Resisting the rollback: How select universities maintain DEI programs despite federal pressure

“Principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are central to our mission as a Jesuit institution and connect us to a long Catholic tradition of advocating for the dignity and worth of every person.”

The quote above came from an April 9, 2025 mailing from the Office of Multicultural Affairs at Fordham announcing Pre Commencement Celebrations for groups ranging from Black, Latine, and Asian, to LGBTQ+ students.   In it, Fordham affirmed its commitment to making students from historically marginalized groups feel welcome, in direct defiance of executive orders and department directives coming from the Trump Administration.

In doing so, Fordham followed the example a fellow Jesuit institution, Georgetown Law School, who responded with comparable language to a March 3 letter from the US Attorney for the District of Columbia demanding it “eliminate all DEl from your school and its curriculum” and threatening to bar Georgetown law students from internships and jobs in its office unless it complied.  In rejecting this demand, Georgetown Law Dean Martin Treanor wrote the following in a letter that garnered national attention.

“Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution.”

This open, public defense of DEI by two private Catholic institutions is only one part of a complex set of responses to efforts to ban DEI at the nation’s universities, some of which emanate from the Trump Administration, others from Republic state legislatures.  

Despite the tremendous effort and attention given to the DEI ban by the Trump Administration, it is my conviction that DEI will survive at most of the nation’s universities, in its current form or under a different name, with the most potent threats coming from the state rather than the federal level.

Before analyzing the form threats to DEI currently take, it would be helpful to briefly summarize what DEI programs consist of and aim to do.  In the aftermath of the Black Lives matter movement, universities around the nation set up Diversity, Equity and Inclusion offices with a mandate to develop programs to bring more historically marginalized groups to universities through revised admissions and hiring strategies and to promote and fund programs which make students and faculty from such backgrounds feel more welcome at the university. However, some of the programs these offices recommended- requiring all job candidates to write letters saying how they would contribute to promoting diversity, making anti-bias training mandatory for all university employees, promoting separate graduation ceremonies for marginalized groups- proved controversial and led to accusations that DEI offices were promoting discrimination against whites.

In response to these accusations, Republican dominated state legislatures, led by Florida and Texas, decided to dismantle DEI offices at all public universities in their states, and since these institutions were 100 percent state-funded, they had no choice but to comply. 

This was the model that the Trump Administration decided to follow in trying to make a DEI ban national policy, implemented through executive orders that started as early as January 21, 2025.

However, forcing institutions to comply with an executive order when you don’t control their funding is not that easy, especially when the institutions think the policies you are banning are valuable, and that what you are asking of them violates deeply held commitments to academic freedom.

If you look at institutions which have dismantled DEI offices since the Trump Administration demanded schools do this- the most prominent of which are University of Michigan and The Ohio State University- they all have one of two traits: they have huge federal grants to fund scientific and medical research, or they are located in a red state where Republicans control the state legislature and the Governor’s office.

In red states like Ohio, where the legislature recently passed a bill, which the Governor signed, which required that faculty members at all state universities submit their syllabi to a state monitor for review, the threat to academic freedom, and unfettered teaching about race and gender, is profound and serious.

But in New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut, I do not know of a single university, public or private, which dismantled its DEI office, or where faculty members feel under pressure to teach differently because of Trump Administration threats or executive orders.

In those states, Governors and Legislatures have doubled down in support of the principles of DEI in universities as well as K-12 education. In the face of that, the Trump Administration’s only recourse is to cut federal funding, which has already been challenged, at the University level, in a February 2025 lawsuit by The American Association of University Professors and the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.

What we have here is a war for the soul of our universities, state by state, institution by institution, which the Trump Administration is not winning and, frankly, cannot win at the national level.

Why? Because only a relatively small number of the nation’s universities have a medical school, or conduct extensive stem research, and therefore are not vulnerable to threats to cut federal research grants, the way schools like Columbia or the University of Michigan are.

In my judgement, it means that programs promoting diversity in hiring admission, programming and curriculum, will survive relatively intact at most of the nation’s private universities and in public universities located in Blue States.

And even in public universities in red states, faculty may find ways of protecting the way they teach about race and gender using different language.

DEI is definitely under assault. But its defenders are numerous and well positioned and reports of its death are premature.

Mark Naison is a Professor of History and African American Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of eight books and over 300 articles on African American politics, labor history, popular culture and education policy.  The best known of his books,  Communists in Harlem During the Depression published in 1983 is still in print and still utilized in college and graduate school courses.

 Dr. Naison is the founder of the Bronx African American History Project, one of the largest community based oral history projects in the nation and has brought his research into more than 30 Bronx schools as well as many Bronx based non profits and cultural centers.  A co-founder of the Bronx Berlin Youth exchange,  Naison’s articles about Bronx music and Bronx culture have been published in German, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese as well as English. In recent years he, has has published a novel, Pure Bronx, co-written with his former student Melissa Castillo-Garsow, a book of essays entitled Badass Teachers Unite and a collection of oral histories entitled  . which is one of the featured readings in a course he teaches at Fordham called “The Bronx: Immigration Race and Culture,” His eighth book is an online text he wrote for his Rock and Roll to Hip Hop class, which can be accessed through this– link https://research.library.fordham.edu/baahp_essays/.

In addition to his teaching, Dr Naison leads tours of the Bronx for students and faculty at Fordham, as well as for groups of scholars and activists from around the nation and around the world.  He also publishes a blog, which can be accessed at withabrookynaccent.blogspot.com, and has founded several Facebook groups, the most popular of which are the Badass Teachers Association and the National Anti-Racism AllIance. His course “From Rock and Roll To Hip Hop” was featured in the New York Post as one of the most popular courses in New York city in 2019.