Growing up on the island of St. Thomas, I lived through several hurricanes. During Hurricane Hugo, I huddled in the bathtub as windows shattered and the roof tore from the building. In the morning, we pushed the door open against the debris and saw nothing but devastation. People often talk about the calm before a storm, but there is also an eerie calm after. No birds chirping. No breezes blowing. Just the reality that somehow you made it through as you stand in the midst of the ruin.
That is the feeling for those doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work in higher education right now. The vicious and unrelenting attacks on DEI, through political theater and coordinated disinformation, felt like a hurricane. As with Mother Nature, when the force of the federal government bears down, you hunker down and pray you survive the onslaught. President Trump declared in his State of the Union address that he “ended DEI.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
While the storm is far from over, recent legal developments undercutting the constitutionality of some of the challenges that fueled this frenzy suggest we may be emerging from the most intense and destructive part of the storm. We’re taking stock. We’re standing in the damage, trying to find our footing again. As higher education professionals dedicated to the institutions we serve, we must now seek not simply to survive, but to rebuild.
Here is what we must do now:
Identify and reinforce landmarks. When the landscape is so altered that you lose your bearings, what helps is finding familiar markers. These guideposts let you redraw the map and find a path through the rubble.
Our academic landmarks are still here if we look for them — and if we choose to fortify them. The dialogue or restorative justice program that never stopped meeting, even if it operated under a different name. The faculty member advocating for resources while others stayed out of the spotlight. The student support office that quietly kept international students afloat when public attention turned hostile. Find those landmarks. Recognize their efforts and return their funding. And use them to chart our way back not just to where we were, but to where we said we were headed.
