ASU Continues to Practice DEI Secretively, Per Associate Director

January 19, 2026 ADI Staff Reporter
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Arizona State University is testing whether diversity, equity, and inclusion by any other name would still count as DEI.

Not all professors are on board. An associate director of criminology and criminal justice indicated as much in an undercover video released earlier this month.

The undercover video by Accuracy in Media accused the director, Rebecca Loftus, of teaching or pushing DEI — but that’s unlikely. Loftus and her husband have openly labeled themselves “Republican conservatives.”

Loftus’ husband, Charlie Loftus, served as the chief law enforcement officer under two Republican attorneys general and ran as a Republican for the state legislature in 2018. Loftus was also the faculty advisor for College Republicans United.

In the video, Loftus advises an undercover reporter disguised as a prospective student that the university continues to implement DEI without using the prohibited terms. Nowhere throughout the video does Loftus defend the university’s actions.

“You’re not going to find many programs that are going to broadcast it the way before because the funding for universities, especially state-run universities like ASU — it’s really tied to funding,” Loftus warned the student. “The curriculum is there still, it’s not as broadcast as it was before.”

Through executive order, President Donald Trump prohibited federal funding to any entities or persons who implement DEI. His order extended to institutions of higher education.

The administration’s effort to cut off funding based on DEI implementation has been frustrated by the courts from the start.

Last April, three federal judges issued injunctions on the ban. These sorts of sweeping injunctions were complicated by a Supreme Court ruling last summer limiting universal injunctions.

In August, one of those federal judges ruled the DEI ban was unconstitutional based on free speech rights and an improper circumvention of administrative procedure.

This may explain how DEI continues to operate within ASU. Loftus advised the undercover reporter that ASU continues DEI efforts through the IDEA office.

“Like most universities, we’re pretty much doing what we’re doing before,” said Loftus. “You’re going to be hard-pressed to find instructors using the terminology of DEI, but you’re going to definitely hear about discriminatory practices and how certain policies are going to target different communities and really going to have negative consequences for particular communities than others, and how certain policies are definitely much more harsh for female offenders than male offenders, and things like that.”

Unlike most of the progressive professors at ASU, Loftus opposes the Muslim terrorists in the Middle East. Loftus is co-director of ASU’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice Counter-Terrorism in Israel study abroad program. She travels annually with ASU students to Israel to educate them on intelligence-gathering, jihadism, and suicide bomber interdiction.

It appears Accuracy in Media either didn’t research Loftus’s background, or chose to exclude it from their reporting.

However, Accuracy in Media did take the time to shop their undercover footage around to major right-wing influencers, like real estate agent-turned-pundit Libs of TikTok and former porn star-turned-commentator Corey DeAngelis.

Per recent reports, the right-wing influencer world was exposed for undisclosed lobbying online: political propaganda that they were paid to post to their millions of followers.

 

About ADI Staff Reporter 14066 Articles
Under the leadership of Editor-in -Chief Huey Freeman, our team of staff reporters bring accurate,timely, and complete news coverage.

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