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When I arrived from the University of Washington to University of California, Los Angeles, in August 2025, I discovered that my office—the new Office of Inclusive Excellence—had been fielding anxious concerns about the unceremonious death of DEI. To attend to our colleagues’ worried queries and emotions, my chief of staff began a meeting with an opening exercise in which he asked administrators to reflect on the loss of that moniker and project.
But really, what was there to mourn? Would colleagues sheepishly peel their Black Lives Matter stickers off the front of their computers after one too many side eyes at department meetings? Would their Pride flags be shifted out of their Zoom frame at the suggestion of a “well-meaning” mentor after that Valentine’s Day Dear Colleague letter? I imagined our beleaguered colleagues dumping out backpacks full of allies’ emails, texts, direct messages and black Instagram screens that signaled guilt, not change, performative activism, not activism.
What would the rapid rise and even quicker fall of DEI mean for those dedicated scholars and administrators who had devoted their lives to transforming the university, to making it an institution that reflects the totality of our community? Notably, there was no mournful wailing, no gnashing of teeth. My peers did not decry the end of DEI.
To be sure, they were exhausted by the orchestrated and mean-spirited attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion. They missed being able to speak forthrightly about inequality. They yearned for the university’s declared commitment to equitable changemaking and the funding that followed. But this group did not bear allegiance to the three reviled/revered letters, D-E-I.
For my part, I felt liberated by their fierce energy and wondered whether this dire time could help us build something new, something bolder and better as we freed ourselves from the aspects of DEI many of us never wanted. From sympathetic words unaccompanied by empathetic action. From the tendency to place the burden of creating more inclusive spaces upon the very people left out of privileged spaces. From DEI’s grandiloquent statements that never brought meaningful change to policy or practice or procedure.
Could this new era, with all its anxieties and attempts at producing chaos, actually portend increased opportunity because we can now relieve ourselves of the many things that didn’t work? It must.
So, What Didn’t Work?
With the zealousness of new converts, mainstream industries throughout our country—higher education, corporations, health care, government, law firms—largely presented the DEI of the early 2020s as a new intervention. This ignored its roots in movements ranging from civil rights, through the 1960s- and ’70s-era freedom struggles for race, gender, sexuality and disability rights, and more recently, through Black Lives Matter. Moreover, DEI handed over the mike, but not the keys, to some specially chosen spokespeople (whom communication scholar Subrina Robinson calls “spoketokens”)—people of color, LGBTQ folks and, notably, white women (who, as the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action, also disproportionately occupied the ranks of chief diversity officer posts at the height of DEI, as one report estimated that three-quarters of all CDOs were white and just over half were female).
In the DEI era, many institutions made statements of outrage and proclamations of change that remained unattached to metrics: It was aspirational, handed down from above. Deliverables remained murky, the work siloed. This approach did not sufficiently empower those who had been fighting for decades, both inside and outside their institutions, to incorporate systemwide changes or create collective action.
Instead, responsibility and emotional labor lay with the few instead of the whole. Many had been doing this work for decades and were burned out by continuing demands on their expertise and the inability of institutions to commit to meaningful change. Many were experiencing what I have diagnosed as racial exhaustion.
And yet, a sparkling moment of hope, a tempered moment of promise, also animated the DEI era. I’m thinking of a time when some institutions not only proclaimed that the concerns of the minoritized mattered but followed up that proclamation with funding, which began to trickle (if not flow) toward the amelioration of years, decades, centuries of inequality. New faces began to change the looks of some institutions, hired with the promise that students could “be it” because they could “see it.” DEI created room for the counternarratives of communities being understood through their assets instead of perceived deficits.
This recent DEI era lasted three short years, from the televised murder of George Floyd in 2020 to the Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious college admissions in 2023. Jobs designated as “DEI” peaked in the fall of 2020, with a 123 percent rise over a matter of months. And then the number of these jobs fell. As local ripples against DEI became a national tidal wave, the gains toward fairness rolled back, as if they were never meant to stick.
What Comes Next?
Those who have been agitating for race, gender, sexuality and disability equity for much longer than 2020–23 have long emphasized that the few minoritized folks designated as spokespeople shouldn’t have to be in the room for the concerns of all to register. Critic Sara Ahmed has identified that latter prospect as the true institutionalization of diversity, “when it becomes part of what an institution is already doing.”
Our task now is to make that prospect real, not just aspirational. To get there, organizations are embracing a wide variety of terminology that reflects a whole systems approach, one that spreads the responsibility for creating fair institutions throughout those very institutions. At UCLA we are doing this through the framework of inclusive excellence.
Inclusive excellence demands that universities share accountability among all members of our community. UCLA’s chancellor, Julio Frenk, describes this as a deeply “integrative concept” where inclusion and excellence “are mutually reinforcing. Excellence without inclusion deepens inequality and resentment. Inclusion without excellence leads to waste and frustration.”
The shared accountability at the heart of inclusive excellence eases the disproportionate burden on those who have been shouldering the majority of the work. Inclusive excellence also eliminates distracting and empty forms of performative activism that stood in the way, again in the words of Frenk, of “the achievement of the highest standards of quality and the expansion of access to larger and more diverse groups.”
Inclusive excellence means ensuring that every space at the university is for all of us. It’s not about a single faculty member solely advocating for a curriculum that reflects all. It’s not about a single staff person speaking up about an unfairly administered policy. It’s not about a solitary student bearing the burden of representing their entire culture in a classroom. Inclusive excellence means all of us are actively engaging our entire community for the inclusion of that whole community. We all must evaluate what barriers are in place and then work to dismantle them. We all must insist that every member of our community has found their rightful mentor, sponsor and coach. Inclusive excellence identifies, amplifies and champions all our pluralistic brilliance in every space.
Let me provide an example. Decades of data show that programs such as McNair Scholars, which identifies and supports emerging, pluralistically excellent students in pursuing doctoral education, have helped create a university that looks more like our population. And in the past two years we have seen these programs come under attack. The solution that inclusive excellence proposes is not to abandon these talented students, but rather to spread accountability for them to all areas of the university that act as pathways to the professoriate.
Inclusive excellence might ask, for example, if a departmental honors program reflects the population of all that department’s majors. If not, how can the department introduce honors pathways to students well before they apply for honors in their junior year, declare their major in their sophomore year, take their first class freshman year or even begin learning about the university as a high school, middle school or elementary school student? What lessons about recruitment, retention, research opportunities, mentorship and support can departmental honors programs learn from McNair so that departmental honors reflect all students? This is inclusive excellence. And it’s a fundamentally different approach than DEI.
Inclusive excellence means holding our entire university accountable for the success of every member of the community. This means we are going to have to work with one another more intentionally across our differences. We will have to learn how to bear the heat that psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt calls friction.
Our communities need to see and understand and celebrate all of us across our differences, and for our pluralistic excellence. We do this by fully identifying barriers, those both easy for most to identify and difficult for many to spot, in order to dismantle them together. We do this through our intentional connections, our respectful engagement, our deep learning and our challenging and constructive dialogues. Bidding farewell to DEI authorizes higher education to galvanize the principle of collective accountability for community success in all that we do.
