The state of DEI, 10 weeks after Trump took office

Yahoo

30-03-2025

The University of Michigan's decision to shutter its diversity, equity and inclusion programs was the latest in a series of shock waves rolling through higher education as the Trump administration continues its efforts to stamp out DEI in government and in business and academia.
In a letter announcing how its approach to DEI is 'evolving,' the school's leadership said Thursday that it would close its DEI office, as well as its Office for Health Equity and Inclusion. The letter cited intensifying federal action against DEI initiatives, including two executive orders by President Donald Trump, and the trickle-down effects of the 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended affirmative action in college admissions.
While just one of hundreds of DEI changes in higher education since Trump took office 10 weeks ago, the news was momentous.
'The Michigan decision is a big, big deal,' said John Sailer, director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has been at the forefront of efforts to rein in DEI over the past few years. 'Michigan was one of those universities that set the tone for the entire country. Other universities looked to what Michigan did and modeled what they themselves should do.'
Michigan was one of the first universities to require diversity statements from job candidates. It had more than 163 employees working in DEI, The Detroit News reported. The school was also the subject of a New York Times Magazine investigation published last fall that found the school had spent a quarter of a billion dollars on DEI.
According to that report, by Nicholas Confessore, 'Most students must take at least one class addressing 'racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.' Doctoral students in educational studies must take an 'equity lab' and a racial-justice seminar. Computer-science students are quizzed on microaggressions.' The Times report said that while some other universities were starting to retreat from aspects of DEI, Michigan had 'redoubled its efforts.'
But the month after Trump was reelected, the school announced that it would no longer require diversity statements — a description of how job candidates will advance diversity efforts — in hiring. The University of California, which pioneered the practice, did the same last week.
The announcements have rocked higher education, and offered further evidence that universities, even while decrying the administration's actions, are taking the president seriously. Americans, however, remain divided over the issue.
NBC reported this week that Americans are roughly split along party lines on the subject of DEI, with 49% of people surveyed the first week of March saying DEI should be eliminated and 48% saying they should continue.
And in a February Deseret News/Harris X poll about Trump's most popular and least popular executive orders, DEI fell into the 'least popular' tally, with 44% of respondents strongly or somewhat supporting banning federal DEI initiatives, and 46% strongly or somewhat opposing.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is tracking changes to DEI policies across the U.S., and as of this week, noted changes at 270 colleges in 38 states, including eight in Utah. While some positions are being eliminated and some offices are being shut down, others involve the renaming and mission change of DEI offices.
The University of California at Los Angeles, for example, replaced its Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion with an 'Office of Inclusive Excellence,' while the University of Colorado now has an 'Office of Collaboration,' and Northeastern University, an 'Office of Belonging.'
The University of Utah ended diversity statements a year ago, and Utah was one of the first states to ban 'discriminatory' DEI practices, replacing them with 'student success centers' to help all students succeed.
Rapid changes in DEI are also occurring in business, with Forbes tracking changes since Trump took office.
Among the changes reported by Forbes: Warner Bros. Discovery has renamed its DEI program 'Inclusion,' Bank of America changed a reference to 'diversity' in an annual report to 'talent' and 'opportunity,' and Pepsi reassigned its chief DEI officer to work on employee development.
Trump's first executive order on DEI, issued Jan. 21, ended DEI programs within the federal government, and 'encouraged' the private sector to end 'illegal DEI discrimination and preferences.' The administration maintains that such measures violate existing civil rights laws that protect Americans from discrimination and also 'undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.'
The second order mandated the termination of DEI positions, contracts and grants and requested an accounting of such programs within the government.
While Trump's executive orders did not directly address higher education, elite universities have been in the crosshairs of the administration for other reasons, including their handling of student protests related to the war between Israel and Hamas. Earlier this month, the administration announced that it would be canceling $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University because of what it called 'the school's continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.'
Faced with the prospect of significant cuts, universities that rely on federal funding have snapped to attention, Sailer told me. While DOGE and culture-war issues such as DEI grab most of the headlines, a lesser-known cut — the National Institutes of Health capping the supplemental funding added onto grants to help pay for 'indirect costs,' or overhead — stands to strip colleges and universities of millions of dollars in funding.
'Universities are kind of recognizing that this is an existential event for them. On one hand, they are, across the board, extremely upset about it. ... But they are also taking it very seriously,' Sailer said.
While some schools that have ample private resources and have flown under the administration's radar might be able to risk losing funding, others can't. ('Certainly not Columbia, but maybe Princeton,' Sailer said.) And, in fact, Columbia quickly made concessions to the administration in hopes of having its funding restored, although it's still unclear if that will happen.
The threatened cuts are coming at a time when public trust in higher education is historically low, with the percentage of Americans expressing high trust in higher ed falling from 60% to 30% over a decade, Sailer said.
As DEI expanded over the past decade, it became a battle in the culture wars even though most Americans champion diversity.
As Derek Monson of the Sutherland Institute wrote for the Deseret News, 'The majority of Americans of all races recognize the value of diversity in American life. A plurality of Americans of all races believe it is important for businesses to promote racial and ethnic diversity in the workplace. But a majority of Americans of all races also believe hiring and promotion at work should be based only on qualifications, even if this produces less diversity, and they do not believe race and ethnicity should be a factor in such workplace decisions.'
DEI also became synonymous with progressive policies, even though its broadest applications extended to diversity of faith.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was former Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate, said this week that Democrats should have doubled-down on both immigration and DEI. Speaking at a town hall in Texas, Walz said: 'We've been talking about this for years as a country of immigrants, and we let (Republicans) define the issue on immigration. We let them define the issue on DEI, and we let them define what woke is. We got ourselves in this mess because we weren't bold enough to stand up and say 'you damn right we're proud of these policies. We're going to put them in, and we're going to execute them.''
University of Michigan President Santa J. Ono and other university leaders said in their statement, 'These decisions have not been made lightly. We recognize the changes are significant and will be challenging for many of us, especially those whose lives and careers have been enriched by and dedicated to programs that are now pivoting. We are deeply grateful for the meaningful contributions of leaders, faculty and staff who have advanced our ongoing efforts to create an ever-more inclusive and respectful community.'
Some faculty members also spoke out strongly against the changes. Derek Peterson, a history professor at the University of Michigan, told the Detroit News, 'It's a capitulation, an embarrassment, a departure from our mission as a university. It turns the university's back on what we thought were core values of this institution in the name of expediency.'
Sailer said the future of DEI will largely depend on the 'political will' of future candidates to advocate for these programs, as Walz wants them to do. 'Behind a lot of really staunch denunciations of what the Trump administration is doing, a lot of people, even progressives, are saying there were problems (with DEI), so on one hand, it doesn't seem like there is political will to reinstate a lot of the things that might be pulled back over the next four years — and certainly not with diversity statements. A lot of people agree that this was a bad policy.' Also, he said, some of these programs took decades develop, and if DOGE-type efforts take hold at universities, it's unlikely these programs will ever be rebuilt to the scale that they had reached.