Some select quotes:

> Patel found that she spent much of her time as a kind of roving equity coach. White teachers asked her how to deliver critical feedback to students of color. (“Sort of, ‘If I say this to the student, are they going to call me racist?’” she recalled.)

> Their public progress reports and D.E.I. strategic plans were heavily vetted by the university counsel’s office and Sellers’s team; the resulting public documents, though meant to ensure accountability, were often both lengthy and vague. “No one knew what they were supposed to be doing,” the former dean said. “And no one would tell us. But we had to show that we were doing something.”

> Professors across the university described to me how, in faculty meetings and on search committees, they had resigned themselves to a pervasive double-think around hiring. “The conversations would be had as if identity was not an issue,” the former dean said. “Even though everyone knew it was.”

> But in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white Minneapolis police officer that May, as protests erupted around the country and demands to root out racism echoed from campuses to corporate offices, none of the training and programming — the money and new hires and promises — seemed to matter.

> In meetings, Kang and Carbado invited students and faculty to share their experiences of racism and discrimination at the university. Yet for all the heated public rhetoric, people with knowledge of the discussions told me, some of the examples seemed to them relatively minor.

> The facilitator urged them to require students to declare their preferred pronouns and furnished a list of dozens of sexual orientations, some of which professors told me they had never heard of. Instead of asking students about their sexuality, they were advised, faculty should ask students to specify their “attractionality.” Some wondered why they should be asking students about their sex lives at all.

> The workshop was titled “Teaching Texts That Contain Racist Language,” but according to one person who attended, Peoples argued that literary works containing slurs should almost never be assigned in the first place. Someone else pointed out that her approach would exclude a large swath of books by Black authors.

> Though the Title IX office found no grounds for punishment, Fretz remains stung. “It’s this gotcha culture they have created on campus,” he told me, adding: “It’s like giving a bunch of 6-year-olds Tasers.”

> Mark Bernstein, the university regent, told me he began to hear more and more concern from students and professors. “The cocktail chatter is: ‘I can’t say anything in class anymore. I’m going to get run out of class.’ There’s an enormous amount of fear.”

> One recent analysis by the political scientist Kevin Wallsten found that the larger the D.E.I. bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students felt expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students.

> In explaining why it was so challenging to boost Black enrollment, Chavous and other school officials argued that rapidly declining high school enrollment in Detroit — a trend that was itself the product of social and economic forces beyond the university’s control — had drained Michigan’s traditional pool of Black applicants even as the school’s overall enrollment was rising.

> Only one sentence in the 37-page plan is devoted to the biggest impediment to making the gardens accessible to a more diverse array of visitors: It is hard to get there without a car. (While the arboretum is adjacent to campus, the gardens are some miles away.) “The No. 1 issue across the board was always transportation,” said Bob Grese, who led the arboretum and gardens until 2020. “We were never able to get funding for that.”

> But even some liberal scholars believe D.E.I. looms too large. Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues that modern D.E.I. is not, as some on the right hold, a triumph of critical theory or postcolonialism but of the corporatization of higher education, in which universities have tried to turn moral and political ideals into a system of formulas and dashboards. “They want a managerial approach to difference,” Khalid said. “They want no friction. But diversity inherently means friction.”