Red State Universities: DEI Is Dead! Long Live … ‘Access & Engagement’?

Since I’m in something of a cinematic mood today, let’s try a line from Jurassic Park as an explanation for the bait-and-switch attempted at two Tennessee universities. Donald Trump keeps trying to kill the Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI) movement in higher education, but …

And if the history of the bureaucratic state teaches us anything, it teaches that carbuncles simply find new surfaces to attach themselves. Administrators who leech off the public teat will find a way, regardless of whether they exist in a blue or red state. Hence, this Fox News story from Tennessee should hardly come as a surprise:

🚨BUSTED: @VanderbiltU‘s Janet Roberts was CAUGHT ON CAMERA disparaging Sen. Marsha Blackburn and hiding the school’s DEI practices.

“God help us…[@MarshaBlackburn‘s] ridiculous”

“We are heavily supported by federal funding…[so] we’re not advertising diversity and… pic.twitter.com/CIxV6FCrwe

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 23, 2025

Staff at two of Tennessee’s most prominent universities — Vanderbilt and the University of Tennessee — were caught on undercover recordings admitting to rebranding their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in an effort to sidestep Republican-led bans.

Despite state and federal orders aimed at dismantling DEI initiatives, school officials described a deliberate strategy to rename, repackage and quietly preserve these controversial programs under new labels like “access and engagement” and “belonging and community.”

“It’s a chess game,” Will Eakin, a coordinator for UT’s “Access & Engagement” office, said in a recording obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital. 

It’s not a chess game. It’s a shell game, with taxpayers as the saps. The full set of undercover videos can’t be embedded here, but it makes clear that the administrators involved see themselves as social-justice agents and refuse to fully comply with the intent of the law, both at the federal and state levels. The woman in the clip, Ivie Carmouche, works at Vanderbilt as an academic coach, and she explains that the name changes are “strategic” to avoid accountability for defying the law:

“The language will be different because we have to kind of be strategic. But there’s a lot of collaborations with them, KC Potter House, Black Cultural Center, Women’s Center, like even in the Women’s Center, they’re very open and welcoming to all gender identities.”

“When I say different, it just looks different now because the language has had to change. Students Center for Belonging Communities is kind of like the DEI,” she added.

It’s important to remember that the Tennessee legislature passed a law that should have ended DEI efforts at universities and colleges in the state. This is not just about Donald Trump and federal funding that could be put at risk, but also violations of statutes duly enacted by the people of Tennessee. But it’s also to consider the scope of this grift, which had forced higher-ed schools to employ administrators and other personnel to impose DEI policies, and who would face re-entry into the job market without their “strategic” use of language to obfuscate their defiance of the public will. 

In fact, this is not even new. As legislatures in red states began prohibiting DEI in higher education, schools in those states began playing this shell game too. John wrote about this in April and September of last year, with examples from Alabama, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Here in Texas, some universities attempted it as well, prompting Attorney General Ken Paxton to threaten legal action for any schools attempting to play this shell game via semantics. (John has an undercover video of the UT effort at rebranding to preserve the bureaucratic grip, via CriticalRace.org, which tracks these efforts to defy law and policy for the purposes of racial discrimination.)

Unfortunately, bureaucratic life will keep finding a way to survive, at least until states start imposing serious penalties. To kill funguses and mold, you need sunlight and a lot of disinfectant. Time to apply both to Academia in quantities large enough to ensure that the parasites get driven out permanently. 

Editor’s Note: President Trump and red-state legislatures have made clear their intent to end discrimination on college campuses through the discredited and corrosive DEI movement. The Deep State exists at many levels, however, and will use any means at its disposal to keep those policies in place. 

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