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Cathy Young
The Bulwark
Excerpt: Among the avalanche of executive orders that Donald Trump loosed upon his return to power are several related to high-profile culture-war issues. Foremost among these is a pair of executive orders relating to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI, sometimes known as DEIA for “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility”). One bans DEI programs in the federal workforce and corporations with federal contracts. The other directs the government to investigate “DEI discrimination and preferences” across the private sector, including large academic institutions.
Many critiques of identity politics have been valid and necessary. But DEI opponents should be wary of linking their cause to the Trump administration, which is all but certain to use colorblind fairness as a smokescreen for anti-woke identity politics—and which has started its first week with a spree of presidential lawlessness.
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The protests that greeted Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival a UCLA School of Law in April were not surprising. Law students, especially at highly ranked schools like UCLA, have become notoriously intolerant of disfavored speakers coming to campus — and few institutions are quite as polarizing as DHS in the “Abolish ICE” era. It was striking, however, that the students who organized the interruptions of Percival’s presentation — with heckling, hacking coughs, cellphones, and the occasional profanity — did exactly what “snowflake” students have been ridiculed and denounced for doing when encountering someone they don’t agree with.
What happens when an entire profession can’t see what’s hiding in plain sight in its own data? That puzzle animated Stony Brook University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s keynote at the Heterodox Academy 2026 West Coast Regional Conference, held recently at UC Berkeley.
The deeper problem, he contends, is not bad-faith activism but a structural one: peer review, editing, and committee deliberation only correct for bias when the people doing the correcting actually differ from one another, and the academy and the press increasingly do not. His full speech is transcribed below.
Two years after protests over the Israel-Hamas war roiled college campuses, resulting in the arrests of more than 3,000 students and faculty, a new study finds that students generally oppose punishing “objectionable speech,” unless they consider it “highly harmful.”
The study, conducted by researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Colorado and Stanford and Columbia Universities and published in April in Science Advances, also found that students’ views of objectionable speech depend largely on whom it is targeted at.
