In the past year, many institutions have quietly restructured their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Offices have been renamed. Programs have been folded into human resources or “community engagement.” In some places, DEI positions were eliminated outright.
What’s striking is not simply that this happened, but how little changed when it did. Institutions continued functioning almost seamlessly. The vocabulary shifted. The norms did not.
That continuity reveals something deeper about how inclusion was structured in the first place—and about the doctrine DEI left intact.
The Norm and Its Disqualifier
Disability studies scholar Lennard J. Davis argues that “normal” is not a natural category but a statistical and administrative invention. Modern institutions are built around an imagined average—an idealized worker, student, or leader whose body, behavior, and circumstances align with predictable productivity.
But Davis’s insight goes further. The norm does not simply describe a center. It requires a disqualifier to function. Without a category of deviance—bodies that move wrong, minds that process differently, lives that don’t conform to institutional tempo—the average has no authority. Disability, in this framework, is not an unfortunate exception. It is the mechanism by which normalcy enforces itself. The norm does not simply exclude disabled bodies. It needs them—needs the category of deviance—to give the average its authority.
This is the doctrine most DEI initiatives never confronted. They sought to diversify who could enter institutions. They did not challenge the standard against which all entrants would be measured.
Inclusion Without Redesign
For years, mainstream DEI frameworks focused primarily on representation: who is hired, who is admitted, who is promoted. Those metrics matter. But representation alone does not alter how institutions define performance, productivity, professionalism, or authority.
In practice, inclusion often came with conditions:
You can be here—as long as you can keep up.
You can be different—as long as your difference doesn’t require redesign.
You can request support—as long as it doesn’t disrupt workflow.
These conditions were rarely explicit. They were embedded in evaluation systems, timelines, meeting norms, performance reviews, and informal expectations about availability and demeanor. And they applied far beyond disability—though disability is where the logic becomes most visible.
The Same Grammar of Exclusion
Consider three workers who deviate from the institutional norm in different ways.
A disabled employee requests a schedule adjustment. The request does not trigger collaborative redesign. It triggers friction. Leadership frames it not as a matter of access but as a disruption to workflow. The message is subtle but unmistakable: unable to meet the demands of the role.
A single parent cannot attend early-morning meetings or after-hours networking events—the informal spaces where decisions are actually made and loyalty is demonstrated. They meet every formal metric. But the institution’s unwritten expectations assume a worker unencumbered by care responsibilities. The message arrives differently but carries the same weight: unable to prioritize the work.
An employee from a cultural background that values consensus-building and relational leadership is evaluated as “indecisive” or “too slow” in an environment that rewards rapid individual assertiveness. Their approach to collaboration—a legitimate and often more effective leadership style—is processed as a deficit. The verdict: not a cultural fit.
Three different bodies. Three different lives. The same institutional operation: deviation from the norm is registered as individual failure to adapt.
This is Davis’s disqualifier at work. The institution does not need to name its ideal body. It only needs to process those who fall outside it—and it has a ready grammar for doing so. Can’t keep up. Can’t prioritize. Doesn’t fit. The language varies. The function is constant.
Normalcy as Institutional Doctrine
Seen through this lens, many DEI initiatives did not dismantle normalcy. They expanded who could enter institutions while leaving intact the standards by which bodies are measured, managed, and expelled.
In multiple institutional settings, mentoring programs for marginalized staff revealed a consistent pattern. Participants described leadership cultures that were callous, opaque, and resistant to structural change. Diversity was discussed; authority was not redistributed. Support spaces existed; decision-making power remained concentrated.
Walking through the hallways of those institutions made the continuity visible. Portraits of former leaders—overwhelmingly white men—lined the walls. Representation at entry and mid-level roles had diversified. The archive of authority had not. The visual message about who embodies institutional legitimacy remained intact.
This is what normalization looks like in practice. Inclusion happens at the margins. The center holds.
Intersectional Inclusion and Containment
Many DEI frameworks invoked intersectionality but operationalized it weakly. Multiple identities were acknowledged rhetorically, but performance norms remained singular—designed around one kind of body, one set of circumstances, one model of professional life.
In healthcare settings that publicly centered gender equity, internal culture often revealed a different tension. Despite outward commitments to inclusion, leadership expectations about professionalism and “fit” aligned closely with dominant norms. Marginalized staff were present, but advancement and authority followed familiar patterns. Inclusion operated within boundaries that were rarely named.
Similarly, at a private university, diversity programming for staff was frequently constrained or deprioritized when it conflicted with administrative doctrine. A highly diverse workforce did not translate into institutional support when programming challenged dominant narratives or power structures. Even leaders from marginalized backgrounds were expected to align with institutional positions, sometimes at odds with their own communities or perspectives.
The pattern across settings was not identical, but it rhymed: inclusion was tolerated so long as it did not destabilize core norms. And when it did, the institution did not question the norm. It questioned the person.
Why DEI Was Easy to Rename
If DEI had reshaped institutional architecture—budgets, workflows, evaluation systems, accountability mechanisms—dismantling it would have required structural overhaul. Instead, most DEI offices operated downstream from power. They advised, trained, and signaled commitment. They rarely controlled performance metrics or enforced redesign.
As a result, when political pressure increased, institutions could rename DEI as “community engagement,” fold it into compliance, or eliminate it entirely without altering how work was structured.
The ease of absorption does not mean inclusion was meaningless. It means inclusion was additive rather than foundational.
It was a program, not an architecture.
Capitalism and Conditional Value
DEI also fit comfortably within contemporary capitalism because it never challenged the terms of value. Institutions could diversify inputs—who enters—while maintaining constant outputs: productivity measured in hours visible, responsiveness measured in speed, commitment measured in availability.
What happens when a worker’s most productive hours don’t align with the standard schedule? When quality of thought matters more than speed of reply? When deep collaboration takes longer than decisive unilateralism but produces better outcomes? These are not hypothetical questions. They describe the working reality of disabled people, single parents, people navigating chronic illness, and employees from cultural traditions that organize professional life differently.
Under current norms, these workers are not evaluated on what they produce. They are evaluated on how closely they approximate the ideal producer. Difference becomes valuable when it enhances institutional reputation or broadens recruitment pipelines. When difference requires material redesign—flexible scheduling, asynchronous communication, multiple legitimate paths to demonstrating competence—it becomes a liability.
Under these conditions, attrition can be framed as personal mismatch rather than structural incompatibility. The system remains neutral. The individual becomes the variable.
The institution does not run out of disqualifiers. It simply rotates which bodies are currently being processed out.
Beyond Representation: Designing for Variation
If the core issue is normalization—if institutions require a disqualifier to maintain their standards—then representation alone will never be sufficient. You can diversify who enters, but the doctrine of the normal body will continue to produce failures. The names on the rejection letters change. The logic that writes them does not.
Universal design offers a different starting point. Rather than asking whether marginalized bodies can adapt to existing structures, it asks whether institutions can be built around human variation from the outset.
In practice, this means evaluating what people actually contribute rather than how closely they approximate an ideal schedule. It means building communication systems that do not privilege immediacy over deliberation. It means defining professionalism by outcomes and collaboration rather than by demeanor and availability. It means treating flexibility not as an accommodation grudgingly granted but as a design principle that benefits the institution.
Some of this redesign already exists in pockets. Organizations that shifted to asynchronous work during the pandemic discovered that many employees—not just disabled ones—were more productive, more engaged, and less likely to leave. Institutions that adopted flexible evaluation criteria found they could retain talent they had previously been cycling through and discarding. These were not acts of charity. They were design improvements.
The difference between accommodation and design is the difference between exception and architecture. Accommodation asks: how do we let this person in despite their difference? Design asks: how do we build a system that doesn’t need to sort people into normal and abnormal in the first place?
The first treats deviation as a problem to manage. The second begins from the premise that variation is the baseline.
Design principles are harder to rebrand away than programs. They alter how institutions function, not just how they present themselves.
What This Moment Makes Visible
The current unraveling of DEI reveals something that many marginalized people already understood: inclusion that does not alter structure will not endure.
DEI did not collapse because it was too radical. In many cases, it collapsed because it left the doctrine of normalcy intact. It diversified who could enter without transforming how value is defined, how authority is distributed, or how deviation is disciplined.
The disabled employee told she can’t meet the demands of the role. The single parent told he can’t prioritize the work. The immigrant professional told she’s not a cultural fit. They are not experiencing separate problems. They are experiencing the same institutional logic—a logic that requires someone to fail so the norm can hold.
The question now is not whether DEI survives as a label. It is whether institutions are willing to confront the doctrine that governs them—and to design systems capable of supporting human variation rather than merely, and temporarily, managing it.