Colleges around US navigate President Trump's DEI crackdown with caution

In Boston, Northeastern University renamed a programme for underrepresented students, emphasising belonging for all.

In New Jersey, a session at Rutgers University catering to students from historically Black colleges had to be abruptly cancelled. And around the US, colleges are assessing programme names and titles that could run afoul of a Trump administration crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

New White House orders ban DEI policies in programmes that receive federal money. Across higher education, institutions rely on federal funding for research grants, projects and contract work.

As they figure out how to adapt, some schools are staying quiet out of uncertainty, or fear. President Donald Trump has called for compliance investigations at some schools with endowments over $1 billion.

Others have vowed to stand firm.

The president of Mount Holyoke College, a liberal arts school in Massachusetts, said she hopes colleagues in higher education will not capitulate to Trump's vision for the country. Danielle Holley said she believes Trump's orders are vulnerable to legal challenges.

Anything that is done to simply disguise what we're doing is not helpful, said Holley, who is Black. It validates this notion that our values are wrong. And I don't believe that the value of saying we live in a multiracial democracy is wrong.

Trump has said DEI amounts to discrimination. To get colleges to shutter diversity programmes, he said during the campaign he would advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.

Efforts by colleges to build the diversity they seek on campuses already had been constrained by the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in higher education. Many colleges have said they are no less committed to recruiting students of color and helping all students succeed, even if strategies change or go by a different name.

Northeastern changed the name of what had been called The Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to Belonging in Northeastern, which it described as a reimagined approach that embraces everyone at the school.

While internal structures and approaches may need to be adjusted, the university's core values don't change. We believe that embracing our differences and building a community of belonging makes Northeastern stronger, university spokesperson Renata Nyul said.

The orders are having a chilling effect at many colleges, said Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.

We are also seeing institutions preemptively reevaluating courses, programmes and even administrative positions, she said. The long-term consequences of such shifts could be profound, both for higher education and for the broader workforce and society.

Some changes are outside the control of the colleges.

At Rutgers University, professor Marybeth Gasman awoke Jan. 23 to a contractor's email telling her to cancel an upcoming conference on student internships. The funding, from the Department of Labor, was coming through the contractor and earmarked for DEI programmes that were put on hold. About 100 students and staff from historically Black colleges and universities had planned to attend the online session.

It feels like a punch in the gut, said Gasman, who runs Rutgers' Center for Minority Serving Institutions, which was completing its final project on a $575,000 grant. With the grant frozen, she now hopes to raise the remaining $150,000 from other sources so they can finish the work and retain staff.

Beyond scrutiny of their own policies and programmes, many universities and faculty members also are worried about research grants.

The White House this week paused federal grants and loans to conduct an ideological review to uproot progressive initiatives. It later reversed itself, but uncertainty remains over the future of research touching on issues related to diversity.

California Polytechnic professor Cameron Jones said he is worried whether he would still get a $150,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study the history of African descendants in early California, even though it's not a DEI grant. He also worries about the ban's effect on his students, especially students of colour.

We're worried that even indirect pressure might lead administrators to back off on programmes that benefit students of color (and) first generation students, Jones said, and I'm a white, cisgender, church-going man.

Colleges already had experience with DEI restrictions in several Republican-led states, including Oklahoma, where Shanisty Whittington, 33, is studying political science at Rose State College.

Compared to her first stint in college, more than a decade ago, she notices some concern about being able to speak freely, along with just a lot of confusion.

One effect of the Oklahoma ban was the loss of a long-running networking programme for female students interested in politics. Whittington, who is juggling work, school and parenting, recently applied for two jobs at the statehouse, but her applications went nowhere.

It would be great to have a tool that would help me be able to kind of get into that world and start introducing myself to people and getting to know them, she said.

Sheldon Fields has been through a time like this before. He was a post-doctoral student studying AIDS/HIV prevention in the early 2000s when the conservative tide put his federally funded programme on the chopping block. Instead of abandoning the work, he and his colleagues got creative.

I had to write a whole grant about AIDS prevention without even talking about sex. We were able to do it because we shifted some language, said Fields, president of the National Black Nursing Association and associate dean for equity and inclusion at Penn State University's nursing school.

Others will not be discouraged in the the current political climate, Fields said.

People have spent their entire careers working on certain areas, said Fields, who has worked to diversity the nursing profession, which is overwhelmingly white and female. They're not going to completely abandon them.