The Hope We Must Make in Fashion Education: Enacting DEI Within Compromised Universities

Over the past decade, U.S. fashion programs have embedded diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into public mission statements and curricula. Yet these advances were made within university structures that never fully integrated them, and their precarity has intensified amid sweeping rollbacks of DEI and broader social justice efforts. In this autoethnographic essay, I reflect on my experience in academic leadership in Canada and the United States and analyze three case studies to examine how justice-oriented work operates within universities shaped by neoliberal diversity practices and an increasingly hostile political climate. The cases explore philanthropy shaped by far-right politics, an Indigenous faculty search under restrictive law, and support for Disabled fashion students amid federal retrenchment. In each example, justice work moves between structural interventions and informal, often hidden practices that build collective power. I offer counter-strategies that fashion educators can enact to resist far-right incursions into fashion education and advance DEI commitments within already compromised universities.