The University of Michigan, which had become the poster child for higher education’s woke Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ethic, recently announced it would shut down its DEI office.

This is a significant development given that UM’s DEI office had employed upwards of 163 officers. That is, of course, if UM has truly dumped rather than just rebranded its DEI ideology.

Since launching its DEI office in 2016, UM has invested a whopping $250 million in the program. According to a 2024 New York Times article, it created “by far the largest DEI bureaucracy of any large public university.”

However, the Times noted, “Black students today regard the school’s expansive program as a well-meaning failure.” That’s a lot of dough wasted on what amounts to little other than a woke virtue signal.

Furthermore — and you may want to sit down for this — the article added, “Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive.”

That is the big irony behind the woke DEI movement. It bills itself as being “anti-racist,” but what it ends up producing is the exact opposite.

Of course, anyone who actually objectively looked at what DEI preaches — with all its claims of systemic racism thanks to some currently nonexistent white supremacy — quickly observed that DEI is inherently racist.

So, did Michigan dump DEI because the school finally figured out that it doesn’t work? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be no.

The actual impetus for Michigan to ditch this costly and race-obsessed ideology had much more to do with Donald Trump’s executive order against DEI. According to Trump’s order, schools across the nation were given until the end of March to expunge their DEI programs, and it appears that Michigan, concerned about getting millions in federal taxpayer funding withheld, elected to shutter its DEI office.

Michigan only needed to look at the Trump administration’s actions to freeze hundreds of millions in federal grants toward Ivy League schools — Columbia, UPenn, and Harvard — to see that resistance would be costly.

Money is a powerful incentive.

Does this mean that DEI is dead at the University of Michigan? Likely in name only. Those universities that have embraced this inherently Marxist-based ideology won’t give up their woke views simply because a president says so.

No, they will simply do what leftists have long done: engage in word games. DEI and the terms associated with it will be changed, but the ideology will remain. For people to truly give up on a deleterious ideology, they have to have their minds renewed. They have to see it for the error that it is, and oftentimes that means experiencing an ideology’s bankruptcy before they realize how bad it really is.

That said, it’s good that Trump is acting against the promulgation of DEI, an inherently anti-American ideology, with U.S. taxpayer dollars. And given enough time, DEI will be exposed to more people for the disastrously racist worldview that it is.