Trump’s DEI Orders Force Colleges to Rethink Diversity Efforts

University of Michigan law library interior. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As one of his first actions in his return to the presidency, Donald Trump issued a directive to dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)  policies across all institutions that receive federal funding. Since then, sweeping changes have been seen in the DEI infrastructure of colleges and universities throughout the country. More recently, the University of Michigan, an institution once at the forefront of the DEI framework in academia, announced the closure of its DEI office and Office for Health Equity and Inclusion on March 27, 2025.

These shutterings also come as the Department of Education announced investigations into 45 different colleges and universities nationwide for “the use of racial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities.” This investigation principally targets the institutions in question that are partnering with the Ph.D. Project, which aims to “expand the pool of workplace talent by developing business school faculty who encourage, mentor, and support tomorrow’s leaders.” However, the crux of the DoE’s argument is that the Ph.D. Project only provides mentorship to those from underrepresented backgrounds, focusing on Black, Latino and Native American students.

Officials in higher education across the United States are struggling to interpret the new legislation. With millions of dollars of funding on the line, conversations continue about whether they should freeze existing programs, adhere to them fully, or preemptively shut them down before retribution gets worse.

Northeastern University has also rolled back DEI policies in the past few months in reaction to new guidance from the executive branch. The university took down their website for DEI programs on Jan. 24, 2025, and quickly replaced it with a web page entitled “Belonging at Northeastern” that has tabs for their Presidential Council on Belonging and their Affinity Groups, but no longer mentions their DEI offices.

In the wake of national social unrest throughout 2020, Northeastern committed to embracing DEI policies, developing an action plan to “address the scrouge of systemic racism.” The website for this plan has since been taken down as well.

The rollback of these programs tailored around the tenets of DEI has reached Boston University’s campus as well. Established in 2020, the Center for Anti-Racist Research was created to “convene researchers and practitioners from various disciplines to figure out novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice.” However, with the exodus of Director Ibram X. Kendi to Howard University, BU announced the center will shut down on June 30, 2025, an action that conflicts with its original mission. 

The Trump administration’s executive orders also pledged to create a plan of specific steps and/or programs to deter the prevalence of DEI programs or principles in institutions of higher education with endowments of over $1 billion. This number affects about 144 institutions according to fiscal data from Q4 2024, including most R1 schools. The punitive measures have included threats of funding being revoked, a decrease in internship spots in the federal government for targeted schools and the possible loss of accreditation in some circumstances.

However, U.S. courts have fought back against these actions. On Feb. 21, 2025, the judge for the Baltimore Division of the District of Maryland granted a temporary injunction nationwide that blocks the Trump administration from enforcing key provisions of the executive orders related to DEI. This was done on the basis that they “likely violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by imposing unconstitutional restrictions on content and viewpoint speech and likely violated the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment because key terms such as 'illegal DEI' were void for vagueness.”

As DEI measures continue to come under attack from the federal government, more attention will be directed at governmental oversight on education in general. With the Supreme Court allowing freezes on grants for DEI training for teachers to continue, the future of these initiatives remains uncertain.