DEI isn't dead. But NYU policy expert says the road ahead will be challenging.

DEI – Diversity, equity and inclusion – initiatives have been having a tough time of it.

President Donald Trump last week put federal DEI staffers on leave, took aim at state and local DEI efforts and blamed a fatal air collision over the Potomac on diversity hiring.

Before that, the Supreme Court two years ago ended race-conscious college admissions, a precursor to a drop in Black student admissions at Columbia and other selective schools. More recently, boardrooms from Main Street to Wall Street have curtailed DEI initiatives.

Even so, DEI isn’t dead, according to David Glasgow, the executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at New York University.

He is the co-author of “Say the Right Thing: How to Talk about Identity, Diversity, and Justice,” and teaches at NYU School of Law.

Glasgow discussed the recent developments on DEI, and the road ahead, with Gothamist. Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

How did we get to this moment? In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis nearly five years ago, there was a huge spike in DEI job postings. Did this feel substantive to you or did it feel kind of fashionable?

I would say it's a little bit of both. I do think that that moment after the murder of George Floyd led many individuals and organizations across this country to genuinely reflect on how they could do better with respect to issues of racial justice and social justice. I believe that the Black Lives Matter movement at that time was recognized as the largest protest movement in American history.

So I do think that there was a lot of genuine pressure on organizations from employees and other stakeholders who really do care about advancing these issues to improve their systems, their hiring and promotion systems, for example, mentorship and the like. So we saw an increase in hiring of diversity officers and personnel working within these companies, philanthropic commitments, internal task forces and so forth, dedicated to addressing these issues.

Now there were some organizations that I think got on board with that because of the social and political pressure that were probably never deeply committed to it. And it was a kind of performative activity that they were engaged in. But like everything, I think it's kind of a mix, some genuine, some not so genuine, but it was a reflection of, I think, the zeitgeist at the time.

To what extent has DEI succeeded at changing the demographics of American workplaces?

Well, that's a very tough question because it's hard to disentangle or measure how much of a DEI program is responsible for the change and how much are just broader changes in demographics or in cultural or social change more generally.

If you wind the clock back 50 years or so, and you just look at, say, CEOs of the top American companies, 100% of them were white men. I think that's now around 70%. So that's a change. It still means that white men who are 30% of the population have roughly 70% of the positions. So there's still more than double what you would expect if these decisions were made in line with the demographics of the country. Now how much you can attribute that to DEI versus other factors is for social scientists to assess. But I do think it's a reflection of the fact that organizations have put a lot of energy into trying to diversify personnel.

Who has benefited most from DEI initiatives?

There's some research that's been conducted [showing] that affirmative action kind of programs generally, which I take to be the predecessor of DEI, have benefited white women considerably. So a lot of the progress has been made with respect to issues of gender and gender representation, but we know that white women have tended to advance more within organizations than women of color.

Let's talk about the backlash. What’s behind it?

I think there is a sizable number of people in the United States who do oppose racial and social progress on issues like gender, race, LGBTQ identity and so forth. There is a sort of deep conservatism among some in the American populace. There's analyses by people like historian Carol Anderson in her book, "White Rage," that suggests that throughout American history, any period of meaningful progress for Black individuals has been met with a fierce white backlash.

So I do think some of it is just sort of organically in the population. At the same time, I think that some kind of elite, anti-DEI groups are doing as much as they can to shape the narrative and shape public thinking on these topics.

Do you expect some institutions to become, say, whiter and more male because of this counter-DEI movement?

Yes. Partly because, as I'm sure you're aware, the Supreme Court decided in June of 2023 that race-conscious admissions is unconstitutional in higher education, which is already having an impact on the diversity of university classes and therefore on the diversity of the applicant pool for many jobs. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if over the coming years what we see is that the effect at the college level and now the DEI backlash in workplaces leads organizations to sort of wind back some of the progress that has been made and perhaps have even more homogeneous workplaces

Can companies just do DEI without calling it as such or without bringing attention to it? Or does that defeat the point?

No, they can do that. In fact, there's an active debate right now within the DEI community about whether or not to just abandon that term DEI and rebrand it as something else. Already we see, in fact, some of the organizations that have retreated from DEI, I think that that's exactly what's going on. I don't think that they've actually retreated from the work of trying to improve the diversity of their personnel or create a welcoming culture. I think they're just calling it "belonging," or maybe they're leaning into the term "inclusion" rather than all three letters of the acronym, or some are adopting terms like "culture and engagement" or leaning into "employee wellness" or "equal opportunity."

So I think we're going to see a whole range of different branding going on. Whether or not that takes care of the backlash remains to be seen because I think a lot of the opposition to DEI is not really based in opposition to the term DEI. They're opposed to the project of what DEI is trying to achieve.

Do you have any advice for organizations that continue to abide by DEI principles that are struggling to navigate this moment?

Yeah, my advice would be to say: Don't over-comply with the law.

Meaning you do need to conduct an audit with your legal counsel of your DEI programs, because it's quite clear that this administration is going to be virulently anti-DEI and investigate organizations that they perceive to be doing work that goes against their agenda.

But it would be a mistake to overcorrect and think that the safest thing to do is just to abandon all DEI programs, because in doing that you might create a workplace culture that is unwelcoming or even toxic to people from marginalized backgrounds and therefore create even more legal risk for yourself just on the other side, increasing your risk of getting sued by traditional discrimination plaintiffs.