The Illusion of Inclusion:
What DEI’s Unraveling Reveals About Power in Academia
The dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs isn’t the scandal. The scandal is that, despite the tireless work of many, those programs were never built to bear weight. DEI was designed to be visible, not volatile; palatable, not powerful. Its fragility wasn’t an oversight. It was the architecture. As long as it remained symbolic, it was celebrated. But the moment it began to inch toward actual transformation, toward unsettling comfort or redistributing power, it buckled. Not by accident, but by design. What collapsed wasn’t progress. It was the performance of it. And if that truth feels uncomfortable, it’s only because the illusion was built to soothe.
For years, academia declared its commitment to equity in polished statements and glossy brochures, investing more in messaging than in change. The work of justice was handed to those already carrying its absence. Marginalized faculty, staff, and students were asked to lead the charge while navigating the very inequities they were tasked with fixing. Institutions celebrated diversity so long as it was decorative, not disruptive.
The Trump-era backlash did not dismantle something strong. It applied just enough pressure to reveal what many had quietly suspected: that much of the system was hollow by design. What we are witnessing is not the erasure of progress but the collapse of performance. And in the face of that collapse, the silence from university and organizational leaders does not merely linger. It implicates. It confirms that, for many, inclusion was always conditional, embraced in times of comfort, abandoned in times of consequence. Anyone who ever believed higher education was built to deliver justice should now understand how fragile that belief has always been.
Let us set aside the comforting fiction that this is simply about shuttered DEI offices or missing mission statements. It is about the tenured faculty who watched the unraveling and chose silence. It is about the higher administrators who once tweeted their solidarity and then vanished into procedural obscurity. It is about the departments that quietly erased words like inclusive excellence from job postings, as if wiping condensation from glass would also erase the memory of what had been there. It is about the sudden and convenient onset of institutional amnesia.
The same voices that once filled conferences with aspirational language now hesitate to speak, not because they disagree with the values but because they fear the consequences. This is not the end of a movement. It is the quiet unmasking of a performance. And for those of us who could never afford to treat equity as branding or trend, this moment does not feel like politics. It feels like betrayal.
I have lived inside this contradiction for years. Publicly praised as a champion of equity, privately scraping together grants, goodwill, and sheer exhaustion to keep the work from collapsing. I have watched brilliant colleagues - scholars of color, queer and trans academics, disabled and neurodivergent thinkers - burn out under the weight of labor that was invisible, yet endlessly expected. When they left, institutions mourned them with statements and replaced them with the next “diverse hire,” ready for the homepage but not for structural change. I have seen ambitious initiatives suffocated by bureaucracy or reshaped into polished workshops meant to comfort the powerful rather than challenge them.
And I have paid the price for asking harder questions. I have been harassed, sidelined, and retaliated against, not for failing in my duties, but for refusing to applaud empty gestures, for refusing to let discomfort be reframed as threat. When I say the DEI era was an illusion, it is not out of bitterness. It is biography. It is the pattern you begin to see clearly only after you stop sanding down the edges of the truth for someone else’s comfort.
The moment we now find ourselves in demands courage, but also compassion for the many forms courage can take. Silence for some is not always complicity. Sometimes it is strategy. Sometimes it is survival. Often, it is exhaustion, shaped by the very forces that silence was meant to confront.
There are people defending equity behind closed doors, risking their livelihoods to preserve what remains. Others speak on panels and march in protests while quietly cleansing their websites of DEI language to avoid retaliation. And there are women of color, especially Black women, who have shouldered the weight of representation for years and are now told that any DEI work could jeopardize their jobs. When power punishes defiance, silence is not always a failure. Sometimes, it is the cost of staying.
So what does silence mean in a time like this? Who can afford to speak, and who is asked to risk everything to be heard? Even at elite institutions with wealth to shield their values, courage is rarely without consequence. For others, it can cost everything.
Still, when injustice escalates and institutions retreat, even principled quiet can echo as consent. What we do not say matters. The question is not who speaks the loudest, but who acts with integrity, who protects others, who refuses to let fear redraw the edges of what is right.
If you are not outraged, you are not standing on neutral ground. You are standing in the silence that allows erosion. But to be clear: this is not a plea for performance. Not everyone has a podium. For some, silence is strategy. For others, survival. But for too many, it has become convenience. And those with safety, status, or tenure must reckon with the weight of their quiet. Even silence speaks.
If your department dropped its equity goals the moment the climate shifted, that is not pragmatism. It is surrender. And if you soothe yourself with talk of pendulums, imagining that justice will return on some inevitable swing, then you have misunderstood the device. The pendulum never moved freely. It was tethered, weighted by those who benefit from stillness. It never reached justice, because comfort was always fixed to the other end.
Perhaps this moment is not a collapse, but a clearing. A necessary fire, burning through the accumulated deadwood of institutional pretense. The fall of the DEI apparatus may feel like a loss, but it also creates space to stop confusing visibility with impact and branding with justice. The real work was never going to come from advisory councils with no mandate, or offices nested deep within bureaucracies, reporting to leaders who viewed inclusion less as a mission and more as a liability to manage. Justice is not buried in policy binders or hidden behind acronyms. It lives in the uncomfortable moment someone calls out bias in a meeting. It lives in the courage to rewrite a syllabus, not out of compliance but conviction. It lives in the kind of mentorship that is felt, not announced. It lives in discomfort. In risk. In the choices we make when we no longer wait for permission to do what is right.
This is not a pendulum swing. It is a reckoning. And it is long overdue. The dismantling of DEI infrastructure is painful. But the deeper wound lies in what it reveals. Beneath the language of equity was a structure designed not to challenge power, but to shield it. Much of what passed for change was choreography. A carefully staged routine that mimicked justice, softened its rhythm, and stalled its final step just long enough to keep power comfortably in place.
The question now is not how we bring DEI back. It is how we build it differently, intentionally, accountably, and from the ground up. Not as a slogan. Not as a committee. But as the foundation beneath everything we claim to value.
And to those with power, status, or security in this system: the illusion is crumbling. What remains is the work. The unglamorous kind. The kind done without fanfare or press releases. Who keeps showing up when there are no statements to sign, no panels to join, no applause to be earned? Who is still building when the risk is not symbolic, but real?
Because if your commitment to equity vanished the moment it became inconvenient, then it was never commitment. It was branding.
And we see you now.
------------------
Author:
Rebecca Calisi-Rodriguez, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior
Faculty Scholar, Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS)
University of California, Davis
Director, Green Care Lab
Bluesky: @rebeccacalisi.bsky.social
July 4, 2025
For years, academia declared its commitment to equity in polished statements and glossy brochures, investing more in messaging than in change. The work of justice was handed to those already carrying its absence. Marginalized faculty, staff, and students were asked to lead the charge while navigating the very inequities they were tasked with fixing. Institutions celebrated diversity so long as it was decorative, not disruptive.
The Trump-era backlash did not dismantle something strong. It applied just enough pressure to reveal what many had quietly suspected: that much of the system was hollow by design. What we are witnessing is not the erasure of progress but the collapse of performance. And in the face of that collapse, the silence from university and organizational leaders does not merely linger. It implicates. It confirms that, for many, inclusion was always conditional, embraced in times of comfort, abandoned in times of consequence. Anyone who ever believed higher education was built to deliver justice should now understand how fragile that belief has always been.
Let us set aside the comforting fiction that this is simply about shuttered DEI offices or missing mission statements. It is about the tenured faculty who watched the unraveling and chose silence. It is about the higher administrators who once tweeted their solidarity and then vanished into procedural obscurity. It is about the departments that quietly erased words like inclusive excellence from job postings, as if wiping condensation from glass would also erase the memory of what had been there. It is about the sudden and convenient onset of institutional amnesia.
The same voices that once filled conferences with aspirational language now hesitate to speak, not because they disagree with the values but because they fear the consequences. This is not the end of a movement. It is the quiet unmasking of a performance. And for those of us who could never afford to treat equity as branding or trend, this moment does not feel like politics. It feels like betrayal.
I have lived inside this contradiction for years. Publicly praised as a champion of equity, privately scraping together grants, goodwill, and sheer exhaustion to keep the work from collapsing. I have watched brilliant colleagues - scholars of color, queer and trans academics, disabled and neurodivergent thinkers - burn out under the weight of labor that was invisible, yet endlessly expected. When they left, institutions mourned them with statements and replaced them with the next “diverse hire,” ready for the homepage but not for structural change. I have seen ambitious initiatives suffocated by bureaucracy or reshaped into polished workshops meant to comfort the powerful rather than challenge them.
And I have paid the price for asking harder questions. I have been harassed, sidelined, and retaliated against, not for failing in my duties, but for refusing to applaud empty gestures, for refusing to let discomfort be reframed as threat. When I say the DEI era was an illusion, it is not out of bitterness. It is biography. It is the pattern you begin to see clearly only after you stop sanding down the edges of the truth for someone else’s comfort.
The moment we now find ourselves in demands courage, but also compassion for the many forms courage can take. Silence for some is not always complicity. Sometimes it is strategy. Sometimes it is survival. Often, it is exhaustion, shaped by the very forces that silence was meant to confront.
There are people defending equity behind closed doors, risking their livelihoods to preserve what remains. Others speak on panels and march in protests while quietly cleansing their websites of DEI language to avoid retaliation. And there are women of color, especially Black women, who have shouldered the weight of representation for years and are now told that any DEI work could jeopardize their jobs. When power punishes defiance, silence is not always a failure. Sometimes, it is the cost of staying.
So what does silence mean in a time like this? Who can afford to speak, and who is asked to risk everything to be heard? Even at elite institutions with wealth to shield their values, courage is rarely without consequence. For others, it can cost everything.
Still, when injustice escalates and institutions retreat, even principled quiet can echo as consent. What we do not say matters. The question is not who speaks the loudest, but who acts with integrity, who protects others, who refuses to let fear redraw the edges of what is right.
If you are not outraged, you are not standing on neutral ground. You are standing in the silence that allows erosion. But to be clear: this is not a plea for performance. Not everyone has a podium. For some, silence is strategy. For others, survival. But for too many, it has become convenience. And those with safety, status, or tenure must reckon with the weight of their quiet. Even silence speaks.
If your department dropped its equity goals the moment the climate shifted, that is not pragmatism. It is surrender. And if you soothe yourself with talk of pendulums, imagining that justice will return on some inevitable swing, then you have misunderstood the device. The pendulum never moved freely. It was tethered, weighted by those who benefit from stillness. It never reached justice, because comfort was always fixed to the other end.
Perhaps this moment is not a collapse, but a clearing. A necessary fire, burning through the accumulated deadwood of institutional pretense. The fall of the DEI apparatus may feel like a loss, but it also creates space to stop confusing visibility with impact and branding with justice. The real work was never going to come from advisory councils with no mandate, or offices nested deep within bureaucracies, reporting to leaders who viewed inclusion less as a mission and more as a liability to manage. Justice is not buried in policy binders or hidden behind acronyms. It lives in the uncomfortable moment someone calls out bias in a meeting. It lives in the courage to rewrite a syllabus, not out of compliance but conviction. It lives in the kind of mentorship that is felt, not announced. It lives in discomfort. In risk. In the choices we make when we no longer wait for permission to do what is right.
This is not a pendulum swing. It is a reckoning. And it is long overdue. The dismantling of DEI infrastructure is painful. But the deeper wound lies in what it reveals. Beneath the language of equity was a structure designed not to challenge power, but to shield it. Much of what passed for change was choreography. A carefully staged routine that mimicked justice, softened its rhythm, and stalled its final step just long enough to keep power comfortably in place.
The question now is not how we bring DEI back. It is how we build it differently, intentionally, accountably, and from the ground up. Not as a slogan. Not as a committee. But as the foundation beneath everything we claim to value.
And to those with power, status, or security in this system: the illusion is crumbling. What remains is the work. The unglamorous kind. The kind done without fanfare or press releases. Who keeps showing up when there are no statements to sign, no panels to join, no applause to be earned? Who is still building when the risk is not symbolic, but real?
Because if your commitment to equity vanished the moment it became inconvenient, then it was never commitment. It was branding.
And we see you now.
------------------
Author:
Rebecca Calisi-Rodriguez, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior
Faculty Scholar, Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS)
University of California, Davis
Director, Green Care Lab
Bluesky: @rebeccacalisi.bsky.social
July 4, 2025
