Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as that, my friend. Professional associations in the Humanities aren’t funded federally. Our funding comes 100% from annual memberships. This means, we are private individuals who associate in a freely chosen way and can issue any statements we want. There is such a thing as institutional memberships but, in the age of budget cuts, they are extremely rare and financially trivial.
As for the university, again, we aren’t federally funded. We are funded by the state of Illinois. If the Governor of Illinois opposed DEI statements, we’d take them down ASAP and pretend they never existed. Unfortunately, the Illinois GOP is for some reason incapable of running anybody not completely demented, so we are stuck.
At my university, there is a couple of people who get federal funding but that’s as close as we get to federal money. Our mission is to provide free (or extremely cheap) higher education to the residents of Illinois. This is a good, noble mission but we exist outside of any federal interests. The only way that we could be impacted on the federal level is through the accreditation commissions. If the existing ACs were dismantled and new ones were created with a completely different set of accreditation criteria, that would help. These commissions come by once every 7 years, and we won’t have another until 2032 (there’s one currently accrediting us). So even if accreditation commissions change, for it to impact us, it would take the better part of a decade.
I’m sorry this is not the fun response everybody wanted. It’s not one I want myself. But DEI will exist for as long as people want it to exist. You can’t flip a switch and make it go away. The steps where we got to make an appearance in the marketplace of ideas, argue our case, and win can’t be skipped.
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