UNC Triples Down on DEI Hiring

Most major institutions are working to comply with the Executive Order banning DEI racial preferences in hiring and other aspects of their organizations. DEI has been banned both federally–in institutions that get federal funding, that is–and by a number of states such as North Carolina. 

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (a truly beautiful campus in a wonderful, but hideously liberal town) has been working on eliminating DEI requirements for about a year, even before Trump came into office. 

Imagine a DEI radical who rejects the “fallacy of equality” and the “fallacy of meritocracy.” Now put that person in charge of faculty hiring at UNC-Chapel Hill.

I thought UNC was overcoming its DEI problem. Not here. https://t.co/qYkkJi4o4u

— Adam Kissel (@kissel_adam) March 14, 2025

But, as with most of these efforts, the institutions have been so warped over the past few years that DEI is baked into the cake when it comes to policy and personnel. Names can be changed, rhetoric modified, jobs moved around, but the DEI mentality continues on without much to see in changes. We have made some progress–even adding a little stigma can lead to profound changes over a long time–but much less than appears from the rhetoric. 

A perfect example is how UNC is dealing with the directive to eliminate DEI. As they say, personnel is policy, and the personnel choices being made are disastrous.

Is UNC Chapel Hill serious about civil rights?

This is an open question considering who the university has in charge of faculty hiring, tenure and promotion decisions. Since 2022, Giselle Corbie has served as vice provost for faculty affairs at Carolina — a hugely influential role that shapes the direction of the university. Yet Corbie’s record should worry every North Carolinian who cares about equal treatment, ending racial discrimination and upholding civil rights laws.

So long as Corbie remains vice provost, UNC’s efforts to dismantle “diversity, equity and inclusion” aren’t just incomplete. They’re unreliable.

Here are the facts that North Carolinians need to know about Corbie. These facts should have led UNC leaders not to hire or promote her in the first place.

Since 2013, Corbie has run UNC’s Center for Health Equity Research. The center promotes “equity-centered” policies and race-based resources for “BIPOC wellness.” It harps on “medicine’s roots in colonialism” and promotes a language policing guide that forbids terms like “white paper” because of “white privilege.”

Shockingly, Corbie has pushed for illegal, race-based rationing of medical care. In a 2021 interview, she argued against treating all patients equally as individuals. She calls that the “fallacy of equality.” Instead, because the medical profession is a “white supremacist culture,” she favors “race-targeted interventions” in medical care. That means treating patients differently based on their race.

Corbie is a radical–to the point of pushing policies that would leave white people dead through neglect as a path to social justice. 

And she will be in charge of faculty affairs, including having a major role in the hiring process. In other words, DEI policies may be struck from the policy directives and some minor changes are made elsewhere, but the ideology has, if anything, become even more entrenched where it matters. 

Her rejection of equal treatment under the law clearly parallels her understanding of how the university should hire faculty.

Corbie has laid out a racist vision of university hiring — making race the determining factor in virtually everything. She explicitly rejects the idea of individual merit, calling it the “fallacy of meritocracy.” In 2022, just months before UNC Chapel Hill promoted her, she wrote that universities must “align their own demographics with those of the communities they serve. In many places, especially academic training centers, that will mean aggressively recruiting and promoting diverse researchers.”

In other words, universities like UNC Chapel Hill should hire and promote based on race. She and her coauthors even declared that “institutions should place as much value on work to improve the health and health equity of diverse communities as they place on advancing fundamental biologic discoveries.” In Corbie’s vision, contributions to DEI should matter as much as contributions to curing cancer.

As vice provost for faculty affairs at Carolina, Corbie plays a decisive role in whom to hire and promote and who gets tenure. If she is willing to ration life-saving medical care on the basis of race and rejects the idea of meritocracy, it’s reasonable to ask whether Corbie is hiring and promoting people based on skin color, not merit. Why wouldn’t she?

As I said, personnel is policy, and we can’t underestimate how entrenched DEI ideology already is in these academic institutions. The people who chose Corbie for this role knew exactly what they were doing, and are buttressing their earlier gains through different means, but the same ends as before. 

Liberals believe that changing words changes reality, so they may even think that by changing the words from DEI to something else will satisfy the legal requirements they have to meet. Their goals remain the same, and nothing will divert them from consolidating their power short of mass firings and other punishments. 

Republicans at the state level will scream bloody murder, at least in Blue states and likely in many Red states, if and when major cuts in federal funding start to really bite into University budgets. Universities are some of the most politically powerful institutions in the United States as enormous resources are poured into them. That simultaneously makes them both more and less vulnerable to political forces. 

They are more vulnerable because serious cuts are incredibly painful–they depend on state and federal funding–and more powerful because there are a lot of jobs at stake, incredible connections of the universities to outside powerful people and corporations, and tremendous lobbying power. Some of the largest employers are health care, higher education, and government. Nobody enjoys crossing any of them. It can cost a politician a job. 

Not coincidentally, government funds make up the bulk or all of the funding for these bloated institutions. 

Slashing these industries is vital to reinvigorating our economy and rooting out the worst excesses of ideologies that threaten our country and culture. 

Let’s hope there is enough political courage for the Republicans to see it through.