The DEI Battle Is Just Beginning

Last week, Katrina Armstrong, Columbia University’s interim president, resigned—officially, to return to her prior role in the university’s medical schools. But the timing suggests otherwise. Amid a backlash from faculty and student activists over her perceived cooperation with the Trump administration, Armstrong was likely pushed out. The irony, as Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald notes, is that Armstrong hadn’t fully complied. When federal officials called for a ban on masks used to conceal identities during campus protests, Columbia issued a carefully worded policy: masks would be prohibited when used “in the commission of violations” of university rules or state law. In other words, mask-wearing could continue—as long as the intent wasn’t openly disruptive.

Armstrong’s ouster is the latest sign of higher education’s volatility. “The professional antiracists in faculties and bureaucracies won’t cede power without a fight,” Mac Donald writes, “since uprooting the diversity ideology constitutes an existential threat.”

Scott Gerber was a respected law professor at Ohio Northern University—until he began speaking out against the university’s DEI policies. He then found himself under investigation, barred from campus, and ultimately forced to resign. Gerber sued; the university responded with a retaliatory countersuit. “Gerber’s ongoing mistreatment at the hands of his former employer,” writes Manhattan Institute director of constitutional studies Ilya Shapiro, “is a reminder that, even as Donald Trump’s election marked a broader political and cultural ‘vibe shift,’ the discriminatory practices entrenched in higher education have not gone away—nor have the administrators who enforce them.”

Socialist assemblyman Zohran Mamdani is gaining ground in New York’s mayoral race with a campaign centered on affordability. But as Liena Zagare reports, his proposals—including a $100 billion public housing plan and steep tax hikes on businesses—are economically unsound and politically unworkable. Mamdani’s rise should serve as a warning to his rivals. They’ll need to address New Yorkers’ cost-of-living concerns, too—but with solutions rooted in fiscal reality.

From the winter issue, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Eric Kober reflects on New York City master builder Robert Moses and his complicated legacy. “City planners have advanced past the thinking of Moses’s era, yes. But they have continually returned to his lessons,” he says.

In Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, Edward Fishman explores how nations, including the U.S., can turn the global economic system against their political adversaries. But as Robert Bellafiore Jr. of the Foundation for American Innovation notes in his review, the alternative to such economically oriented conflict may be even worse. “If the global order continues down the path toward multipolarity, and American economic weapons weaken,” he writes, “we may find ourselves resorting to the old-fashioned form of nation-state conflict.” Read his full assessment here.

“Housing vouchers will spread the gangs, crime and blight to other neighborhoods. Liberals love trying to force working class people to solve the problems the elite created, at the expense of the working class people who can ill afford it.”

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