Want out, can’t afford the loss. Private, gradual off-ramps; never a demand to recant.
The Holdfast Model
Groups act to reduce an anxiety or to meet a need. Every structure in a captured institution serves one of those drives for the people who keep it. Remove the structure and the drive remains, so the group rebuilds it under a new name. Reform holds when the drive is served a better way and the old way costs more.
Change by edict
- A law passes or a directive comes down.
- No one asks what the old structure did for the people inside.
- Staff resist quietly: slow-walking, renaming, workarounds.
At best a temporary win. The old structure returns under a new name.
Change that holds
- Ask what anxieties the current structure reduces and what needs it meets, for whom.
- Design an alternative that meets those needs, tied to the institution’s purpose.
- Make the old way costly and the new way easier, then check at 6 and 12 months.
The old structure has nothing left to do. Reform holds.
Each case below follows one pattern: the structure went, the drive stayed.
The pattern, documented
Three kinds of evidence that bans alone do not change what institutions do: renamed offices, officials describing how they kept doing what the law forbids, and admissions numbers that barely moved after the Supreme Court ended racial preferences in 2023.
Renamed, not closed
| Institution | Before | After | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| University of Texas at Austin | Division of Diversity and Community Engagement | Division of Campus and Community Engagement (Jan. 2024, “to comply with SB 17”). Closed in April 2024 after the bill’s author warned that institutions might “merely rename their offices or employee titles.” | Daily Texan · Daily Texan, April 2024 · KUT |
| University of Oklahoma | Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion | Division of Access and Opportunity (March 2024). The president: “The easy thing would be to just simply say, ‘We’re going to comply,’ and then just sort of look away… That’s not what we’re doing.” | OU Daily |
| University of Alabama System | DEI divisions at UA, UAB and UAH | “Opportunities, Connections and Success,” “Access and Engagement,” “Access, Connections, and Engagement” (July 2024), each still led by the former DEI vice president. | Alabama Reflector · 1819 News |
| Rice University | Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion | Office of Access and Institutional Excellence (2025), to “preserve its core mission.” | OutSmart |
| Target | DEI goals; Supplier Diversity team | DEI goals “concluded”; its existing “Belonging at the Bullseye” strategy continues; Supplier Diversity renamed Supplier Engagement (Jan. 2025). | Target fact sheet |
A Defending Education report in April 2025, which its authors call not exhaustive, counted 26 rebranded DEI offices, offices still operating at 242 universities and 162 schools within them, and 16 closures (Daily Signal).
Saying it out loud
After the Supreme Court barred racial preferences in admissions (SFFA v. Harvard, June 2023), federal civil-rights investigations in 2026 found several schools still using race, and quoted their own officials:
- UC Davis School of Medicine. The associate dean of admissions called the school’s socioeconomic score “class-based affirmative action” and said “that’s how we skirted the issue.” Admit rates in 2024: 1.4% for white applicants, 8% for Black and Hispanic applicants. Justice Department findings letter, June 2026.
- UC San Diego School of Medicine. Two weeks before the ruling, the admissions director wrote that about 550 minority applicants would “fall out of Group B” under race-neutral cutoffs and that “I would recommend that we purposely select some students from Group C,” the lowest listed tier. Justice Department findings letter, July 2026.
- UCLA School of Law. Investigators found essay prompts “designed to elicit information about race” and staff coaching applicants on how to disclose it at a “Diversity Admissions Open House.” Justice Department, Oct. 2026.
- Duke School of Law. Reviewers applied a “Diversity/Services” tag; the median LSAT of rejected white and Asian applicants exceeded the median of admitted Black applicants in 2024–25. Justice Department, Aug. 2026.
- A former Georgetown admissions officer, on NPR in April 2026, described the field’s question after the ruling: “How could we categorize them in ways that are, like, compliant and, like, constitutional?” NPR, Code Switch.
Findings are the government’s; the schools dispute them. UCLA Law said it was “confident in our process” (LAist). Similar findings were issued against the Yale, UCLA and George Washington medical schools and UC Berkeley’s law school in 2026.
The numbers
The trial record in SFFA v. Harvard found a “statistically significant and negative relationship between Asian American identity and the personal rating” Harvard assigned, holding other characteristics constant, though that court ruled for Harvard and found no intentional discrimination (district court, 2019, as quoted in the Congressional Record). The Supreme Court noted the lower courts’ finding that Harvard’s use of race produced “an 11.1% decrease in the number of Asian-Americans admitted,” and the opinions in the case noted that an Asian American in the top academic decile had a lower chance of admission (12.7%) than an African American in the fourth-lowest decile (12.8%) (600 U.S. 181).
In the first class admitted after the ruling, the Asian American share fell at Yale (30% to 24%), Duke (35% to 29%) and Princeton (26% to 24%), stayed flat at Harvard (37%) and rose at MIT (40% to 47%). Students for Fair Admissions wrote to Yale, Princeton and Duke in September 2024; its letters to Yale and Duke said “your racial numbers are not possible under true race neutrality” (letter). Yale’s and Princeton’s Asian shares rose again the following year (Yale, Princeton).
None of this surprises anyone who has run an institution. The law changed what could be written down, not what people inside wanted or feared, so they found other ways to serve the same drive.
What to read in any structure
Read two things: the drive a structure serves (an anxiety it reduces or a need it meets), and the defense the group mounts when it is threatened.
The anxiety it reduces
Institutions build routines to keep anxiety out of sight, and the routines outlast their reason. Find the anxiety and you find why the structure is hard to remove.
| The anxiety | The structure it builds | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|---|
| A lawsuit or a public scandal | A compliance apparatus | Mandatory training, a reporting line, and an office that exists to show the institution tried. |
| Being called a bigot | Public ritual | Land acknowledgments, pronoun lines, a statement after every news event. |
| Open conflict among staff | Rules about words | Language guides, bias reporting, and meeting norms that keep hard disagreements off the table. |
| Being left out | Visible agreement | The most committed set the norm; everyone else complies and stays quiet. |
Isabel Menzies Lyth (1960): many of a hospital’s nursing procedures served to shield nurses from anxiety, often at the expense of patient care.
The need it meets
People keep a structure because it meets their need. The substitute must meet the same need, or the structure returns.
| Need | How the current structure meets it | How the substitute meets it better |
|---|---|---|
| Safety | Vigilance against an enemy, and a line to report them | Rules that protect each person, enforced equally |
| Belonging | Membership that can be revoked for one wrong word | Belonging tied to shared work, with no purity test |
| Status | Standing that depends on saying the right things | Respect earned by competence and conduct |
| Moral worth | Guilt by group membership, with no way to settle it | Responsibility, with room to repair a mistake |
| Relief from responsibility | The system is at fault, so no one is | Clear roles and adult choices, offered as dignity |
| A livelihood | Jobs, budgets and contracts that depend on the ideology | Real roles tied to the institution’s purpose; no purges that make martyrs |
The hardest sell is responsibility itself, offered as dignity: you are an adult whose choices matter.
The defense it will mount
Threaten a structure and the group falls back on one of four shared patterns, each with a weak point. The messaging guidance page shows how to use them.
| Pattern | What it looks like | Weak point |
|---|---|---|
| Fight | Named enemies, purity tests, scapegoats | Without a vivid enemy it fragments and turns inward |
| Flight | Painful questions dodged, changed or shut down | A dodge looks foolish when the question is plain |
| Dependency | Experts and institutions trusted to protect | Trust collapses when an institution breaks its own stated values |
| Pairing | A promised future that will save everyone | Promises disappoint, and the group then blames an enemy |
Adapted from Wilfred Bion’s basic assumptions: dependency, fight/flight and pairing (fight and flight are split here). The weak points and responses are ours.
Running a case: five steps
Work through one institution in order. The output is a substitution plan: which structures go, what replaces each, and how you will know it held.
1Map
List every office, rule, ritual and training that enforces the ideology. Note who runs each one and who is paid by it.
2Read
For each structure: what anxiety or need does it serve, for whom, and what defense will fire when it is threatened?
3Anchor
State what the institution exists to do, and test every structure against that purpose alone.
4Replace
Design a substitute for each drive: open to all, tied to the purpose, defensible in public. Make the old way cost more.
5Hold
Leaders carry the anxiety through the change. No martyrs. Check at 6 and 12 months for the same functions under new names.
Worked example: a university diversity office
| Step | Finding |
|---|---|
| Map | A central diversity office, a bias-response team, mandatory training for hiring committees, and diversity statements required of applicants. |
| Read | Anxiety: a discrimination lawsuit; being called racist in public. Needs: a livelihood for the staff, status for the faculty champions, belonging for the compliant majority, and relief for leaders who can point to the office when something goes wrong. Defense: dependency on the office as protector, turning to fight when it is cut. |
| Anchor | The university exists to teach and to do research. Hiring, discipline and student support are judged by whether they serve that. |
| Replace | General counsel takes legal compliance. An ombuds office open to everyone replaces bias reporting. Published merit standards replace diversity statements. Staff move into student-support roles that serve all students. Budget and hiring authority leave the old office, so keeping it costs more than letting it go. |
| Hold | Leadership states the purpose and owns the decision in its own words. No public purges. At 6 and 12 months, read the job postings, training calendar and policy pages for the same functions under new names. |
In development: After DEI, a field manual with a function-by-function substitution library.
The Read step, up close
One structure serves different drives for different people, so read each group separately. Those whose livelihood depends on it resist hardest; those who hold it for status or belonging can be moved.
| Who | Drive | Seeks | Fears | Role | What sets off the defense |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Students reporting | Status | Moral standing; a recognized grievance | Slights, exclusion, lost standing | Victim | Due-process demands, which threaten the standing a complaint confers |
| Diversity administrators and trainers | Livelihood | Jobs, budgets, contracts | Defunding | Rescuer (paid) | Audits and budget scrutiny |
| Faculty adopters | Belonging | Alignment with campus norms | Being reported | Compliant bystander | Free-speech challenges, which force them to choose a side |
Campus microaggression rules, read group by group.
Persuade where the drive is symbolic; change budgets and law where it is material. In the cases we coded, the rules weakened where the paid roles were cut more than where they were argued with.
The Hold step: who inside will move
Not everyone who keeps a structure believes in it. Sort people by how tied they are to the group and whether membership still serves them or now costs them.
Fused with the group →
Trapped doubters
The core
Don’t target. Just don’t feed their fight.
Ready to leave
The best target. Belonging without policing.
Comfortable borrowers
Wait for an institution to fail them, then be there. Welcome, don’t gloat; shame sends them back.
Membership costing themMembership serving them
Measured by survey with established scales (identity fusion, need to belong, self-censorship), not by tracking individuals. Planned, not yet run.
Where it comes from, and what keeps it honest
The parts are established: Bion on the patterns groups fall into, Menzies Lyth on the structures institutions build against anxiety, Miller and Rice on the primary task, Lewin on why change reverts, Kotter on why mandated change fails, and needs research from Maslow to Baumeister and Leary on belonging. Psychoanalytic ideas about groups have mostly been used to critique Western institutions; this model uses them to strengthen what those institutions are for. Sources are in the Field Guide.
Groups, not diagnoses
No claims about any individual’s psyche.
Tested, not asserted
Each play is a hypothesis for a survey experiment.
Every side
Any movement runs these patterns, including ones we agree with. Know your own side’s defenses too.