Final 12 months, Chris Rufo, the influential right-wing strategist who spearheaded the marketing campaign towards variety, fairness and inclusion, or D.E.I., initiatives, informed me about his ambitions for a second Trump presidency. He hoped, he stated, to see Donald Trump’s administration aggressively examine Ivy League establishments that, in keeping with Rufo, apply “rampant” discrimination towards white, Jewish and Asian college students and school members, significantly by D.E.I. packages, which goal to spice up the illustration of teams deemed underprivileged. In the event that they had been discovered to have violated the legislation, he needed the faculties put below a federal consent decree, “in order that the federal authorities can get them into compliance by power.”
Extra broadly, he imagined a whole transformation of American academia. “You probably have the complete weight of the White Home, the complete weight of the Division of Schooling and a platoon of right-wing legal professionals attempting to make use of the entire statutory and government authority that they must reshape larger schooling, I believe it might be a factor of super magnificence,” he informed me.
The mannequin for such a multipronged assault, stated Rufo, was Florida, the place Gov. Ron DeSantis created an “huge enchancment within the tradition.” One place to see what this seems like in apply is New School of Florida, the place DeSantis made Rufo a trustee. As soon as a progressive redoubt, it at the moment presents lessons like “The ‘Woke’ Motion,” whose course description says, “What has turn into recognized colloquially because the ‘woke’ motion is greatest understood as a form of cult.”
Now Rufo, who met with Trump’s schooling crew on Inauguration Day, is seeing his imaginative and prescient begin to turn into actuality. With considered one of his first government orders, Trump arrange sweeping investigations into D.E.I. within the personal sector, instructing federal companies to determine as much as 9 investigative targets amongst main establishments, together with schools and universities “with endowments over $1 billion,” a class that features all of the Ivies.
