Do people think that making it so "white rural farm boys" are comfortable on college campus isn't within the philosophical framework of DEI thinking? Maybe it hasn't considered that in its application, but the idea is that you want people from all backgrounds to be represented and valued within your organization & community. Iowa should have kept DEI and expanded/ refined it rather than throwing it out if its universities weren't well serving the state's rural populations.
I was a McNair Scholar in undergrad, it's a program aimed at getting underrepresented backgrounds into Doctoral programs.
I was underrepresented as a first generation, low-income student.
I'm also white, and grew up in a very white neighborhood. I wasn't a rural farmboy, but rural farmboys were the epitome of who would have felt comfortable in the spaces I existed in when I was 16-20 years old.
Most McNair Scholars were non-white. Through the program, I often found myself in rooms where I was the only white person, and in rooms where <10% of the people were white. Those experiences, were a huge part of me becoming more comfortable in my own skin, in an academic setting. The impostor syndrome, the concerns about not dressing correctly, the concerns about using something other than the Queen's English or whatever stuffy bull**** that was coming out of every professors mouth, the concerns about never being the one talking about my family's summer vacation home, etc, etc, etc, are what got dealt with in those rooms. All of that is exactly what the plutocrats don't want white rural farm boys learning. They want the thinkers and dreamers born on rural farms to remain excluded from places where they can think and dream about transforming the economy into something more equitable that doesn't grind the labor class to dust just for the betterment of shareholder value and CEO compensation.
I never would have felt comfortable on a college campus repeating the jokes told around the campfire by rural white boys that I'd heard a hundred times in my teens; and that was a good thing. When I arrived at an elite East Coast private school for PhD work, I did find myself in rooms where slightly less crass versions of those campfire jokes would have been a way to facilitate entry into certain social circles. It's that sort of white supremacist, misogynstic, patriarchal thinking that they want rural white farm boys to stay comfortable with.