DEI: Shiny new acronym, same old discrimination

A senior program manager at Washington University in St. Louis did exactly what every diversity, equity, and inclusion program claims it wants employees to do. She spoke up when something felt like discrimination .

In January 2025, her employer’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion split a mandatory training into what it called “shared racial identity spaces” — in other words, Zoom breakout rooms segregated by race. She was the only Black staffer on her team, and told the office beforehand that this would leave her isolated. The university ran the session anyway.

The manager complained internally, then filed a charge with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Her department eliminated her position months later. A university diversity official called it a miscommunication and defended the racial breakout rooms as anti-racism work.

Last month, the commission sued Washington University . Its acting General Counsel Catherine Eschbach put it bluntly: This employee was separated from her white colleagues exactly as she feared, then lost her job for objecting to it.

I have spent 30 years building governance and compliance frameworks for family offices, and I have sat as a court-designated expert witness explaining fiduciary duty to judges and juries from coast to coast. When you build a policy, you look at what it actually does, not at what its name promises.

When you sort people by race into rooms, committees, hiring pools or admissions tiers, you are discriminating by race — full stop. It doesn’t matter whose photo is on the recruiting brochure. It doesn’t matter how many anti-racist tracts or videos you force your employees to read or watch. Title VI and Title VII carry no asterisks for supposedly good intentions.

The pattern runs straight through higher education. In May, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division found that Yale School of Medicine had studied how to use racial proxies to work around the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on race-conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions . The school was admitting Black and Hispanic applicants with consistently lower grades and test scores than their white and Asian peers.

Investigators had flagged the same conduct at UCLA’s medical school days earlier. Three weeks ago, the department turned to Duke University School of Law , whose admissions statistics say it all: In 2024 and 2025, rejected white and Asian applicants had higher median LSAT scores than Black applicants who were admitted. For the 2024 admitted class, the median LSAT score for successful Black applicants was 164; for successful Hispanic applicants, it was 170; white applicants needed a 172 and Asian applicants a 173 to get in the door.

Duke had made cosmetic changes after the Supreme Court’s ruling, but then, according to the department’s findings, kept sorting applicants by race through diversity essay prompts and proxies like Pell Grant status. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon put it plainly: Schools do not get a free pass to discriminate against white, Asian or any other students just because they believe their intentions are good.

More recently, the department added George Washington University’s medical school to the list of targeted institutions. Barred from checking race on forms, it instead used essay questions to infer race. It then inferred putatively Black students with significantly lower MCAT scores than their white and Asian peers.

In each case, the Justice Department offers the same choice: Settle voluntarily or else face a lawsuit. Columbia already agreed to a $200 million settlement that requires it to eliminate race preferences from hiring and admissions and end race-based DEI benefits. Officials say Cornell and Brown are negotiating similar deals.

Duke, Yale, and Washington University are not outliers. In May, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the New York Times for denying a promotion to a white male employee under a diversity program the paper had been boasting about since 2021.

In March, Planned Parenthood of Illinois paid $500,000 to settle claims that it segregated employees by race during mandatory affinity caucus meetings and allowed white staff to be harassed under an anti-racism banner. An Asian job applicant collected another $500,000 from HCL America after a recruiter flagged him as insufficiently “diverse.”

Four major law firms signed consent agreements disavowing their own DEI hiring targets rather than face the commission in court. The White House ties this push to its 2025 order, “ Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy, ” which says that outcome gaps alone are not proof of discrimination. This is not a handful of surprised bad actors — a business model normalized over the course of decades, now hitting the wall of federal civil rights law one case at a time.

Defenders will say that intent matters, and that DEI exists to correct generations of real discrimination, not to add to the pile. I understand the impulse. But curing an old wrong with a new sorting system built on the same premise — that a person’s race tells you something useful about how to treat him or her — just moves the wrong onto a different set of shoulders. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not march so the country could eventually pick a different favored race. He wanted the sorting to end.

Every general counsel, university provost, and human resources director should pull training slides and admissions rubrics off the shelf this week, not next quarter. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Justice Department now treat much of their “diversity” language as evidence of wrongdoing, not as a shield.

Boards funding programs built on racial sorting are not managing risk — they are underwriting it. Civil rights law was written to end the practice of deciding what people deserve based on the color of their skin. Giving that practice a new acronym never made it legal or moral, and it never will.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management.