate and full professor ranks, according to data from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR).
A 2023 report from the American Psychological Association identified one key reason behind these patterns: faculty of color are subjected to an “inequity tax.” This tax consists of invisible and uncompensated labor—mentoring students of color, educating white colleagues about racism, staffing diversity committees, and absorbing the emotional impact of institutional neglect—performed in addition to meeting the same publication and grant expectations as colleagues who carry none of these burdens. Promotion and tenure committees neither recognize this labor nor adjust expectations to account for it. The result is predictable: higher attrition, lower promotion rates, and the reproduction of predominantly white faculty hierarchies.
Yale’s experience remains instructive. Following a 2005 commitment to diversify its faculty, the university hired 56 faculty of color; by 2012, only 22 remained. Those who left reported that they did not feel fully included in the intellectual community, were excluded from informal networks, and had to work harder than colleagues of equivalent rank to receive comparable recognition. Yale’s response was a $50 million initiative that, once again, funded recruitment and salary incentives rather than addressing the ways the institution itself produces exclusion. Similar independent reviews at other institutions, such as UCLA, documented a pattern of bias and discrimination against faculty of color and complaint procedures too weak to address it, despite public commitments to inclusion.
Oregon’s Particular Failure in Public Higher Education
Oregon’s public universities are not exceptions to this pattern. Their history of lawsuits, failed recruitment initiatives, and stagnant faculty demographics shows how national dynamics take on a specific regional form.
Portland State University professor and administrator Douglas Samuels filed the largest employment-related racial discrimination lawsuit in the state’s history after being demoted and reassigned to the Black Studies program following years of inequitable treatment in pay, committee assignments, and job responsibilities. In 2009, PSU settled for $795,000. Samuels’ attorney publicly stated that the university had a reputation for a hostile work environment for faculty and staff of color.
PSU’s response in the years that followed was to produce strategic plans. Its five-year plan pledged to create an open, inclusive, and diverse environment and to adopt best practices for the recruitment, retention, and advancement of diverse faculty. Yet 16 years after the Samuels settlement, approximately 40 percent of PSU’s incoming students are students of color, while faculty of color remain at roughly 14 percent of the professoriate.
The University of Oregon has fared no better. Among the nation’s top 62 research universities, UO ranked lowest for faculty of color from 2005 through 2012. Its recruitment program, which offered departments $90,000 to hire faculty of color, was widely regarded as ineffective for a reason that required no sophisticated analysis: search committees composed overwhelmingly of white male full professors tend to hire candidates who resemble themselves. Philosopher Naomi Zack noted that she was one of only two women of color holding full professorships anywhere in the university. The university’s incentive program did not alter that basic fact.
The 2025 PSU Climate Survey reflects a similar pattern. The 21-point racial inclusion gap between administrators and other campus members indicates that those who make decisions about hiring, promotion, tenure, and program continuity experience the institution differently from those whose careers are governed by those decisions. Administrators who report high levels of racial inclusion are the same people who determine which programs survive budget cuts, which grievances advance, and which faculty lines are renewed. The survey revealed who holds power and how that power sidelines faculty and staff of color while preserving a sense of inclusion among those who control the institution’s resources.
Diversity Initiatives as Management Strategy, Not Structural Change
More than a decade ago, Sara Ahmed argued that university diversity initiatives are less about transforming institutions than about managing diversity and its perception. Subsequent experience has borne them out. Universities across the United States have deployed diversity offices, multicultural centers, and equity statements primarily as instruments of fundraising, accreditation compliance, and protecting their public image rather than as mechanisms for structural change.
Trump’s executive orders have exposed this logic. Institutions that built reputations on diversity commitments abandoned them at the first sign of federal pressure, closing DEI offices, stripping DEI language from websites, and rescinding diversity statements in hiring. The speed and scale of capitulation confirm what critics of symbolic diversity work have long argued: a commitment to equity that cannot survive a change in administration was never structural.
When the performance of diversity is withdrawn, what remains is the underlying institution: the same hierarchies, the same informal networks, the same promotion committees, and the same patterns of exclusion that existed before strategic plans were drafted and diversity statements were posted online. If diversity initiatives have functioned primarily as instruments of image management, the question is not whether universities should have such offices but what structural change would entail in practice.
What Structural Change Actually Requires
Measures that alter institutional structure share one feature: they make the cost of exclusion visible and attach consequences to it.
Public exposure of this data is the first accountability strategy, not because universities lack this information, but because they refuse to share it. Portland State knows promotion and tenure rates for faculty of color by department and rank. The University of Oregon knows how many faculty hired under its $90,000 diversity incentive remained after three years. These numbers are rarely published. Making them public—disaggregated by race, gender, and rank and subject to external review—would expose the gap between proclaimed commitment and documented outcomes.
Cluster hiring addresses the institutional isolation that drives attrition. A single faculty member of color in a department of 14 white colleagues is not a diversity hire; that person is a token, burdened with representing an entire population, excluded from informal networks, and evaluated by colleagues with little stake in retaining them. Hiring faculty of color in cohorts provides social support and builds intellectual communities that make scholarly careers sustainable. Institutions that have implemented cluster hires show measurably higher retention rates for faculty of color.
Promotion and tenure criteria must also change. Mentoring students of color, advising equity committees, and managing the institutional fallout from discrimination complaints are forms of academic labor that universities currently extract without recognition. Portland State and Oregon State have begun to include contributions to diversity in promotion standards. These revisions are meaningless, however, if individual departments retain full discretion over whether such work counts. Uniform enforcement, with administrative accountability for departments that ignore or minimize diversity contributions, is what distinguishes a structural revision from a symbolic one.
Search committee composition is another locus of institutional power. Committees dominated by tenured white faculty tend to reproduce their own composition; this is not simply a tendency but a well-documented pattern. Diversifying committees, requiring external reviewers for searches in departments with poor retention records, and holding department chairs accountable for search outcomes directly reshape practices that universities already understand. The PSU-AAUP contract, faculty senate procedures, and collective bargaining agreements provide the institutional framework for enforcement. The tools exist; using them is a matter of administrative will, not institutional capacity.
Beyond Performance
The current political moment has stripped higher education of one of its most effective alibis. For decades, Oregon’s public universities, like institutions across the United States, could point to diversity statements, equity officers, and multicultural programming as evidence of institutional commitment. Those instruments are now being eliminated, abandoned, or reclassified, and the underlying institution stands essentially unchanged. Trump’s executive orders did not create Oregon’s racial hierarchies; they removed a thin layer of symbolic compliance that universities had used as proof of change.
The PSU Climate Survey’s 21-point racial inclusion gap did not appear in 2025. It has long been visible in exit interviews, discrimination complaints, and the career trajectories of faculty who left. The Samuels settlement at PSU, the University of Oregon’s last-place ranking among major research universities for faculty of color, and the national pattern in which the percentage of Black full professors increased by only two-tenths of one percentage point over seven years are not anomalies.
The choice before Oregon’s public universities is not between diversity programs and their absence. It is between material change and continued performance. Anything less is not reform; it is rehearsal for the next statement of regret.
Note: An earlier version of this essay was presented as "Challenging Institutional Racism in Pacific Northwest Higher Education" at the American Association of University Professors Annual Conference on the State of Higher Education in Washington, D.C., in June 2016. This version has been substantially revised and updated.