Billionaire Tech Investor And Trump Adviser Says Colleges Will ‘Pay The Price’ For Promoting DEI
Marc Andreessen, founder of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), said universities will “pay the price” for promoting diversity and allegedly discriminating against supporters of President Donald Trump.
The comments come from leaked messages to a WhatsApp group used by White House officials and technology leaders, according to screenshots of the chatfrom May and June reviewed by The Washington Post.
Andreessen criticizes universities
The investor criticized Stanford and MIT, sending out a rapid-fire series of messages, according to screenshots and two members of the chat, who spoke to The Washington Post anonymously.
“I view Stanford and MIT as mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point,” Andreessen wrote on May 3. He described a “counterattack” against universities and urged the federal research funding agency National Science Foundation to receive “the bureaucratic death penalty.”
“The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal,” Andreessen said. “When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”
Where were the messages sent?
These messages were sent to a WhatsApp group used by Trump officials to speak about artificial intelligence policy with several tech figures and academics, according to screenshots of the chat from May.
Members in the group have varying political views and were established in 2023 to connect investors with people who have similar interests in open development of AI
A spokesperson for the White House said members of the Trump administration in the group were engaging in a personal capacity, no official policy was discussed, and that Andreessen was not an official adviser to the president.
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Universities ending DEI initiatives
In March, the Department of Education launched investigations into 52 universities in 41 states, claiming that these schools were using “racial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities,” as reported by NPR.
Additionally, the department’s Office of Civil Rights stated that 45 schools violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, particularly in their graduate programs, by collaborating with The PhD Project. This nonprofit organization assists students from underrepresented groups in earning doctoral degrees in business. The program works with students from Black, Latine, and Native American backgrounds.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced in May that it will close its DEI office. MIT President Sally Kornbluth stated in a letter that the institution will “sunset” its Institute Community and Equity Office (ICEO) and the vice-presidential role responsible for overseeing inclusion programs.
Harvard recently shut their DEI offices over the past two weeks as the Harvard Divinity School replaced its diversity office with an Office of Community and Belonging. The official dean wrote in an email that the Harvard School of Public Health would rename its diversity group to the Office for Community and Belonging.
Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg / Getty Images
