The Trump administration is making universities afraid to support diversity — and counting on them to retreat.
Last month, the Treasury Department and IRS proposed rules that threaten to strip private colleges of their tax-exempt status if they have race-conscious policies in admissions, scholarships and programs.
But a threat is not the same as a legal requirement.
Universities should stop treating guidance or warnings from Washington as orders. Before any college president, provost or board dismantles a program, changes hiring practices or abandons research, they should ask: What, exactly, does the law require us to do? If the government claims the law requires or prohibits something, it should have to prove it.
Federal agencies recently admitted in federal court that they cut nearly $2 billion in research grants at the University of California — without reviewing them. They scanned for keywords like “diversity” and “gender,” and pulled funding regardless of the science.
The cuts were halted after faculty sued, not because the university had challenged them.
Nothing in federal or California law required the UC to give up those grants or change its research. The administration was using its control over federal funding to force changes without first establishing its legal authority to require them.
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Universities often capitulate, even when the law does not require them to. Resegregation could happen without a law requiring it and without a fight if universities dismantle the infrastructure that supports historically underrepresented scholars in response to political pressure. When those supports disappear, fewer of these scholars make it onto campus — and more are pushed out.
The word resegregation is deliberate. After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 led to K-12 school desegregation, schools resegregated not through laws mandating separation, but by stripping away the mechanisms holding integration in place.
Higher education built its own faculty and admissions desegregation mechanisms. A system of recruitment, scholarships, cultural centers, ethnic studies and mentorship programs created pathways into a profession that was about 95 percent white in the early 1970s; by 2021, 12 percent of tenured faculty, from our calculations, came from historically underrepresented groups.
That infrastructure is now being dismantled.
Unlike with K-12 schools after Brown v. Board of Ed, this dismantling is not mainly about creating separate spaces. It is about keeping people out, about who never becomes a professor.
In our study, in more than 100 interviews across 38 states, faculty described what that looks like.
A professor hired through a since-ended equity initiative said she would never be hired now, while directors of a long-running program that widened paths to STEM doctorates learned via email that their program had ended.
One respondent described the elimination of a diversity-focused postdoctoral program: “I’m very concerned about our recruiting of faculty of color into the university, because most of them were coming in through that program.”
Another respondent described a cascade of changes after an NSF-funded program ended: a postdoctoral fellow left, a lab manager had to find other employment and a doctoral student went unfunded. All were historically underrepresented.
What the dismantled infrastructure produced was never just representation. It was knowledge.
An exposure scientist we interviewed helps communities facing new mines and industrial plants understand the health risks. Her environmental justice grants, which she said are “now being grouped with DEI,” were terminated, and with them the funding for her research.
A scholar in a quantitative field who uses her training to study civil rights questions, and who came up through a graduate diversity fellowship since disbanded, has been told her research is something she “might want to let go.” She has no plans to stop, but she accepts that “I may not be here for a long time in the academy.”
Related: OPINION: Beyond DEI offices, colleges are dismantling all kinds of programs related to equity
Multiply these changes across every field and the cost comes into focus. They affect what gets discovered, and what never will. A single cut can have impacts at multiple levels.
This dismantling advances through institutional action, driven by what one professor called “an extortion framework” through which anticipated funding cuts and compliance reviews make preemptive restriction feel necessary. At his university, for example, the governing board hired a law firm, whose lead attorney had helped draft Project 2025, to review faculty teaching and research. “That sent a chill,” he said, “for anyone teaching race-related issues.”
An administrator at a different school ordered faculty to strip diversity language from syllabi. Told no law required it, the administrator replied: “You’re going to do it.”
This is anticipatory compliance: institutions ending practices no law bars because they believe resistance could be costly.
The new scrutiny of race-conscious practices is not evenly applied. As universities consolidate ethnic studies and gender studies, fields that have historically provided a foothold for scholars from underrepresented groups, including women, some schools are creating publicly funded centers for “intellectual freedom” that hire almost entirely white faculty and face no scrutiny at all.
What passes for neutrality turns out to have a color.
Anticipatory compliance is not confined to red states. Every university that takes federal money is exposed. A Washington Post analysis found that of 184 universities that had publicly pledged to diversify their faculties, at least 108 had fully or partially rolled back those efforts, while just 12 told the Post they remained committed to faculty diversity programs.
Once inclusion reads as a liability, administrators need no order to retreat from it.
Not every institution represented in our study folded in the face of pressure. Faculty at HBCUs and some Hispanic-serving institutions told us they were largely untouched because inclusion was never a separate office. Where inclusion was built into the mission, it held.
The lesson is that what can be appended can be erased due to threats.
The UC case proves how thin some of these threats can be. The government had not read what it defunded.
The answer to governmental pressure is not to pretend these threats are harmless. They are not.
But universities should stop surrendering before they have to. Demand the statute. Test the threat. In court, it can collapse.
Faculty courage cannot substitute for what took decades to build and a season to tear down. Those who surrender preemptively give up something that isn’t the campus’s alone. As the people who teach in and study the country stop reflecting it, we learn less about ourselves, our history, our health, our people.
That loss is everyone’s.
Laura Hamilton and Veronica Lerma are University of California faculty at Merced and Davis. Learn more at herelab.org.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about colleges and diversity was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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