Undercover Video: UNC is Still Pushing DEI, Just Covertly

Today seems to be the day for undercover videos. I wrote about the one featuring David Hogg earlier today. This afternoon Accuracy in Media has posted their own video about the persistence of DEI at the University of North Carolina.

We’ll get to the video in a moment but the backstory here is that last May the UNC Board of Governors voted to repeal and replace the existing DEI policy with a new one.

The new policy reverses one that was adopted in 2019 that sought to “foster an inclusive environment” and required each school to submit diversity and inclusion reports to the board of trustees every year.

The new policy now requires UNC schools to “ensure equality of all persons & viewpoints,” and promote “nondiscrimination in employment practices.”

But as is often the case at schools that have heavily invested in DEI, changes in policy don’t often result in changes in personnel. So the same people are given new job titles that don’t mention DEI explicitly and they go right ahead and keep doing whatever they were doing. That seems to be what happened at UNC.

The undercover video takes place in an office where Janique Sanders, the Assisstant Director of Leadership and Community Engagement at UNC-Charlotte, is describing how things work since DEI was banned. She decides to do this because she has a “general feeling” that the person she’s talking to (the undercover reporter) isn’t going to get her in trouble by repeating any of this.

The University of North Carolina – Charlotte administrator is Janique Sanders.

She is their assistant director of leadership and community engagement. pic.twitter.com/II2HGHRLhI

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) May 28, 2025

It’s literally a joke at this point.

The administrator whispers and jokes about how she isn’t supposed to say that DEI is still happening at the university.

She says “We’ve renamed, we’ve reorganized, we’ve recalibrated so to speak.” pic.twitter.com/iYDXqCtytS

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) May 28, 2025

Language changes but the people don’t change.

“Because language changes, right? But the people who have to be in the presence of and in the space don’t change.”

“We don’t have to call them ‘diverse groups of people.’ We can just say ‘everybody has different stocks of knowledge.'” pic.twitter.com/BK9yWjp4lf

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) May 28, 2025

The word of the year is “finesse,” i.e. keep doing the same thing without using the same words. She refers to this as being “PC” or politically correct.

“I could care less about whatever you want to call my office.” pic.twitter.com/kLiHSvQcF4

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) May 28, 2025

Bottom line, there are no DEI jobs at UNC but there is “covert” DEI work available. Wink, wink.

She says explicit “DEI positions” don’t exist, but that there are ways to do “work that is covert.” pic.twitter.com/bOaGbWMqBN

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) May 28, 2025

This really isn’t new. I’m sure this is what has been going on at 80% of the schools that have officially backed away from DEI over the past year. What’s different here is that someone got caught on video admitting it.

The full video is below. It includes all of the clips above but also includes one of the reporters, Adam Guillette, confronting university provost Jennifer Troyer with the fact that the school is flouting the Board of Governors decision. As you’ll see, the provost doesn’t have much to say.