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KOLUMN Magazine
When Colleges Cancel Diversity
The quiet revolution remaking American higher education — and what vanishing DEI offices mean for who gets in, who stays, and who belongs.
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On a gray April afternoon in Austin, the steps of the University of Texas tower filled with students carrying cardboard signs that said things like “Protect Our People” and “DEI Saved My Life.” They chanted in English and Spanish, in voices hoarse from a year of meetings, petitions and town halls. Nearby, the doors of the Division of Campus and Community Engagement were locked. Inside, the nameplates had already been unscrewed.
Sixty staff members — academic advisers, mental-health counselors, program coordinators who ran first-gen initiatives and cultural centers — had just been told their positions no longer existed. UT Austin, one of the country’s premier public universities, was complying with Texas Senate Bill 17, a statewide ban on diversity, equity and inclusion offices at public colleges.
Outside, a junior from Houston watched the protest from a distance, pulling her sweatshirt tighter around her shoulders. She’d come to UT through a summer bridge program housed in the same DEI division that was now being dismantled. She remembers those early weeks on campus — the writing tutor who helped her rework essays, the mentor who quietly slid a campus-food-pantry flyer across the table when she admitted she sometimes skipped meals.
Now the program’s director was out of a job. The office door where she used to drop in between classes led to an empty suite.
“Nobody’s told us what replaces it,” she said later. “They say the support is still there, just ‘restructured.’ But where? Who’s in charge? We don’t know where to go.”
Her confusion is one small data point in a sprawling national experiment: what happens when colleges and universities, under pressure from lawmakers, donors, activists and — increasingly — the federal government, dismantle the bureaucracies built over the last decade in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Across red states and swing states, at flagship publics and elite private campuses, DEI is being renamed, defunded or explicitly banned. Supporters of the rollback say they are restoring intellectual pluralism, ending “woke” excess and returning admissions and hiring to a race-neutral ideal. Critics warn of an unraveling that will reshape who gets to attend college, who feels safe once they arrive, and which ideas are allowed to flourish.
The debate is usually framed in the language of policy memos and court opinions. On campus, it looks like office doors quietly closing, student organizations losing budgets, and faculty wondering, sometimes aloud, whether it’s still safe to study racism.
The Unmaking of an Acronym
The backlash against DEI did not spring up overnight. It grew out of overlapping developments: the country’s long-running ideological war over affirmative action, the surge of institutional pledges after the murder of George Floyd, and a growing conservative movement convinced that DEI had morphed from a commitment to fairness into an ideological regime.
In June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, ruling that the programs violated the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee. Supporters of that decision framed it as the beginning of the end of identity-based preferences in higher education; opponents saw it as a green light for a broader assault on efforts to close racial gaps.
State lawmakers moved quickly. By mid-2023, at least 17 Republican-controlled legislatures had introduced bills to limit or ban DEI initiatives, bar the use of diversity statements in hiring, or prohibit mandatory trainings that addressed systemic racism. Texas approved SB 17, which ordered public universities to shutter DEI offices and barred them from requiring diversity training or using DEI criteria in hiring. Florida passed SB 266, prohibiting its universities from spending state or federal dollars on programs that “advocate” for diversity, equity and inclusion and narrowing what can count as general-education coursework.
Those state-level skirmishes have since been enveloped by a larger conflict. In Washington, the Trump administration’s second term has used executive orders and agency guidance to push universities to eliminate DEI initiatives, warning they risk losing federal contracts and grants if they are deemed to use “racial preferences” in admissions, scholarships or hiring.
Elite campuses have become symbols in this fight. Harvard’s public refusal to rewrite its protest policies or dismantle its diversity commitments has already led to frozen research funding and litigation, according to reporting in Black media outlets. The University of Michigan, long touted as a national DEI model, has shuttered its flagship diversity program and related offices, scrapping a DEI 2.0 strategic plan after ending diversity statements in faculty evaluations.
To critics of DEI, these moves represent overdue course corrections. To many students and faculty, they feel like a rug being pulled out from under them.
Texas: After the Layoffs
In Texas, the immediate effects of SB 17 can be counted: at least 35 DEI offices closed and roughly 350 positions cut across public universities, according to one analysis. UT Austin alone eliminated around 60 staff roles, shutting down the Division of Campus and Community Engagement and the Multicultural Engagement Center at the start of this year.
Administrators insist that the underlying services remain. In a carefully worded letter, UT leaders said programs that support low-income or first-generation students would be “realigned” under new, compliant units. The law bans DEI offices, they argue, not help for struggling students.
But rebranding isn’t neutral. Directors who once held titles like “Assistant Vice President of Diversity and Community Engagement” now oversee generic “student success” units, stripped of explicit mandates to address racial inequities. Some staff have been reassigned; others have left campus altogether.
Students describe a different landscape. In interviews with local reporters, UT undergraduates spoke of feeling “betrayed” after a year of dismantling DEI programs; more than 60 people were laid off at UT Austin, and more than 100 across the state, according to a tally by the Associated Press.
One student recalled how the Multicultural Engagement Center had once hosted late-night study sessions and teach-ins after high-profile police killings. “It was where we went when the news felt too heavy,” she said. Now, that space is dark.
At Texas A&M, a separate but related set of changes has roiled campus. The university closed its Office of Diversity even before SB 17 took effect, revised hiring and training practices, and more recently announced restrictions on courses that “advocate for race or gender ideology” without approval from the university president.
Supporters of these changes say DEI offices had become ideological enforcers, compelling faculty and staff to affirm certain views on systemic racism and gender identity. One Texas lawmaker described DEI as a “weaponized acronym” used to police speech rather than protect vulnerable students.
But even as A&M touts a new $25 million hiring initiative to recruit 167 faculty members, surveys suggest Texas’s political climate — including its DEI bans — has hurt recruitment. A 2024 American Association of University Professors survey found that a majority of Texas professors were reluctant to recommend the state to out-of-state colleagues, citing attacks on academic freedom and diversity-related policies.
Staff cuts and chilled hiring are the visible edges of a less quantifiable shift: a quiet narrowing of what feels safe to say in a classroom.
Florida: Defunding a Language
If Texas illustrates the blunt instrument of state bans, Florida shows what happens when those bans are paired with an explicit campaign to reshape the curriculum.
SB 266, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in 2023, prohibits public colleges and universities from spending state or federal funds on programs that “advocate for DEI” or “promote political or social activism.” It also directs institutions to prioritize courses that emphasize “Western civilization” in general-education requirements.
At the University of Florida, administrators have redirected or eliminated DEI-branded centers and laid off staff, while students and faculty speak of “vagueness as a weapon.” Faculty who teach courses on structural racism or gender inequality wonder whether they might now be construed as “advocacy.”
New College of Florida, the small public honors college in Sarasota, has become a test case for a more aggressive model. A special committee of the American Association of University Professors documented how a DeSantis-backed overhaul of the board of trustees led to the ousting of the president, the defunding of diversity offices, the restructuring of academic programs and the exodus of faculty and students.
This is the version of the anti-DEI agenda that most alarms academic-freedom advocates: not just defunding diversity staff, but using ideological tests to reshape what can be taught, who is hired and which research gets funded.
Opponents of DEI often say they are defending free speech on campus. In Florida, critics argue, the result has been a new orthodoxy — one that casts suspicion on scholarship about race and gender and channels resources toward conservative-branded institutes.
North Carolina: ‘Equality’ by Another Name
In North Carolina, the rollback has been less theatrical but no less significant. In May 2024, the University of North Carolina System Board of Governors voted to repeal its DEI policy and replace it with one titled “Equality Within the University of North Carolina.” The new policy emphasizes nondiscrimination, viewpoint neutrality and freedom of expression, but omits explicit references to race, gender or sexual orientation.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, the state’s flagship, this “controlled demolition” of DEI has meant eliminating 20 DEI positions, mostly in the central Office for Diversity and Inclusion, and reassigning others. A total of 27 roles were realigned, with job descriptions rewritten to comply with the Equality policy.
System-wide, UNC campuses have scrapped diversity offices, dropped graduation requirements that touched on DEI themes, and excised certain language from strategic plans and websites. In a single year, nearly 60 jobs were eliminated across the system, according to one investigation.
Some faculty see the shift as mostly cosmetic — a relabeling exercise that leaves core student-support programs intact. Others say that when you remove the words, you remove the ability to name and address specific inequities.
One UNC professor described the new euphemisms as “like trying to fix a broken bone without saying which limb is fractured.”
Michigan and the Midwest: Model No More
For years, the University of Michigan’s DEI plan was held up as a national model: a multi-year, multi-million-dollar initiative that set quantifiable goals for diversifying faculty, closing retention gaps and creating new pipelines for first-generation and low-income students.
By late 2024, under a combination of political pressure and internal criticism, that model was unraveling. The university announced it would eliminate diversity statements from hiring and tenure processes, responding to complaints that such statements enforced ideological conformity. Months later, Michigan leaders moved to shutter the DEI office itself, canceling the DEI 2.0 strategic plan and closing related offices that had supported first-gen students and health-equity work.
The decision sparked protests and a faculty-led petition drive; more than 500 faculty and students rallied to condemn what they saw as a capitulation to outside pressure.
Ohio State University, meanwhile, has stripped away DEI branding from programs and reevaluated hiring practices, prompting warnings from Black journalists and advocates that the changes are part of a longer history of erasing supports for Black students from predominantly white campuses.
The Midwest cases complicate the narrative that DEI is only under attack in deep-red states. They suggest that elite, research-heavy institutions, even in politically divided states, are recalibrating their public commitments as the legal landscape shifts.
What Students Lose When the Offices Go Dark
Behind the language of “compliance” and “realignment” are students who used DEI-branded offices less as ideological training grounds than as navigational tools.
Black Student Unions, multicultural centers and identity-based support programs have been particularly vulnerable. Across several states, new laws banning or restricting DEI have led universities to defund or reconfigure BSUs and their associated cultural centers. At the University of Utah, one Black Student Union lost its $11,000 annual budget, and its Black Cultural Center was converted into office space after a state law barred identity-focused programs. The group ultimately disaffiliated from the university to continue its mission.
Scholarships earmarked for historically marginalized groups have been canceled; some universities now face lawsuits alleging that race-conscious fellowships violate civil-rights laws.
To understand what this means in lived experience, it helps to rewind to the early 1970s, when Black Student Unions first emerged as hubs of organizing and mutual aid on mostly white campuses. They weren’t originally DEI projects; they were born out of protest and necessity. Over time, as institutions professionalized their responses to demands for representation, much of that work migrated into offices with titles like “Student Diversity and Belonging” or “Multicultural Affairs.”
Now, as those offices shrink or vanish, student leaders find themselves back where their predecessors started: crowdfunding for basic programming, begging alumni for money to host cultural events, and, in some cases, moving off campus altogether to preserve autonomy.
The ripple effects extend beyond the students currently on campus. K-12 educators and counselors told Word In Black that high-profile attacks on DEI in colleges are already dampening some Black students’ aspirations; schools that once seemed like aspirational destinations now look hostile or precarious.
“If Harvard and Michigan are rolling back diversity, what does that say to a 10th-grader watching from a classroom in Jackson or Baltimore?” one counselor asked. “It says: they’re not talking to you anymore.”
What Supporters of the Rollback Say
For all the attention paid to the harms of defunding DEI, the critics’ case resonates with a sizable share of the public — and with a growing number of judges.
Conservative lawmakers and activists argue that DEI offices, however well-intentioned, evolved into bureaucracies that enforced a narrow worldview and unfairly advantaged some applicants over others. They point to mandatory bias trainings that required employees to acknowledge “white privilege,” hiring rubrics that awarded points for “DEI contributions,” and the growth of diversity statements that some saw as loyalty oaths.
In recent litigation, advocacy groups have challenged fellowships, faculty-hiring programs and scholarships reserved for underrepresented minorities as illegal racial discrimination. Some corporate giants, under similar legal pressure, have announced rollbacks of their own DEI policies, vowing to focus on “merit-based” hiring instead.
There is also a more philosophical objection: the belief that identity-based initiatives, however well-designed, inevitably reify the categories they seek to transcend, encouraging people to see themselves primarily as members of racial groups and turning universities into arenas for zero-sum competition.
Those critiques have landed most forcefully in legislatures and courts, where the vocabulary of “colour-blind” equality still carries enormous weight.
But among students and faculty, even some who are skeptical of DEI as it has been practiced express discomfort with the pace of dismantling. They worry that universities are replacing imperfect tools with nothing at all — or with new structures that entrench a different kind of orthodoxy.
The Pipeline, Rerouted
The impact of campus DEI rollbacks doesn’t stop at the campus gate. Universities are nodes in a larger pipeline that connects K-12 schools to professional life. When they pull back from explicit efforts to foster inclusion, the effects are felt upstream and downstream.
Health-equity centers and medical-school DEI offices have come under particular scrutiny. Conservative lawmakers have threatened to cut funding from medical schools that include lessons on structural racism or maintain diversity offices, arguing that such programs politicize medicine.
Researchers warn that this could weaken efforts to address racial disparities in health outcomes, from Black maternal mortality to COVID-19 death rates, by chilling the very research designed to explain those gaps.
On the corporate side, DEI attacks aimed at universities are beginning to reshape the college-to-corporation pipeline. Equity advocates told Word In Black that if fewer Black and Latino students enroll in or feel supported at selective institutions, the talent pool feeding Fortune 500 leadership programs and elite law firms will narrow accordingly.
“We’ve spent years telling companies to build diverse pipelines, not just diverse endpoints,” one consultant said. “You can’t do that if the universities that feed those pipelines are being told diversity is a dirty word.”
Where Do Students Go Now?
Not all institutions are retreating. Some, like Harvard, have chosen open confrontation with federal authorities, accepting lawsuits and funding freezes rather than dismantle programs they see as essential to their mission.
Historically Black colleges and universities — mostly exempt from the most aggressive anti-DEI legislation — have experienced surging interest from students who want campuses where their presence isn’t up for debate. Spelman College’s former president, Beverly Daniel Tatum, told The Guardian that in an era of frozen federal funding and attacks on DEI at predominantly white institutions, more Black students are gravitating toward HBCUs “where their history isn’t being erased.”
But HBCUs, chronically underfunded compared with their predominantly white peers, cannot absorb every student disillusioned with flagship publics or Ivy-plus campuses. Some are already straining to meet demand.
On other campuses, students and faculty are improvising new forms of support. Informal mentoring networks spring up where offices once sat. Faculty rebrand once-explicitly DEI-themed courses under broader titles — “Social Determinants of Health” instead of “Racism and Health,” “U.S. Legal History” instead of “Critical Race Theory” — while hoping their syllabi don’t cross a shifting line.
The language changes. The needs do not.
Back in Austin, the junior from Houston who found her footing in a now-defunct summer bridge program has started hosting late-night study sessions in her apartment. Friends pile onto the floor with laptops and microwavable dinners; they swap notes about financial aid and share job-search tips for younger siblings.
“It’s what that office used to be,” she says. “Except now it’s just us.”
For now, those improvised networks are holding. The longer-term question is whether the country’s colleges and universities — institutions that have long presented themselves as engines of mobility and laboratories of democracy — can sustain that work without the acronym that, for all its flaws and contradictions, tried to name it.