Whether the apparent cultural turn of early 2025 will produce lasting change remains an open question. Despite early promises from universities to scale back diversity, equity, and inclusion and recommit to open inquiry, campus life still feels stultified and defensive. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Sam Abrams wrote in the Washington Examiner this week, “beneath the rhetorical softening lies the same sprawling bureaucratic infrastructure that has shaped campus life for years.”

And following early signs of corporate and institutional retreat from the excesses of 2020-style woke progressivism, reports of wokeism’s demise appear to have been greatly exaggerated. What appeared in early 2025 to be a broad recalibration increasingly resembles a narrow exercise in financial and reputational risk management — one that produced cosmetic changes while leaving the underlying ideological framework intact. While the federal government did meaningfully dismantle DEI programs, many businesses and universities simply repackaged them under softer labels such as “belonging” or “access and opportunity.” Progressive values and themes, meanwhile, continue to dominate university curricula and the entertainment industry.