Trump’s Cornell deal leaves a ‘zombie’ DEI agenda ready to rise again

Cornell University’s deal with President Donald Trump, announced Friday, ended the administration’s civil rights investigations into the school — and left Cornell’s destructive Diversity, Equity and Inclusion agenda diminished, but not destroyed.

What remains of Cornell’s DEI apparatus now resembles a zombie: It exists but is not quite alive.

And it could yet resurrect itself.

Each side benefits from the deal: Cornell, where I have taught law for 18 years, will get hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of federal grants that were put on hold as the government probed the campus response to the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel and the harassment of Jewish students.

Cornell will pay a $30 million penalty and invest another $30 million in agricultural research — rounding errors, given its $6 billion annual budget.

The federal investigation was well founded.

One now-former student is serving prison time for threatening Jews on campus; a Cornell professor set off an Internet firestorm when he said he felt “exhilarated” by the Hamas rampage; anti-Israel activists called for an Intifada, set up encampments, and disrupted university events.

Many Jewish students — including some who testified before Congress — felt under siege.

Cornell now gets to crow that it upheld “principles of academic freedom, independence, and institutional autonomy.”

Indeed: That unfettered independence created a faculty monoculture of leftism that brewed those toxic campus incidents, and it remains unchanged.

Here on campus, of course, we’re hearing howls of anger that the school has bent the knee to the Orange Man.

But Cornell’s president and trustees had a duty to protect the university that faculty, students and internet trolls don’t have, and for administrators this is Mission Accomplished.

The White House also touted the deal as a win, saying it ensures Cornell “upholds merit-based standards, complies with Federal law, and fosters an environment of academic excellence and safety for all students.”

It’s important to the wider project of higher-education reform, putting pressure on other elite academic institutions to fall in line.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the deal a “transformative commitment from an Ivy League institution to end divisive DEI policies.”

Nonetheless, it leaves Cornell’s DEI programs and initiatives in place.

I have long advocated that Cornell’s DEI programs “must be removed wholesale, weeded out root and branch” — because they have poisoned the entire university by “centering race and group identity.”

The deal does not rip out DEI by the roots, as much as I hoped it would.

I shouldn’t be surprised: A university that mandates an absurd virtue-signaling “land acknowledgement” at the start of every official event will likely go to any lengths to retain its DEI religion.

And Cornell has already shown us that it sees DEI reform as a mere word game — it has rebranded its DEI offices with the term “inclusion and belonging,” and has changed its former Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives into the Office of Academic Discovery and Impact.

The deal does jeopardize DEI at Cornell in important ways, however.

The agreement forces Cornell to train its faculty and staffers with a July document from the Justice Department, “Guidance for Recipients of Federal Funding Regarding Unlawful Discrimination.”

That’s hugely important: It means the university has acknowledged the government’s expectations for the most ideologically pernicious group on campus — the faculty.

No faculty member can now claim he or she was unaware of the Justice Department’s guidelines on civil rights.

But Cornell cannot be trusted.

Already its president is mocking claims the deal changed anything, assuring the community that the federal guidance is not binding — comments that arguably violate the agreement to use the guidelines going forward.

Yet even as Cornell laughs in Trump’s face, his executive orders on ending DEI in the federal government and in the private sector, along with federal law, give his Justice Department and other agencies ample power to enforce both the letter and the spirit of the deal.

The Equal Protection Project, which I founded, can and will notify the Attorney General and other officials of DEI activities we consider to violate the law, but we will need federal authorities to act promptly and forcefully.

Make no mistake: In a netherworld of word games and obfuscation, Cornell’s DEI lives on — and it will come roaring back if higher education waits Trump 2.0 out.

Only ongoing federal enforcement and monitoring will short-circuit a future DEI zombie apocalypse.

William A. Jacobson is a clinical professor of law at Cornell University, and founder of The Equal Protection Project.