As colleges and universities jettison DEI initiatives right and left (mostly right) in response to the Trump administration’s scorched-earth march through higher education, classic icebreakers that have been used at the beginning of courses for decades are being abandoned. Here are five of the most prominent casualties:
“What’s your favorite color?” — Linda McMahon, the President’s nominee for Secretary of Education, calls this query “the poster child for racist questions in higher education. Just imagine the agony that young people experience when they are forced to choose the race they like the most. How can we ever achieve a color-blind society if we continue to allow this wrong-headed line of inquiry?”
Some schools have developed a work-around. At both the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, for example, students are simply asked to select between green and blue. “It’s not an ideal solution,” says Dartmouth’s Director of Non-DEI Programming, “but it’s better than nothing.”
“When you go out to eat, what type of food do you prefer?”– According to McMahon, “this is basically an invitation to start a race war. Just think about it. Indicating that you have a special fondness for Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Indian, or Soul food is basically the same thing as saying, ‘I believe Ethiopians and Jamaicans are inferior’.
“If women were only allowed to be teachers or nurses, which one should they be?” — McMahon insists that this is a trick question hatched by the woke elite: “It assumes that women should be working outside of the home to begin with. This is the radical left poking its nose — and sneezing — inside the sacred tent containing the divinely ordained roles of housewife and Catholic nun.”
“If you could only blame one white person alive TODAY for the existence of slavery in the United States in 1860, who would it be?” — Once again, McMahon claims that this is a trick question: “The use of the word ‘blame’ presumes that slavery was a bad thing. Where’s the evidence?”
“Complete the following sentence: ‘A trans woman and a trans man walk into a bar. They order a _______ and a _______.” — “There’s nothing funny about this request to finish a joke,” says McMahon. “Gender and sex are serious subjects, and so is consuming alcohol. I’m not amused.”
The challenge of getting students to talk during the first class session of the semester has gotten a lot harder in 2025.