The following article, The Lost Generation of Blacks, was first published on The Black Sphere.

Section I: The Box I Refused to Check

Long before “diversity, equity, and inclusion” became the reigning orthodoxy of American institutions, I warned that the obsession with ethnic categorization would end not in justice, but in absurdity. The warning was simple and, at the time, widely dismissed: when a society replaces citizenship with identity checkboxes, it ceases to evaluate individuals as human beings and begins managing them as statistical assets. The result is not fairness, but a bureaucratic parody of it.

I was told that these boxes were harmless. Necessary, even. That they were temporary correctives meant to level a historically uneven playing field. But systems have inertia, and incentives harden into norms. What begins as remediation ends as entitlement. Today, one can be biologically white, check the box marked “Black,” and face no meaningful scrutiny. Questioning the claim itself is treated as a moral offense. The system does not care about truth. It cares about compliance.

Justice Clarence Thomas has repeatedly emphasized that systems of preferential treatment, even if well-intentioned, risk undermining dignity and merit. In his writings and speeches, he asserts that “equal opportunity, not equal outcome, is the true measure of justice”¹. This aligns precisely with my perspective: the only box worth checking is “American.” Not as a denial of heritage, but as a defense of civic coherence. A nation cannot survive when its institutions reward identity claims over individual merit. Citizenship is not an aesthetic; it is a shared commitment to standards, norms, and expectations that apply equally to all.

I agree with Justice Thomas, and as a Black man, this position placed him and me at odds with the prevailing narrative.

I was expected to celebrate policies that reduced me to a representative sample rather than a thinking individual. I was expected to accept lowered expectations as a form of progress, and to confuse symbolic elevation with substantive achievement. I rejected that bargain. Meritocracy, imperfect though it may be, remains the only system that treats adults as adults. Everything else is managerial paternalism dressed up as compassion.

The irony is that DEI does not elevate minorities so much as it reclassifies them. Individuals cease to be evaluated for what they can do and are instead assessed for what they are presumed to symbolize. This shift does not empower. It infantilizes. It replaces excellence with optics and responsibility with grievance. In doing so, it emasculates institutions by stripping them of their willingness to discriminate between good and bad work, strong and weak ideas, capable and incapable leaders.

The cost of this transformation is not evenly distributed.

While the language of DEI promises inclusion, its implementation produces a quiet sorting mechanism that benefits a narrow professional class while degrading the overall quality of the institution itself.

This dynamic is explored with unsettling clarity in The Lost Generation², which documents how journalism and academia have become inhospitable not merely to white men, but to anyone who does not conform to a narrow moral and aesthetic sensibility. What is striking is not the overt exclusion, but the pervasive fear. The article notes that nearly every subject interviewed understood the rules well enough to know that discussing them openly would be professionally suicidal. The humanities, as one professor admits, are too small to risk dissent. Silence is safer than honesty.

This culture of silence is not accidental.

It is the natural outcome of an institutional framework that treats disagreement as harm and questions as threats. Once race and gender become the primary lenses through which work is evaluated, excellence becomes secondary, and truth becomes negotiable. People learn quickly that advancement depends less on producing exceptional work than on signaling the correct moral posture.

Elite media organizations and universities did not seek out the best Black thinkers or the most formidable minority scholars. They sought individuals who were demographically useful and ideologically compliant. Those who met both criteria were absorbed upward. Those who did not were left behind, not uplifted.

What began as a moral project has devolved into a managerial one. Administrators do not ask whether an idea is correct, only whether it is safe. Editors do not ask whether a story is true, only whether it conforms. Faculty committees do not ask whether a candidate is the best, only whether they fit the desired profile. This is not inclusion. It is risk management.

And yet, the most destructive consequence of this system may be the lie it tells young people, particularly young men. It teaches them that effort is less important than identity, that excellence is suspect, and that ambition must be filtered through the politics of resentment. For young Black men, this message is especially corrosive. It offers symbolic victories in exchange for real achievement and calls that trade justice.

I refused that trade. Not because I deny history, but because I refuse to be trapped by it. Human beings are not data points. Civilizations are not built by quotas. And dignity is not conferred by checking the right box.

If this sounds unfashionable, so be it.

The purpose of scholarship is not to flatter prevailing myths, but to interrogate them. In the sections that follow, I will examine how this identity-first framework hollowed out media and academia, how it sidelined competence in favor of optics, and how it produced what can only be described as a lost generation of professionals trained to manage narratives rather than confront reality.

The tragedy is not that standards existed. The tragedy is that we abandoned them and called the abandonment progress.

Section II: From Black Excellence to Credentialed Tribalism

For most of my life, Black excellence was not an abstraction. It was taught as lineage. Blacks knew our “firsts” the way other cultures know their founding myths. So for examples, Blacks recognize Obama as the first recognized Black president, while whites recognize George Washington as the first president.

For Blacks however, “firsts” represent something much deeper.

For example, Jack Johnson was not merely the first Black heavyweight champion. For Blacks, Johnson proved that dominance could not be legislated away. Johnson bucked all the norms of his time, even marrying a white woman. Johnson lived a “white” life in a time when Blacks were hanged for lesser offenses. Johnson showed Blacks the long game, the future for Blacks.

In another example, Jackie Robinson did not just integrate baseball. He demonstrated that excellence under pressure carried a moral authority no slogan could rival. Robinson knew that he carried the weight of Black America on his shoulders by playing America’s game.

Arthur Ashe epitomized class in the sport of tennis, a sport reserved for rich whites. Thurgood Marshall ascended to the top of his profession to the Supreme Court, and there are many others. The accomplishments of these Black firsts were earned and not participation trophies.

White Americans rarely speak of “firsts.” They never needed to. Their history was embedded into the fabric of institutions themselves. Black Americans, by contrast, cultivated excellence as a collective survival strategy. We understood ourselves as one organism, each success strengthening the whole, each failure risking regression. That is why excellence was not optional. It was existential.

DEI severed that inheritance.

Left to our own trajectory, Blacks would have created a world where we too ignored “firsts”. No longer would our collective be viewed through a prism of a few, but the entirety of the Black race would be respected. As individuals.

The shift from excellence to entitlement did not empower Black communities. It infantilized them. The moral emphasis moved away from achievement and toward grievance. Role models ceased to be builders and became victims. Today, the cultural pantheon elevates figures like Michael Brown Jr., a violent criminal whose death became a political commodity, and George Floyd, a habitual offender elevated into sainthood not because of virtue, but because his death was narratively useful.

This is not remembrance. It is moral sabotage.

When a culture teaches that destruction confers status and that personal responsibility is oppression, it erases the internal discipline that once made excellence possible. DEI did not replace Jim Crow with justice; it replaced aspiration with absolution.

Thomas Sowell has consistently demonstrated that cultures thrive when merit, not grievance, drives reward³. Walter E. Williams emphasized that individual responsibility and internalized standards—not bureaucratic intervention—build lasting success⁴. The current DEI framework runs directly counter to these principles.

Section III: The Lost Men, and the Lost Black Men

If white men of this generation experienced institutional marginalization as a cold, then young Black men experienced it as pneumonia. Both were neglected. One survived weakened. The other has been left gasping for air. The cultural displacement described in The Lost Generation did not stop at white men. It accelerated with Black men. While white men were slowly edged out of corporate pipelines, media ladders, and academic prestige, Black men were quietly written off altogether. Not excluded from advancement, but excluded from expectation.

The result is visible and measurable.

A generation of young Black men now exists largely outside the architecture of career formation. Marriage rates have collapsed. Stable employment is treated as optional. Fatherhood is fragmented across households. Hustle has replaced vocation. Income, when it exists, is episodic rather than cumulative.

This is not because opportunity vanished. It is because aspiration was deliberately misdirected.

Where previous generations of Black men were taught that excellence was armor, grievance became the currency of this generation. Where their predecessors internalized achievement as collective responsibility, this generation were encouraged to externalize failure as systemic inevitability. Career was reframed as assimilation, discipline as betrayal, and stability as surrender.

In this sense, DEI did not merely fail Black men. It actively displaced them.

Corporate America, already risk-averse, discovered that Black women provided a better intersectional hire than Black men. Black women provided a DEI “two-fer”, and thus fit seamlessly into the moral narrative of uplift without confrontation. They became the preferred beneficiaries of diversity initiatives, leaving Black men culturally acknowledged but structurally irrelevant.

This produced a perverse outcome.

Black men were liberated from the expectation of professional success without being liberated from its consequences. If white men were told they were suspect, Black men were told they were unnecessary.

The irony is that this disengagement is often celebrated as authenticity.

Many Black men opted for hustle culture, which is mistaken for independence. Fathering children without forming families is reframed as virility. Opting out of institutions is called resistance. In reality, all are abandonment with better branding.

At least white men were taught to care about careers before being told they were no longer welcome. Black men were taught not to care at all. If that is an advantage, it is a grim one.

Media and academia, now increasingly staffed by people who neither understand nor value men, are incapable of representing this reality honestly. They lack both proximity and permission. The stories they tell flatten Black male experience into either victimhood or menace, neither of which requires expectation, and neither of which demands excellence.

This is how a generation becomes truly lost. Not because it is oppressed, but because it is unclaimed. A civilization can recover from exclusion. It cannot recover from indifference.

Black men were once raised to believe they carried the reputation of an entire people on their backs. That burden was heavy, but it produced giants. Today, they are told they represent nothing but themselves, and even that is negotiable.

Section IV: When a Moral Demand Becomes a Managerial Weapon

In its original conception, the impulse behind diversity, equity, and inclusion was neither radical nor corrosive. It was, in fact, morally grounded. For much of American history, Black existence was acknowledged only in abstraction and ignored in substance. Blacks had risen from slavery to cultural relevance through ingenuity, discipline, and relentless striving, yet their voices remained systematically excluded from the institutions that shaped national life.

This exclusion was not accidental. It was engineered. Democrats, particularly in the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, worked diligently to ensure that Black advancement did not translate into Black influence. Cultural contribution was tolerated so long as it did not threaten political control. Blacks were permitted to entertain, to labor, to inspire, but not to govern narratives or shape policy. Relevance without agency was the compromise offered.

Against this backdrop, the original moral claim behind DEI was legitimate.

Black Americans wanted what conservatives today articulate with increasing urgency: to be heard. Not indulged. Not placated. Heard. The Black opinion mattered because it reflected lived experience within a system that had demonstrably excluded it. Diversity, as it was once understood, meant diversity of thought. Equity meant an equal chance to compete. Inclusion meant access to institutions previously closed by design.

Justice Clarence Thomas has argued in multiple opinions and speeches that “true inclusion requires merit, not tokenism, because dignity depends on earning one’s place”⁵. On those principles, DEI was warranted. It was a demand for participation in the American experiment, not its redefinition. Blacks were not asking for standards to be lowered, but for gates to be opened. The American Dream was not to be redistributed, but instead pursued.

The tragedy is that these principles were not preserved. They were appropriated. Over time, DEI was severed from its grounding in shared humanity and repurposed to accommodate an ever-expanding catalog of grievances untethered from historical exclusion.

Race, once rooted in concrete injustice, became merely one category among many. Sexual proclivities, identity expressions, and subjective self-conceptions were elevated to the same moral plane as centuries of racial subjugation. The language of civil rights was stretched beyond recognition and applied indiscriminately.

This was not expansion. It was dilution.

The framework that once demanded equal treatment under law became a mechanism for infinite exception. Inclusion no longer meant entry into a shared standard. It meant exemption from standards altogether. Equity ceased to signify fairness of opportunity and came to signify parity of outcome. Diversity, once intellectual and experiential, was reduced to aesthetic variation.

In this transformation, DEI lost its moral compass and gained bureaucratic power. What had begun as a corrective for historical exclusion hardened into an ideology that treated disagreement as harm and hierarchy as oppression. The very tools designed to confront injustice were now deployed to suppress debate.

The irony is sharp. Black Americans sought inclusion because they believed in the promise of America. DEI, in its modern form, undermines that promise by rejecting the very mechanisms that made progress possible: competition, challenge, and accountability. It does not amplify marginalized voices. It replaces them with approved narratives.

In this sense, DEI did not evolve. It metastasized, then moved from a demand for recognition into a system of control. From a plea for fairness into a mandate for conformity. From a moral argument into an administrative weapon. And like all systems untethered from first principles, it began to consume itself.

Section V: From Moral Claim to Moral Threat — The Psychology of Silence

Once DEI shifted from a moral demand grounded in shared humanity to an administrative ideology untethered from first principles, silence became inevitable. When inclusion ceases to mean participation in a common standard and instead becomes protection from challenge, disagreement is no longer treated as intellectual difference. It is treated as harm. At that moment, speech becomes dangerous.

This is the psychological hinge on which modern institutions turned. The original civil rights demand invited debate because it appealed to conscience. It asked the nation to live up to its professed values. Modern DEI does the opposite. It asserts moral certainty and then enforces it through professional consequence. What began as a claim for recognition hardened into a moral threat: agree, or be classified.

The Lost Generation captures this fear with remarkable candor. Academics and journalists alike acknowledge that they understand the distortions created by identity-first governance, yet refuse to speak openly about them. Not because they are unconvinced, but because they are rational. The humanities are small. Media is insular. Reputation is portable. Dissent follows you.

This is not cowardice in the traditional sense. It is structural intimidation.

Millennials, burdened with debt, precarious employment, and delayed adulthood, learned quickly that resistance was unaffordable. They entered institutions already captured by DEI orthodoxy and made the only calculation available to them: survival over truth. Going along to get along was not ideological surrender. It was economic triage.

Academia followed the same path. Faculty learned that challenging DEI frameworks meant stalled promotion, hostile review committees, or reputational exile. Media professionals learned that deviating from approved narratives meant unemployment. Silence became the new professionalism.

Over time, this silence rewired institutional culture. Young professionals were not trained to test ideas, but to anticipate offense. They did not ask whether an argument was true, only whether it was permitted. Moral reasoning gave way to moral risk management.

This is how a generation becomes lost. Not because it lacked intelligence or talent, but because it was never allowed to develop moral courage.

The consequences are visible: collapsing enrollment, eroding public trust, and financial instability in universities; dwindling audiences and credibility in media. Silence does not preserve institutions. It rots them.

VI. The DEI Lost Generation: Universities That Spent Richly and Gained Little

We stand amid a generation of higher education that poured treasure into Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as if the next great renaissance hinged on it. Decade after decade, tens and hundreds of millions flowed from endowments, state funds, and tuition revenues into offices, salaries, programs, and consultants — yet too often, tangible progress remained elusive.

At Columbia University, years of investment into DEI bore a peculiar fruit: expense without evident transformation. Millions were spent over more than a decade with little to show in measurable improvements to academic outcomes or a unified campus culture.⁹

The tale repeats with the University of Michigan. An estimated $250 million poured into DEI infrastructure from 2016 through much of the 2020s yielded few of the promised outcomes. Campus discourse remained fraught, criticisms of DEI effectiveness grew louder, and in 2025 the university shuttered its central DEI office under mounting pressure tied to federal funding conditions.¹⁰

Across state lines, the University of Wisconsin system spent roughly $40 million on DEI initiatives in Fiscal Year 2023–24. Yet a state audit concluded that spending was poorly tracked, lacked consistent definitions, and produced no clear metrics of success. The murkiness of purpose precipitated the dismissal of senior DEI personnel — a stark rebuke from the very institutions that once championed the cause.¹¹

In the Deep South, Mississippi’s public universities collectively expended $23.4 million on DEI since 2019, with roughly 70 percent of that going toward salaries. A state auditor’s report highlighted duplication of roles and an absence of evidence tying this spending to meaningful student benefit or demonstrable improvement in campus climate.¹²

At the University of Alabama and Auburn University, a detailed study estimated more than $5 million in DEI expenditures across both schools. Despite the financial outlay, researchers found little measurable return on investment — no clear gains in academic experience or community cohesion linked to these programs.¹³

Even broader analyses reveal systemic problems. In South Carolina’s public institutions, over $8.3 million was spent on DEI in 2022 alone, yet auditors lamented the absence of performance metrics capable of showing value for that money.¹⁴ Nationally, universities hire dozens of DEI administrators — many earning six‑figure salaries — but few institutions produce the hard data needed to justify such largesse.¹⁵

Peer‑reviewed studies tell a similar story. Diversity training and curriculum mandates abound, but rigorous evidence of long‑term impact is sparse. The literature repeatedly notes that without standardized success metrics, DEI efforts can become exercises in well‑meaning bureaucracy rather than engines of measurable change.¹⁶¹⁷

This is the lost generation of academic idealism: a chapter where good intentions were funded lavishly, yet accountability was weak and outcomes were all but unmeasured. Campuses are richer in titles and offices than in evidence of the progress those titles claimed to deliver. For students and families paying tuition, and for taxpayers underwriting public systems, this is not just a policy story — it is a ledger of squandered opportunity.

Section VII: When Ideology Turns Inward and the Question of Replacement

Every ideology eventually confronts its contradictions. DEI has reached that stage. Having exhausted external targets, it now turns inward, consuming the very constituencies it once claimed to protect.

The most visible example is women’s sports. Men identifying as women routinely dominate female athletic competitions, displacing women who trained and excelled under biological constraints. This is not inclusion. It is erasure. Equity becomes inequity.

This ideological experiment has deeper consequences than mere record books. By celebrating men who identify as women as paragons of courage and resilience, the narrative simultaneously casts natural men as toxic, aggressive, or unworthy. The traits that historically drove achievement — competitiveness, physicality, and ambition — are discouraged in boys, while these same traits are valorized when performed under the banner of identity politics.

For real women, the cost is tangible: scholarships, competitive opportunities, and even cultural recognition are redirected to those who were never biologically female.

This is not incidental; it is the logical outcome of a framework that prioritizes ideological symbolism over fairness, biology, and merit. In effect, the Left elevates the emasculated man, glorifying their accomplishments, while sidelining both natural men and real women in the process.

Athletics, once a realm of empirical measurement and honest competition, has become a theater of performative identity, where victories are celebrated for narrative alignment rather than skill or ability. The subtle message to the next generation is clear: achievement and recognition are no longer grounded in reality — they are determined by ideology.

Where does this leave women, as they are continually demoralized by this twisted ideology? Further, consider the broader question: when DEI systematically disables men—the very architects of civilization.

Who is left to produce innovation, advance science, or explore new frontiers?

History offers a stark lesson: male creators built the infrastructure of modernity. Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, and more dared to dream what society deemed impossible. Without men of vision, exploration stalls; invention dies; civilizations regress.

Elon Musk provides a contemporary example.

His work with SpaceX is far more than the spectacle of rockets reaching orbit. SpaceX is humanity’s bridge to the stars, advancing the dream of interplanetary civilization while also building the infrastructure that makes it possible to sustain life beyond Earth.

With Tesla, Musk has forced the world to confront the imperative of green energy adoption. Electric vehicles, solar power, and battery storage are not abstract innovations; they are tools to combat climate change, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and transform global energy markets. Tesla accelerates the world toward a low-carbon future, yet critics focus on personal controversies rather than acknowledging the enormous environmental and economic impact. By creating markets and technological pathways, Musk catalyzes a shift that governments and regulators have long failed to achieve.

Neuralink pushes the boundaries of what it means to be human. By exploring human-machine interfaces, Neuralink promises revolutionary treatments for neurological disorders, spinal cord injuries, and brain diseases. Beyond medicine, it opens the door to enhanced cognitive capacities, potentially allowing humans to coexist and compete with advanced artificial intelligence. In this way, Neuralink represents the next phase of civilization’s evolution — the fusion of biological and technological intelligence, a frontier that could redefine life itself.

Musk’s work with robotics, both at Tesla and in related ventures, is quietly transforming automation, manufacturing, and human labor. Intelligent machines capable of performing complex tasks at scale promise to increase productivity, reduce workplace hazards, and unlock new industries. Musk is not just building cars or rockets — he is orchestrating a civilizational upgrade, reimagining the interaction between humans, machines, and society.

Limitless Accomplishment

His work with Starlink demonstrates a uniquely humanitarian dimension: by connecting isolated communities, providing disaster-response communications, and creating resilience in global information networks, Musk’s innovations foster inclusivity, education, and economic opportunity on a planetary scale. His vision of connectivity is one where knowledge and opportunity are no longer geographically constrained — a literal flattening of the world’s informational landscape. This is not just convenience — it is empowerment: education, commerce, and communication for communities that were previously cut off from the global network⁸. The implications for human development, economic growth, and global equity are staggering.

Yet, despite these transformative contributions, Musk is relentlessly demonized by Leftist elites. He is criticized not for ethics but for disrupting ideological narratives, for refusing to fit the prescribed moral and cultural scripts that DEI orthodoxy demands. A man who expands human potential, democratizes technology, and catalyzes civilization itself is portrayed as reckless or malicious simply because he defies the cultural gatekeepers.

Musk is, in essence, a Da Vinci of our time on steroids: a polymath whose work spans energy, space, neuroscience, robotics, and global connectivity — yet for the Left his genius and tangible contributions are often overshadowed by ideological resentment from leftist ideologues.

Section VIII: Conclusion — Civilization Advances by Being Tested

Civilizations do not improve by affirming themselves endlessly. They improve by confronting failures, questioning assumptions, and subjecting values to stress. Every major moral advancement in American history followed this pattern. Women’s suffrage emerged from confrontation. Civil rights emerged from challenge. Labor protections emerged from resistance.

DEI requires none of these.

It does not invite challenge, and actually forbids it. It does not persuade, but instead penalizes. History offers repeated warnings about what happens when critical or inconvenient voices are silenced.

• Socrates was condemned for questioning the majority’s assumptions, forced to die for his commitment to truth, leaving Athens intellectually diminished.

• Galileo Galilei faced the Inquisition for asserting heliocentrism; empirical truth was subordinated to ideology, delaying scientific progress.

• The Weimar Republic saw moderate, reasoned voices drowned out by extremes, leading to societal collapse and the rise of authoritarianism.

• The Soviet Lysenko affair illustrates how subordinating biology to ideology can devastate agriculture and science alike.

In all these cases, societies suffered when empirical truths or dissenting voices were dismissed, and ideology or narrative alone dominated.

These historical parallels reinforce the stakes of today’s debates over sex, identity, and fairness: ignoring reality and silencing dissent does not simply inconvenience the truth — it erodes the foundations of the culture itself.

The question facing society is whether these lessons will guide policy and practice, or whether the cycle of dismissing reasoned voices will continue to repeat itself.

A system that cannot tolerate scrutiny is authoritarian. A culture that treats excellence as suspicion will never produce it. A society replacing human agency with demographic accounting will find itself unable to build, defend, or renew anything.

Stop Checking the Boxes

I refused to check the box because I refused to surrender responsibility. Progress comes from earning judgment, not avoiding it.

Standards create opportunity, accountability create trust, and competition reveals excellence. When those mechanisms are abandoned, progress stalls. DEI demands less and calls it virtue. The results are unmistakable.

Institutions must decide: pursue truth or enforce narratives, cultivate excellence or manage grievance, trust people or supervise permanently. Civilization advances not by insulating itself from discomfort, but by demanding more of itself.

Let’s hope we can guide the lost generation back to itself. The erosion of truth, fairness, and opportunity has left a definable gap in our cultural and intellectual continuum. From the universities that squander billions on ideology over achievement, to the arenas where real women are displaced, to the demonization of innovators who propel humanity forward, the signals are clear: without intervention, an entire generation risks growing up untethered from reason, merit, and purpose.

Replacing that gap is not merely a matter of policy or education — it is a moral imperative. Restoring a culture that values truth, achievement, and human flourishing ensures that the next generation will inherit not just knowledge, but the ability to shape a civilization worth inheriting.

Footnotes & References

1. Thomas, Clarence. My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir. New York: Harper, 2007.
2. Johnson, Andrew. “The Lost Generation.” Compact Magazine, Dec. 2025. https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
3. Sowell, Thomas. Discrimination and Disparities. New York: Basic Books, 2018.
4. Williams, Walter E. Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1993.
5. Thomas, Clarence. Speech, Federalist Society, 2018. https://fedsoc.org/contributors/clarence-thomas
6. U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, “2019–2022 DEI Spending Report.” https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/
7. Dobbin, Frank, & Kalev, Alexandra. Why Diversity Programs Fail. Harvard Business Review, 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail
8. SpaceX. “Elon Musk’s Mission.” https://www.spacex.com/
9. Columbia University DEI spending critiques and analysis. (specific institutional audits and reporting on Columbia DEI outcomes)
10. Reuters: “University of Michigan shuts DEI office citing federal funding warning.” (Michigan DEI closure and spending context)
11. Wisconsin Public Radio: Audit finds UW system failed to track DEI spending. (Wisconsin audit on DEI tracking and outcomes)
12. Mississippi Office of State Auditor: Report on DEI spending at Mississippi public universities. (Mississippi DEI expenditure and auditor findings)
13. 1819 News: Study reveals little return on investment for DEI at Alabama and Auburn. (Claremont Institute study on Alabama/Auburn DEI ROI)
14. Foundation for Government Accountability: “Defund DEI” report (South Carolina data). (South Carolina DEI spending and lack of performance metrics)
15. FGA higher‑ed DEI staffing and expenditure data. (national context on DEI administrators and costs)
16. PMC systematic review on diversity training outcomes. (peer‑reviewed evidence on diversity training effectiveness)
17. JAMA Network Open: DEI leadership and implementation challenges. (academic research on DEI resource mismatch and accountability)

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