Top Research University Skirts Civil Rights Laws, Pushes DEI

Carnegie Mellon University is skirting civil rights laws, making the university ripe for investigation. Pennsylvania lawmakers and the U.S. Department of Education should use CMU as an example to demonstrate that private schools are not above the law.

CMU, which has had contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense totaling some $2.8 billion since 2008, is a private research university that ranks among the most competitive institutions in the world. The university is at the forefront of research on artificial intelligence and conducts training programs for military officers on effective AI use.

Yet the university still operates a diversity, equity, and inclusion office despite a White House executive order prohibiting federal contractors from engaging in discriminatory DEI practices. In February, a federal appeals court allowed this DEI prohibition to stand, along with another order against DEI issued by the Trump administration. 

CMU promotes DEI materials, and officials feature DEI content across the school’s campus and curriculum. In fact, university staff recently displayed a PowerPoint describing how so-called microaggressions can be “gendered,” an idea that is part of the loosely organized DEI catalogue.

The concept of “microaggressions” dates back at least as far as the 1970s, though Columbia University professor Derald Wing Sue is among those who resurrected the notion over the last decade. Microaggressions are a slippery idea because the perpetrators are supposedly unconscious of committing them. Researchers find that even the victims also may not be aware of them and need to have their consciousness raised by learning to recognize minuscule gestures.

This creates a paradox: You do not know if you have committed a microaggression, and you do not know that you have received one that should offend you—so did anything really happen?

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According to CMU staff, yes. Even addressing a group of people by saying “Hey, guys!” constitutes an insult. You could be guilty of a microassault, a microinsult, or a microinvalidation. And the presentation even provides contact information for the university police, indicating students should be prepared to call the authorities over a microaggression.

The microaggression is “gendered” when the offender’s actions involve a person of one “gender” offending someone from a different “gender.” But microaggressions can be alleged in the area of race, too. When more than one identity (such as sex or race) is “oppressed” at the same time, DEI advocates call this “intersectionality.”

Under critical race theory, radical law professors argue for solidarity among all the “oppressed,” adding economic class to the other categories. For them, life is a constant struggle between workers and capitalists, and also between individuals from different races. This is how theorists such as the late Derrick Bell, former Harvard professor, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, who conceived of intersectionality, expanded Karl Marx’s socialist idea that the world is just waiting for the next working-class revolution. Capitalism is inherently racist to these theorists, and, despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964, American law is systemically oppressive. 

Intersectionality is now part of many school curricula at the K-12 and postsecondary levels. Educators are teaching students to hunt for different ways in which they can suffer insults, then compound the insults by way of identity politics.

The CMU presentation and its applications come notably close to conflicting with civil rights statutes because individuals are encouraged to treat people more severely based on their group identity. It looks like CMU is advocating for disparate treatment on the basis of sex. Depending on how members of the CMU community are expected to treat mere speech and minor gestures, CMU could be breaking the law.

CMU is already facing scrutiny from the Pentagon because of the school’s relationship to foreign entities. CMU receives more funding from foreign sources than any college in the country except Harvard. Entities from both China and Russia send money to CMU.

CMU’s presentation on gendered microaggressions may or may not be illegal. But the presence of DEI initiatives on campus, the likely applications of the microaggression PowerPoint, and the funding from countries of concern all warrant a closer look by state and federal officials.