#colin wright

By: James L. Nuzzo

Published: Jul 17, 2026

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is not merely a set of workplace trainings or campus slogans. DEI is a political movement rooted in critical theory, intersectionality, and “social justice”—ideas that often begin from premises at odds with reality. The result is a worldview that does not merely fail to promote human flourishing, but actively obstructs it.

That obstruction comes at a cost.

A framework for understanding those costs can help explain the damage DEI has done, expedite its removal from institutions, and warn future generations against repeating the mistake. DEI imposes three broad kinds of costs: the cost of commission, the cost of omission,[1] and the cost of correction.

The Cost of Commission

The cost of commission is probably what most people think of first when they think about the price of DEI. It is the cost of doing DEI.

Some of that cost is financial. Between 2016 and 2024, the University of Michigan spent $250 million on DEI staffing and programs, with many DEI staffers earning between $152,000 and $416,000 per year. Federal agencies have spent billions more on DEI-related projects, including the Departments of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services. And because DEI causes bureaucracy to bloat, it reduces institutional efficiency that creates indirect costs that are harder to measure but no less real.

DEI also creates unnecessary noise in systems. In academia, this has been achieved by lowering the bar for what counts as rigorous scholarship. Thousands of DEI-based papers are submitted to journals each year, further clogging an already overburdened and flawed peer-review system. Professors’ inboxes fill with requests to review weak papers dressed up in fashionable jargon. When those papers are eventually published, they pollute databases with junk research that other scholars must waste time navigating around.

But the costs of commission do not end there.

DEI policies and practices also harm human health and well-being. They include the physical and psychological harms caused by “gender-affirming care.” They include the injuries, lost medals, and lost opportunities suffered by women and girls forced to compete against male athletes. They include the damage done by public health authorities telling people that their health is almost entirely determined by “structural” forces, and feminist psychiatrytelling boys and men that their struggles are the product of privilege and toxic masculinity.

DEI judicial activism is another costly act of commission. When judges influenced by critical legal theory treat criminals less harshly because those criminals occupy favored identity categories, the public becomes less safe. Take, for example, the case of a New York City woman who, after being assaulted by a black man, refused to cooperate with prosecutors because she did not want to see another black man go to jail. Weeks later, that same man killed an elderly man in the subway.

Human life, quite literally, can be one of the costs of DEI.

The Cost of Omission

The costs of commission are bad enough. But for every act of commission, there is usually an omission.

Omission means leaving something out, or failing to do something that should have been done. In the case of DEI, the cost of omission is the cost of all the things institutions did not do because they were busy doing DEI instead. It represents the counterfactual: the research not conducted, the students not taught, the time not spent on the actual mission of the institution.

Counterfactuals are hard to quantify because they concern things that never happened. Nevertheless, we can still speculate rationally about the kinds of losses DEI has imposed.

In academic research, the cost of omission includes the knowledge that was never produced because a government agency funded a DEI project instead of a more academically serious one. It includes the papers that were never published—or were delayed in publication—because their conclusions offended the ideological commitments of journal editors. And, in the most extreme cases, it includes the entire careers and research programs derailed because scholars were punished or cancelled for challenging DEI orthodoxy.

In teaching, the cost of omission is the insightful lecture students never heard because a professor was hired for ideological or demographic reasons rather than academic merit. It is the serious course material that was minimized, distorted, or crowded out to make room for DEI programming. It is the hours students spent completing ideological coursework instead of studying history, biology, economics, literature, mathematics, or any number of subjects that might have actually expanded their minds. One analysis estimated that undergraduates in the United States spend a combined 40 million hours fulfilling DEI course requirements.

Finally, there is the time lost by faculty and staff. In 2024, more than 4.1 million people worked as faculty or staff at American colleges and universities. If each spent just 30 minutes a year on DEI-related requirements, that would amount to more than 2 million hours annually diverted from other work. Even if the burden were only 10 minutes per person per year, the total would still be roughly 685,000 hours.

Those hours could have been spent grading papers, answering student emails, improving lectures, reading scholarship, writing papers, collecting data, analyzing results, or simply giving one’s mind a needed rest. Instead, they were fed into the DEI machine.

The Cost of Correction

The cost of correction is the time, money, and labor required to fix the problems DEI creates.

Correction is costly because it pulls people away from their usual productive work. The hours spent cleaning up DEI’s messes are hours not spent building, teaching, researching, writing, discovering, or creating something new. Correctors become institutional janitors, forced to spend their time cleaning up the ideological trash left behind by others.

Examples are everywhere. Individuals and organizations now devote enormous resources to correcting DEI-driven policies, such as Olympic rulesallowing male athletes to compete in women’s sports. Others spend years challenging DEI’s legal overreach, including lawsuits over discriminatory hiring practices and the destruction of sex-based protections for women and girls.

Then there are the institutions created as alternatives to DEI-captured ones. Peterson Academy, the University of Austin, and the growing network of classical liberal schools all exist, at least in part, because so many existing educational institutions have been corrupted by DEI. The same is true of organizations founded to oppose DEI’s excesses, including Reality’s Last Stand, Do No Harm, The College Fix, and Critical Therapy Antidote.

Researchers pay this cost, too. They spend hours, days, and sometimes years correcting crazy DEI research that should never have passed peer review in the first place. Each week, Colin Wright and I devote many hours to this corrective work. But we are not alone.

Consider David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri. In 2021, and again in 2025, Geary took time away from his usual research and teaching in evolution and cognitive development to write essays in Quillette exposing the blatant sex discrimination embedded in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index.

When serious scholars like Geary must spend their days on DEI clean-up duty, something valuable is lost. The public gains a necessary correction. But science loses the work those scholars might otherwise have done.

Residual Costs and the Clean-up Mission

DEI has imposed enormous costs through commission, omission, and correction. Some of the direct financial costs can be quantified. But many of the deeper costs are harder to measure: the wasted time, the institutional decay, the research never conducted, the careers derailed, the standards lowered, and the years now required to repair the damage.

And the costs are not confined to today and the past. They will persist for years.

In a recent analysis, I found that some aspects of DEI in academic articles appear to have peaked a year or two ago. But others have not. Even where the trend has started to decline, the prevalence of DEI language remains far higher than it was before 2019.

That means the institutional clean-up mission is far from over. Universities are now staffed by DEI-era hires who carry these assumptions into their teaching, research, mentoring, peer review, and administrative work. Even if formal DEI offices are dismantled, the ideology will live on inside departments, journals, classrooms, grant committees, and professional associations.

DEI has been a societal nuisance. It has wasted time and money, increased political polarization, lowered standards of performance and civility, and lied to people about the causes of their own circumstances.

None of this matches the image DEI activists like to project: empathy, kindness, inclusion, moral superiority. There is nothing especially empathetic, kind, or moral about uprooting the foundations of human freedom and flourishing and replacing them with lies, discrimination, and a return to tribal warfare.

By: Colin Wright

Published: Jul 17, 2026

Ashley Webb, a man who identifies as a woman and is running for the United States Senate in Maine in the wake of Graham Platner’s sudden withdrawal, went viral recently for promising that he would never lie to or deceive the public. The remark struck many viewers as ironic, given that Webb made it while wearing a dress, presenting himself as a woman, and expecting voters to address him as one.

But I think the more important question is not whether Webb is consciously deceiving anyone. While honesty and transparency are important, being sincere in one’s beliefs is not the same as possessing a sound and reasonable mind. A person can hold genuine beliefs that are wildly detached from reality.

Webb’s online public record reveals that his tether to reality is, at best, alarmingly tenuous, and I believe having a firm grasp of reality should not be viewed as optional for someone seeking one of the most powerful offices in the country.

Webb identifies not only as transgender but also as intersex. Earlier this month, he announced his run for the Democratic nomination in a post titled “Running Openly as Trans Intersex candidate for Senate in Maine.”

The account’s comment history contains some truly extraordinary claims.

Webb claims to ovulate. Webb also claims to experience a monthly period that began when he was 25. However, because Webb was born with “external male parts” rather than “the proper hole,” the supposed menstrual blood cannot leave through a vagina. Instead, Webb believes that a hidden female reproductive tract formed an “exit connection” with his colon, causing monthly rectal bleeding.

“When you don’t have the proper hole, it finds one of two exits,” Webb wrote. “My exit connection was made with my colon. Cause when I get this monthly pain, that is where the blood comes out of.”

Webb has not given any anatomical evidence for this claim. According to his other posts, colonoscopies have not found any such connection, while repeated CT scans have failed to reveal a uterus or ovaries.

Webb does not view these negative findings as evidence against his hypothesis that he’s actually female. Instead, Webb claims that CT scans “can’t find a uterus and ovaries when they enter your gender as male” because doctors supposedly “use a different scanning process for females.”

But that’s not how abdominal and pelvic CT imaging works. A uterus does not become invisible on a CT scan because the patient is simply listed as male.

And rectal bleeding is not a form of menstruation. Menstruation occurs when the uterine lining breaks down and blood and tissue pass from the uterus through the cervix and vagina. Ovulation occurs when an ovary releases an egg. For the blood coming out of Webb’s anus to be menstrual blood, he would need functioning ovaries, a uterus capable of cycling and shedding, and some abnormal passage connecting the reproductive tract to his colon. Those are not conclusions that can be drawn from abdominal pain and rectal bleeding.

Such claims are, frankly, insane.

Webb also posted an image that’s supposedly one of his CT scans. He falsely claimed to be a 5’6’’, 26-year-old female. He’s 6’1’’, 40, and male. He asked other Reddit users whether his “ovaries” looked normal, and simply marked objects on the scan that he believed to be his ovaries.

He said he “just want[ed] to make sure nothing was wrong” with his ovaries, because he “want[s] to be a mom.”

Webb also makes bizarre claims about his chromosomes. In multiple posts, Webb says that a karyotype test came back XY—that of a typical male. Webb also says he was recorded male at birth. Nevertheless, Webb has written, “Pretty positive I am the XX type.”

That claim is impossible to reconcile with Webb’s own description of his body. He reports typical male external genitalia and a pre-treatment testosterone level within the normal male range, indicating functioning testes. Webb is therefore not merely suggesting that he has an obscure chromosomal variation. He appears to believe that he has two fully-functioning testes alongside two fully-functioning ovaries—and, in addition, a uterus capable of menstruation.

Webb’s apparent claim of possessing complete and functional male and female reproductive systems has never been observed in humans. And, given the realities of how sexual development occurs, it never will be.

In the posts I reviewed, Webb did not cite any DSD diagnosis. To the contrary, Webb wrote, “I am trying to get diagnosed,” and elsewhere said that the “proper tests” were still being conducted to confirm his belief. In other words, Webb’s claim of being intersex is a self-diagnosis.

The only real evidence Webb offers is an estrogen panel.

“Have both estrogen 1 and 2 tested,” Webb wrote. “My estrogen 1 was 59pgml and estrogen 2 was 44pgml, my total estrogen 280pgml.”

From this, Webb concluded: “Doctors say I am male, but pretty certain I am female and the doctors are wrong.”

These results appear to correspond to Labcorp’s assays, and they do not show what Webb thinks they show.

Estrone, or E1, is a relatively weak estrogen in terms of its feminizing abilities. Labcorp lists its adult-male reference range as 0 to 174 pg/mL. Webb’s reported E1 level of 59 was therefore entirely within the male range.

Estradiol, or E2, is the main estrogen associated with the female reproductive cycle and the one most relevant to feminizing effects. Labcorp’s standard adult-male range is 7.6 to 42.6 pg/mL. Webb’s E2 of 44 was just 1.4 pg/mL above that upper limit.

Webb’s total-estrogen result of 280 pg/mL was elevated relative to Labcorp’s male range of 56 to 213. The number also falls within Labcorp’s broad reference intervals for premenopausal women. But that does not mean Webb has (or had) a typically female endocrine profile. “Total estrogens” is a broad measurement that does not tell us whether the most biologically relevant estrogens are in the female-typical range, nor does it negate the separate E1 and E2 results.

There is substantial overlap between the lower end of female estrogen reference ranges and the upper end of male ranges. A result’s appearance somewhere within a broad female range does not make it uniquely female.

Webb’s pattern of reasoning is troubling, to say the least. For Webb, every piece of confirming information is accepted, while every piece of disconfirming information is ignored or explained away.

Webb is asking to become one of one hundred people entrusted with making high-level decisions about war, spending, public health, and constitutional rights. Those duties require the ability to distinguish delusion from reality.

Webb has demonstrated a complete inability to make that distinction.

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A troon is divorced from reality. Shocking. 😐

Abstract

The global anti-trans backlash, which seeks to erase knowledge about trans lives and perpetuates epistemic violence, is well-documented. This article examines trans people's efforts to counter epistemic violence by analyzing their experiences of sharing trans knowledge in the media. We propose the concept of affective epistemic labor, which encompasses the emotional resources required to communicate alternative knowledge claims and the communicative strategies that leverage emotions to resist dehumanization. We demonstrate that a sense of responsibility to counter epistemic violence compels trans individuals to act as representatives in the media and share experiential knowledge as an act of solidarity, with the hope of making life easier for others, particularly for trans and queer youth. While trans individuals employ empathy and openness in their communicative practice to foster cisgender solidarity, this article also highlights the limitations of such virtuous epistemic practices in media spaces where transphobic hostility is widespread.

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By: Colin Wright

Published: Jul 2, 2026

Within minutes of the Supreme Court’s decision allowing states to protect girls’ and women’s sports, the headlines arrived in formation.

“Supreme Court Allows States to Bar Transgender Athletes From Girls’ Sports,” said the New York Times. According to NPR, the Court had upheld “bans on transgender athletes participating in women and girls’ sports.” Reuters claimed the Court had cleared the way for “transgender sports bans.” The BBC, NBC, ABC, ESPN, USA Today and others all settled on some version of the same phrase: transgender athletes banned from sports.

They know they’re lying. We know they’re lying. And they know that we know they’re lying.

Let’s be clear: the Supreme Court did not “ban transgender athletes from sports” this week. It didn’t even ban transgender athletes from women’s sports. The Court simply allowed states to pass laws that restrict girls’ and women’s sports to female athletes, which is the entire point of having a female category in the first place. The decision has nothing to do with identity or pronouns. The disputed trait is sex.

You can test this easily.

Suppose a female athlete identifies as a man but is not taking testosterone (a performance-enhancing drug). Is she barred from women’s sports under these state laws? No. In fact, we already saw this with Iszac Henig, whom NBC News described as “a trans male swimmer at Yale University who swims on the women’s team.” There was no national panic over Henig’s presence on the women’s team. Why? Because Henig is a female playing in the female category.

What about female athletes who identify as “nonbinary.” Are they barred from women’s teams for not identifying as men or women? Again, no. In 2018, the Oberlin Review profiled two “nonbinary” female athletes competing on the college’s women’s cross-country and basketball teams. Why don’t you know their names? Because women competing against women is not controversial.

If females with transgender or nonbinary identities are still eligible for female teams, then “transgender athletes” are not what is being banned.

What do the athletes at the center of every dispute have in common? They are male. That is the fact every left-wing headline attempts to obscure.

Consider the Globe and Mail headline: “Supreme Court allows states to ban transgender girls and women from school athletic teams.” That sentence is technically defensible, but in the most slippery way possible. Yes, states may bar certain athletes who identify as transgender woman and girls from certain teams. But which teams, and why? Female teams, because they are male.

But these laws would also bar any “cisgender” male who attempted to play on female teams, and for the same reason—they’re male.

Leaving the issue of sex out of the headlines is obscuring the central point.

Imagine that I—a 40-year-old man—tried to join a tee-ball league for children ages 4 to 7. Let’s say I identified as a trans-age 6-year-old. The state then passed a law saying adults like me could not compete in leagues reserved for small children, and the Supreme Court upholds it. Would any honest newspaper run the headline: “Supreme Court allows states to ban men from sports teams”?

That would be technically true, since the law does indeed ban men from certain sports teams. But it would leave readers with a completely false impression that men were banned from all sports, when in reality we were banned from children’s sports. The age component is the whole story.

This is what left-wing media is doing with the recent SCOTUS decision. Males are not banned from sports. Transgender-identifying students are not banned from sports. Males are barred from female sports. The sex component is the whole story.

This distinction is not complicated. In fact, it’s one of the most easy and straightforward distinctions imaginable. It’s a distinction that has kept our species going for millions of years. The reporters understand it, the editors understand it, and everyone involved in writing these headlines understands it. That is what makes left-wing media coverage so revealing.

If a headline said, “Supreme Court Allows States to Keep Males Out of Girls’ Sports,” readers would immediately understand the case. They might agree or disagree with the ruling, but they would at least understand the central issue. A headline calling it a “transgender sports ban” does the opposite, and causes readers to imagine it as a broad, cruel exclusion of an entire vulnerable class from athletics itself. It tries to turn a simple sex-based eligibility rule into a civil-rights cause.

The language is designed in a way that the ordinary sounds extreme, and the extreme sounds ordinary. The existence of a female sports category is framed as “discrimination.” A male athlete is referred to as a “woman” or “girl.” A law preserving female-only competition becomes a “ban on transgender athletes.” Every word is specially selected to keep readers from making contact with reality.

It’s a mistake is to think that this kind of narrative manipulation is unique to the transgender issue. If major news organizations are attempting to mislead you about something as obvious as the distinction between men and women, imagine what they do on stories where the facts are less familiar and the science and law are more technical and difficult to understand.

They do the same thing on other issues, they just get away with it more often.

Defenders of these Orwellian headlines will say that “transgender athletes” is a common phrase and that everyone understands what it means. But if that’s true, then why not just say it? Why choose the word “transgender” over “male,” especially when headline character space is so limited?

Because accurate wording would weaken the preferred narrative.

The Supreme Court did not ban transgender athletes from sports. It allowed states to preserve the female category.

That is the headline. Everything else is spin.

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Abstract

Black Queer Feminist Alchemy: A Codex of Sociogenic Conditions of Knowing and Being articulates a counterhumanist paradigm and methodological praxis that begins from the premise that Black life does not require validation within dominant epistemological systems to be recognized as fully human. Rather than positioning Black experience as an object of study, this work proceeds from Black queer ways of knowing as already generative, sufficient, and in excess of the categories that have historically sought to contain them. In doing so, it refuses the terms through which humanness has been narrowly defined and reorients inquiry toward the conditions through which knowing and being become possible.

Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s sociogenic principle, this codex develops Sociogenic Condition and Fractal Threading as conceptual and methodological articulations for engaging these conditions. Together, they attend to how humanness is produced, lived, and felt across history, relation, and everyday life, while offering a mode of inquiry that moves through recursion, relation, and return rather than linear progression or resolution. Within this orientation, knowledge is not extracted or stabilized, but emerges through sustained engagement with lived experience, memory, and the ongoing movement of meaning.

Organized as a codex, the work resists a singular, fixed path of reading and instead invites multiple points of entry. Its methodological movements operate relationally, allowing inquiry to remain responsive to the conditions from which it emerges rather than bound to predetermined sequence or outcome. In this way, the codex repositions research as a relational and ongoing practice rather than a closed system of explanation.

By centering relational, affective, and lived modes of knowing, this work contributes a paradigm and methodological praxis to qualitative research that reimagines how knowledge is produced, shared, and lived, expanding the conditions under which inquiry itself becomes possible.

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By: Colin Wright

Published: Jun 25, 2026

For years, we were told not to worry about pediatric gender medicine because it was vanishingly rare. Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, we were assured, were reserved for a tiny number of carefully assessed children with severe and persistent distress.

But when new data show that these treatments aren’t so rare, the same defenders suddenly change their tune: the numbers are no longer reassuring because they are small; now they are reassuring because they are large. More children receiving medical transition means that a previously hidden population finally feels safe enough to pursue the care it has always needed. Higher cross-sex identity persistence after social transition or administering puberty blockers means the interventions were obviously appropriate.

Any outcome, it seems, can be interpreted as proof that “gender-affirming care” is successful. But this is not how evidence-based medicine is supposed to work. This is how an ideology protects itself from falsification.

The latest example comes from Oregon. As Benjamin Ryan first reported, a new study in Research Connections analyzed insurance claims for 868,740 insured Oregon adolescents ages 8 to 17 from 2016 to 2023. The data cover roughly 80 percent of insured Oregonians. The figures were shocking.

By age 17, roughly one in 240 insured Oregon girls was taking testosterone, and about one in 630 boys was taking estrogen. Across all ages in the study, about 1 percent of insured Oregon youth had a gender-related diagnosis. For girls, the figure was 1.5 percent.

These aren’t nationwide numbers. Oregon is an unusually progressive state with an unusually supportive legal and insurance environment for pediatric gender medicine. But they give us a glimpse of what happens when supporters of child transition receive little to no pushback.

The study’s authors don’t view the numbers as alarming. They still describe medical transition as “rare” and emphasize that access remains “limited” even in Oregon. They suggest that the state’s supportive policy environment likely contributed to greater access, while “structural and systemic barriers” may still be holding treatment rates down.

Whatever the data, they support the affirmative model. If the rates are low, that proves the panic is overblown. If the rates are high, that’s evidence that access is improving. If the rates rise, that means stigma is declining. If they don’t rise enough, that means barriers remain. Heads they win, tails you’re a bigot.

This pattern shows up again and again. Years ago, when critics warned that puberty blockers appeared to function less as a “pause button” and more as the first step on a nearly automatic pathway to cross-sex hormones, defenders insisted that persistence meant the children had been properly selected. But if administering puberty blockers changes the likelihood that a child will persist in rejecting their sex from about 15–20 percent to more than 97 percent, then persistence isn’t proof that the child’s transgender identity was fixed all along—it’s evidence that the intervention made permanent what would have been ephemeral.

Kenneth Zucker, one of the world’s leading experts on childhood gender dysphoria, has warned that even social transition is not a neutral act. Changing a child’s name, pronouns, clothing, and social identity is a psychosocial intervention. It may reduce distress in the short term, but it also seems to increase the likelihood that a child’s cross-sex identity persists into adolescence, when puberty blockers and hormones are put on the table.

That possibility should haunt the field. Instead, it is dismissed.

Consider a new Canadian study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health and shared by pediatric psychiatrist and gender medicine proponent Jack Turban on social media. Researchers examined 445 adolescents referred to gender clinics. After a median follow-up of 2.4 years, 97.1 percent still identified as transgender or nonbinary, and only 1.1 percent of those who started cross-sex hormones stopped taking them. The study presents this as reassuring evidence that adolescent transgender identity is extremely stable, and that concerns about regret and potential detransition are overblown.

The same logic appeared in response to the Oregon data. Trans activist Ari Drennen said on X that it “should not be shocking” that 0.4 percent of 17-year-old girls in Oregon are chemically transitioning. But it is shocking. If one in 240 girls aged 17 in a state were receiving any other powerful intervention for a new psychiatric diagnosis that permanently deepened their voice, caused them to grow beards, altered their sexual function, and affected their fertility, no serious person would shrug and say, “Sounds about right.”

At some point, defenders of pediatric gender medicine must answer several simple questions: What result would make you reconsider? Would it be one in 100 girls on testosterone? What about one in 50? What rate of regret or detransition is too high? Would you accept that as evidence that suicidality and mental health don’t improve after treatment? How many systematic evidence reviews must conclude that the evidence of benefit is extremely weak while the risk of serious harm is significant?

We should have insisted on answers long ago, before we ever started performing this medical experiment on children—not after the results come in, when activists have had ample time to devise explanations about why the latest horrific finding is actually wonderful news.

Falsifiability is a basic principle of science. No claim that can be supported by every possible outcome has any business being called scientific or “evidence-based.”

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The thing that never happens.

By: Colin Wright

Published: Jun 19, 2026

The moral panic that swept through higher education after 2020 caused tremendous damage. In the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, antiracism, decolonization, and “social justice,” universities scrambled to avoid accusations of racism by building new offices, making DEI a central factor in hiring and promotion, and going on a hiring spree for “diverse” candidates to artificially augment the non-white racial makeup of faculty.

All of this took place at a time when public confidence in higher education was already in the gutter. At the exact moment universities needed to show the public that they were still committed to truth-seeking and academic rigor, many just doubled down on the ideological rhetoric and actions that caused so many Americans write them off in the first place.

The University of North Carolina (UNC), however, has been one of the few major public universities where trustees have shown some willingness to resist this ideological takeover. In 2021, they refused to approve a tenured appointment for Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind the New York Times’ overtly political “1619 Project,” correctly perceiving that Hannah-Jones wasn’t being recruited for having strong credentials, but rather as the face of a controversial political project that rewrote America’s founding through a highly contested racial narrative.

The trustees’ instincts were sound. Unfortunately, their resolve was not. After protests and national backlash, the board ultimately approved Hannah-Jones for the tenured position. But this backfired in humiliating fashion when she subsequently declined the offer and took a position at Howard University.

Now the board faces a similar test. This time the candidate is Kiran Asher, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who last month was proposed for a distinguished professorship at UNC with tenure. According to reports, Asher’s hire had already been approved by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences, the university-wide appointment, promotion, and tenure committee, and UNC’s new provost, Magnus Egerstedt. By the time her case reached the Board of Trustees, many faculty viewed final approval as a mere formality.

But the trustees exercised their veto power, and voted to reject Asher’s appointment. The backlash has begun.

UNC is a public university created to serve North Carolina and advance its stated mission: “to serve as a center for research, scholarship, and creativity” and to educate the next generation of leaders. Trustees exist to protect that mission over the long term. While they’re not supposed or expected to micromanage every faculty search, when a proposed lifetime appointment raises serious questions about whether scholarship has been subordinated to ideology, they have not only the right but the duty to intervene.

Asher’s work sits squarely inside the activist academic world exposed by the 2018 “Grievance Studies” affair, where skeptics managed to get a half-dozen nonsense papers published in popular, peer reviewed feminist journals. One absurd paper was even chosen as one of twelve “lead pieces” in celebration of the journal’s 25th year in production. Decolonial feminism, postcolonial theory, anticapitalist critique, Queer Theory, and notions of “embodied” and “situated knowledges” run through Asher’s scholarship, as well as allusions to her “postcolonial feminist rage and research” and her insistence that research must be joined to activism.

In one co-authored paper, Asher and Priti Ramamurthy explain that anticolonial scholarship foregrounds how colonial practices create “Eurocentric” forms of knowledge-production that marginalize “other forms of knowing and being in the world.” They write that postcolonial and decolonial approaches agree that “the political task of working toward liberation, decolonization, and social justice must accompany scholarly and academic tasks of analysis.”

These are not one-off papers. Such ideas form the foundation of her scholarship. To win back the public’s trust, we need fewer scholars motivated by politics and “rage,” and more who are committed to cool-headed analyses to uncover truth.

Decolonial scholarship treats the university system and modern science as instruments of oppression that must be destabilized, dismantled, or replaced by alternative “ways of knowing.” In plain English, this means that the standards that made universities useful in the first place—evidence, logic, falsifiability, replicability, disciplined argument, and openness to criticism—are portrayed as forms of oppression rather than tools for discovering what’s objectively true.

A university is an institution built around the production and transmission of reliable knowledge. That requires methods capable of separating what is true from what is merely felt, asserted, or politically useful. The scientific method may have been primarily formalized by white Westerners, but it is not owned by the West. It can be used, checked, and replicated by anyone, anywhere. Its universality is precisely what makes it such a powerful tool. Any ideology that rejects it as a form of Western oppression has no place in institutions committed to rigorous scholarship and the pursuit of truth.

How could Asher’s hiring advance the mission of the university when her personal and professional mission as an activist is to undermine its very legitimacy? If a field or candidate is devoted to replacing disciplined inquiry with identity-based epistemology or activist “praxis,” trustees are allowed to—and should—say no.

They are also allowed to question the judgment of administrators who send such appointments forward. Provost Magnus Egerstedt supported Asher’s appointment and advanced it to the board for final approval. That’s unsurprising, given that Egerstedt was part of UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering Anti-Racism Task Force, an initiative created in the wake of the post-Floyd moral panic.

While that alone should not disqualify his recommendation, it does show that he comes from the same activist culture UNC’s trustees have been trying to resist, and that they were right to not simply defer to his judgment.

Asher’s own comments after her rejection reveal the bullet that was dodged. She suggested that the board’s decision was part of a broader pattern affecting “women and people of color,” especially those doing “gender work, race work, social justice work, non-Christian work, Islamic studies,” and said, “I don’t see this as an individual thing—it’s all systematic.” She also said someone told her “the BOT has gone rogue,” adding that “rogue doesn’t just happen” and that certain things “facilitate a certain kind of rogueness.”

But the board did not “go rogue.” They are not obligated to grant tenured appointments to scholars whose work treats the university’s foundations and mere existence as oppressive structures to be dismantled.

The UNC Board of Trustees made the right call in blocking Asher’s appointment, and other university trustees should use them as a model for what real oversight looks like. Faculty and administrators will complain. Activists will accuse them of political interference. National media may frame the decision as an attack on academic freedom. But academic freedom does not require public universities to grant lifetime appointments to every scholar approved by a process that’s been ideologically captured.

Trustees should expect backlash, and they should ignore it. The pressure to fold is strongest precisely when their resolve matters most.

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