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Dive Brief:
Texas officials are encouraging college students, employees and the public to report violations of the state’s ban on faculty senates and diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s newly created Office of the Ombudsman launched the Students First portal — separate from its existing student complaint portal — to give “the public easy access to file complaints and provide feedback” over colleges’ alleged legal violations.
Through Students First, college students and employees can submit formal complaints and are not required to have previously filed a complaint with the college. Members of the public can submit informal feedback.
Dive Insight:
The Students First portal focuses on violations of two significant Texas laws — 2023’s SB 17 and 2025′ SB 37.
SB 17 prohibited colleges from having diversity offices or hiring employees to do DEI-focused work. It also banned mandatory DEI training for employees and students.
While SB 17 functionally outlawed DEI at public colleges — making Texas one of the first to enact legislation growing increasingly popular in conservative states — SB 37 focused primarily on academic governance.
The law stripped faculty senates of much of their authority and autonomy and shifted that power to political appointees. SB 37 also established the THECB’s ombudsman office. Earlier this month, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Brandon Simmons, the chair of the Texas Southern University Board of Regents, to lead the office.
Republican state Sen. Brandon Creighton, author of SB 37, said in April that the bill is meant to affirm authority over public colleges lies with regents, not faculty. In Texas, regents are appointed by the governor.
Prior to its passage, higher education advocates and faculty groups — including the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors and the Texas American Federation of Teachers — strongly opposed SB 37 and raised concerns over the erosion of academic freedom and increased political influence on college campuses.
Creighton, who also wrote SB 17, resigned from the Legislature in October after being named the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System.
In September, Abbott said Texas is “targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation.” The following month, Texas policymakers launched new select committees in the state House and Senate and tasked them with reporting on “bias, discourse, and freedom of speech” on college campuses.
If the ombudsman office decides to investigate a formal complaint, the affected college will be notified within five days. From there, the college has 175 days to respond to the complaint — barring an office-granted extension — and 30 days to respond to any written requests for additional information.
If the college is found to be out of compliance, it has 180 days to resolve the issues to the ombudsman office’s satisfaction.
The ombudsman office will “submit to the Ombudsman and State Auditor a report on the noncompliance that includes the recommendations” if it determines the college “has not resolved issues and recommendations identified in the report,” according to the Students First portal.
Simmons said Friday that he aims to foster a “collaborative, productive partnership with our institutional leaders and students” through the new “user-friendly website and engagement on campuses across Texas.”
eSchool News is counting down the 10 most-read stories of 2025. Story #6 focuses on DEI in education.
Key points:
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have become integral to educational institutions across the United States. DEI aims to foster environments where all students can thrive regardless of their backgrounds. The programs are designed to address systemic inequalities, promote representation, and create inclusive spaces for learning. However, as DEI becomes more prevalent, it also faces scrutiny and debate regarding its effectiveness, implementation, and impact on educational outcomes.
One of the main advantages of DEI in education is the promotion of a more inclusive and representative curriculum. Students gain a broader understanding of the world by integrating diverse perspectives into course materials. This enhances critical thinking and empathy. Furthermore, the approach prepares students to navigate and contribute to our increasingly globalized society. Moreover, exposure to diverse viewpoints encourages students to challenge their assumptions and develop a more nuanced perspective on complex issues.
DEI initiatives also contribute to improved academic outcomes by fostering a sense of belongingness amongst students. When students see themselves reflected in their educators and curricula, they are more likely to feel valued and supported. This leads to increased engagement and motivation. This sense of inclusion can result in higher retention and graduation rates (particularly among historically marginalized groups). Furthermore, diverse learning environments encourage collaboration and communication skills because students learn to work effectively with peers from different backgrounds.
In addition to benefiting students, DEI programs can enhance faculty satisfaction and retention. Institutions that prioritize diversity in hiring and promotion practices create more equitable workplaces. This can lead to increased job satisfaction among faculty members. Mentorship programs and professional development opportunities focused on DEI can also support faculty in creating inclusive classroom environments, which further benefits students.
Despite these benefits, DEI initiatives are not without challenges. One significant concern is the potential for resistance and backlash from individuals who perceive DEI efforts as a threat to traditional values (in other words, a form of reverse discrimination). This resistance can manifest in various ways (opposition to DEI policies, legal challenges, and political pressure). Such opposition can hinder the implementation and effectiveness of DEI programs, thereby creating a contentious atmosphere within educational institutions.
Another challenge is the difficulty in measuring the success of DEI initiatives. Without clear metrics, it can be challenging to assess the impact of these programs on student outcomes, faculty satisfaction, or institutional culture. The lack of quantifiable data can lead to skepticism about the efficiency of DEI efforts, thus resulting in reduced support or funding for such programs. Additionally, the absence of standardized definitions and goals for DEI can lead to inconsistent implementation across institutions.
Resource allocation is also a critical issue in the execution of DEI initiatives. Implementing comprehensive DEI programs often requires significant financial investment (funding for specialized staff, training, and support services). In times of budget constraints, institutions may struggle to prioritize DEI efforts. This may lead to inadequate support for students and faculty. Without sufficient resources, DEI programs may fail to achieve their intended outcomes thus further fueling criticism and skepticism.
The potential for tokenism is another concern associated with DEI initiatives. When institutions focus on meeting diversity quotas without fostering genuine inclusion, individuals from underrepresented groups may feel marginalized or exploited. Tokenism may undermine the goals of DEI by creating superficial diversity that does not translate into meaningful change or equity. To avoid this, institutions must commit to creating inclusive environments where all individuals feel valued and empowered to contribute fully.
Furthermore, DEI programs can sometimes inadvertently reinforce stereotypes or create division among student populations. For example, emphasizing differences without promoting commonalities may lead to increased social fragmentation or feelings of isolation among certain groups. Educators must carefully balance the celebration of diversity with the promotion of unity and shared values to foster cohesive learning communities.
In summary, DEI initiatives in education offer numerous benefits, but these programs also face significant challenges. To maximize the positive impact of DEI efforts, educational institutions must commit to thoughtful, well-resourced, and inclusive implementation strategies that promote genuine equity and inclusion for all members.
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by Jeni Hebert-Beirne, The Hechinger Report December 22, 2025
It started with Harvard University. Then Notre Dame, Cornell, Ohio State University and the University of Michigan.
Colleges are racing to close or rename their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices, which serve as the institutional infrastructure to ensure fair opportunity and conditions for all. The pace is disorienting and getting worse: since last January, 181 colleges in all.
Often this comes with a formal announcement via mass email, whispering a watered-down name change that implies: “There is nothing to see here. The work will remain the same.” But renaming the offices is something to see, and it changes the work that can be done.
Colleges say the changes are needed to comply with last January’s White House executive orders to end “wasteful government DEI programs” and “illegal discrimination” and restore “merit-based opportunity,” prompting them to replace DEI with words like engagement, culture, community, opportunity and belonging.
One college went even further this month: The University of Alabama ended two student-run magazines because administrators perceived them to be targeting specific demographics and thus to be out of compliance with Attorney General Pamela Bondi’s anti-discrimination guidance. Students are fighting back while some experts say the move is a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
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With the one-year mark of the original disruptive executive orders approaching, the pattern of response is nearly always the same. Announcements of name changes are followed quickly by impassioned pronouncements that schools should “remain committed to our long-standing social justice mission.”
University administrators, faculty, students, supporters and alumni need to stand up and call attention to the risks of this widespread renaming.
True, there are risks to not complying. The U.S. State Department recently proposed to cut research funding to 38 elite universities in a public-private partnership for what the Trump administration perceived as DEI hiring practices. Universities removed from the partnership will be replaced by schools that the administration perceives to be more merit-based, such as Liberty University and Brigham Young University.
In addition to the freezing of critical research dollars, universities are being fined millions of dollars for hiring practices that use an equity lens — even though those practices are merit-based and ensure that all candidates are fairly evaluated.
Northwestern University recently paid $75 million to have research funding that had already been approved restored, while Columbia University paid $200 million. Make no mistake: This is extortion.
Some top university administrators have resigned under this pressure. Others seem to be deciding that changing the name of their equity office is cheaper than being extorted.
Many are clinging to the misguided notion that the name changes do not mean they are any less committed to their equity and justice-oriented missions.
As a long-standing faculty member of a major public university, I find this alarming. In what way does backing away from critical, specific language advance social justice missions?
In ceding ground on critical infrastructure that centers justice, the universities that are caving are violating a number of historian and author Timothy Snyder’s 20 lessons from the 20th century for fighting tyranny.
The first lesson is: “Do not obey in advance.” Many of these changes are not required. Rather, universities are making decisions to comply in advance in order to avoid potential future conflicts.
The second is: “Defend institutions.” The name changes and reorganizations convey that this infrastructure is not foundational to university work.
What Snyder doesn’t warn about is the loss of critical words that frame justice work.
The swift dismantling of the infrastructures that had been advancing social justice goals, especially those secured during the recent responses to racial injustice in the United States and the global pandemic, has been breathtaking.
This is personal to me. Over the 15 years since I was hired as a professor and community health equity researcher at Chicago’s only public research institution, the university deepened its commitment to social justice by investing resources to address systemic inequities.
Directors were named, staff members hired. Missions were carefully curated. Funding mechanisms were announced to encourage work at the intersections of the roots of injustices. Award mechanisms were carefully worded to describe what excellence looks like in social justice work.
Now, one by one, this infrastructure is being deconstructed.
The University of Illinois Chicago leadership recently announced that the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Diversity will be renamed and reoriented as the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Engagement. The explanation noted that this change reflects a narrowed dual focus: engaging internally within the university community and externally with the City of Chicago.
This concept of university engagement efforts as two sides of one coin oversimplifies the complexity of the authentic, reciprocal relationship development required by the university to achieve equity goals.
As a community engagement scientist, I feel a major loss and unsettling alarm from the renaming of “Equity and Diversity” as “Engagement.” I’ve spent two decades doing justice-centered, community-based participatory research in Chicago neighborhoods with community members. It is doubtful that the work can remain authentic if administrators can’t stand up enough to keep the name.
As a professor of public health, I train graduate students on the importance of language and naming. For example, people in low-income neighborhoods are not inherently “at risk” for poor health but rather are exposed to conditions that impact their risk level and defy health equity. Health is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being,” while health equity is “the state in which everyone has the chance to attain full health potential.” Changing the emphasis from health equity to health focuses the system’s lens on the individual and mutes population impact.
Similarly, changing the language around DEI offices is a huge deal. It is the beginning of the end. Pretending it is not is complicity.
Jeni Hebert-Beirne is a professor of Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health and a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-colleges-are-not-just-saying-goodbye-to-dei-offices-they-are-dismantling-programs-that-assure-institutional-commitment-to-justice/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
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The majority of college-bound high school seniors — 80% — either strongly or somewhat want to attend a college that “supports students of all races and ethnicities,” according to a recent poll that examines student views and beliefs concerning diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programming in higher education.
The poll — conducted by Art & Science Group, a Baltimore-based consulting firm — surveyed about 1,500 high school seniors in May through July.
Of those who were college-bound, it found that 61% “strongly” wanted to attend an institution where students of all races and ethnicities are supported, and 19% “somewhat” wanted to attend such a college.
Additionally, 76% either strongly or somewhat agreed that belonging was “just as important as academics” when choosing a college, according to the poll. And nearly two-thirds of students, 61%, expressed at least some concerns about threats to DEI efforts on campus.
However, the poll also found that how a college supports or prioritizes DEI is “not a decisive driver of college choice for most students.” The survey found only 23% of college-bound students sought out DEI information.
For Michelle Samura, a researcher who specializes in student belonging on campus, the poll’s findings show that support for students from all backgrounds is “something that they want from their college.”
“The ramifications for those institutions is that there would be an expectation among students entering those spaces of some type of support and welcoming environment,” said Samura, who is dean of arts, humanities and social sciences at Santiago Canyon College in Orange, California.
However, Samura added, what that support will look like in the current political and social climate — where the Trump administration is rooting out DEI efforts on campus, arguing they’re discriminatory and unlawful— is unclear.
Meanwhile, the poll found that 44% of students believe colleges can consider race in admissions, even though the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the practice in 2023.
Matthew Mayhew, a higher education professor at Ohio State University, said it is not surprising that a substantial share of students still think colleges can consider race in admissions, as the federal ban on the practice is relatively new.
Or, some students might sense that various questions colleges may ask about “resilience” during the admission process are just a “coded way for admissions people” to consider race “without stating that they’re looking for that issue and violating the law,” Mayhew said.
As for how students choose a college and what they expect once they arrive on campus, Mayhew said most base their decisions on what they can afford, their parents’ beliefs, or which would be the “best branded institutions” as reflected in college rankings and the like.
Students come to campus open, wondering what they will learn and what the experience will be about, Mayhew said.
“They have no sort of idea about what to actually expect by way of what the instructors are going to say in class, about what the curriculum is going to offer,” he said.
Samura, the college dean, said she found it interesting that the poll’s methodology showed that only 642 of the 1,481 high schoolers surveyed intended to attend a four-year college full time in fall 2025. The survey report did not indicate the plans of the remaining survey respondents.
But given that more than half of the students didn’t plan to attend a four-year college, Samura said, “That makes me wonder: Is there a broader question of belonging and higher ed?”
Under repeated threats to their funding, higher ed institutions began to rebrand or shut down cultural centers, Black student resource centers and LGBTQ+ and women’s programs. Many campus diversity officers lost their jobs or were shuffled off to other offices, barred from doing much of the work they were hired for. Some institutions scrapped celebrated traditions such as affinity graduations and campus residential communities geared toward students of certain racial or ethnic backgrounds. Some student groups, like Esperanza, lost university funding because of their identity-based missions.
In one recent example, the University of Alabama ended two student publications, one focused on women and the other on Black students, citing federal policy concerns. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga shuttered its Women’s and Gender Equity Center, an LGBTQ center, its Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Office of Student & Family Engagement, replacing them with a Center for Student Leadership, Engagement and Community. The changes have affected faculty and staff as well as students; earlier this fall, the University of Illinois System banned consideration of race, sex or country of origin not only in financial aid decisions but in hiring, tenure and promotion as well.
“It’s very sad to see a lot of universities fall to their knees,” Luna said. Higher ed institutions “are supposed to be the places where the exchange of ideas happen, where leaders are developed and where you’re just taught about how the world objectively is … It’s a very dangerous sign for the future.”
A Double Attack
State-level anti-DEI laws have proliferated for several years now, but diversity-related programs and services were dealt a double blow this year when Trump took office.
On Feb. 14, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague letter declaring race-conscious student programming and resources illegal, based on an expansive interpretation of the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision against considering race in admissions in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard. It gave colleges and universities 14 days to eliminate such offerings or risk losing their federal funding. A month later, ED launched investigations into 51 colleges for ongoing DEI activity. Federal judges struck down the department’s anti-DEI guidance in April, pausing enforcement, but colleges nonetheless scrambled to review and scrub DEI language from their programs and offices or shutter them altogether.
Over the summer, the Department of Justice came out with a sweeping guidance memo declaring an even wider set of practices off-limits, including those that use “potentially unlawful proxies” for race, such as recruiting students from majority-minority geographic areas. In a series of contentious legal battles, the federal government pressured some universities to agree to settlements that included anti-DEI provisions, including bans on race-conscious programs and transgender athletes. For example, the University of Virginia, which the DOJ targeted for DEI practices, recently agreed to quash all DEI programming to maintain federal funding.
I am a person who still believes, and I will forever believe, that it is important to call it diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism.”
Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at USC’s Race and Equity Center
All the while, federal agencies have slashed, frozen and stalled billions of dollars in research grants to universities, often for perceived ties to DEI concepts. More than 120 TRIO programs, which support disadvantaged students, also lost their federal funds over alleged DEI connections. And in September, the Education Department abruptly ended grants for many minority-serving institutions, calling such programs—used to fund supports like extra peer mentoring or streamlined STEM programming at colleges with burgeoning minority student populations—“discriminatory” and “unconstitutional.”
States, meanwhile, enacted an unprecedented number of new laws cracking down on DEI: 14 in 12 states, including Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. That’s double the number of states that passed anti-DEI laws last year.
A higher education consultant and lawyer in the Washington D.C. area, who asked to remain anonymous, said campus leaders are increasingly asking, “How do we keep ourselves off the radar? How do we avoid scrutiny from the federal government?” At the same time, they face “increasingly disgruntled and disappointed communities within who are saying, ‘We thought you cared about this issue’,” the source said. University leaders have come under “very real pressure.”
A ‘Loss of Momentum’
Diversity officers and scholars fear that this year’s seismic policy shifts and campus crackdowns on DEI will have ripple effects across academe and beyond.
Kaleb L. Briscoe, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Oklahoma, is concerned that some institutions have responded to DEI bans by limiting what’s taught in the classroom.
For example, Florida colleges removed hundreds of courses related to race, sex and gender from their general education requirement options. Classes at Texas A&M University that “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity” now require approval from the university president. And other Texas universities have undertaken reviews of course syllabi and curricula for anything that runs afoul of state or federal DEI bans.
Curriculum changes that would normally “take years’ worth of processes” are sometimes happening quickly and without appropriate faculty input, Briscoe said. While proponents of DEI bans often call for viewpoint diversity, “by implementing these bans, you are taking away voices and taking away knowledge … which really counters what they are hoping to do.”
She also fears a “blue, red, purple divide of education,” where students have different levels of access to certain subject areas or perspectives depending on where they go to college.
“We are now going to see different people in different states learning and getting access to different things,” she said. “That is horrible because, knowledge-wise, we should be preparing our students to be productive citizens across difference.”
What we’re doing is reducing opportunities.”
Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education
Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center, said he’s mourning a “loss of momentum” in improving the experiences and outcomes of underrepresented students, a movement that stretches back to the 1960s.
He recently visited a campus where “the Black cultural center still exists in name, but it has no staff. It has no programming. It’s just an empty room,” he said. Harper, who also serves as USC’s Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy, said he found a smattering of students still trying to use the space, sitting in the dark and talking. He remembers when the same center was “a light, bright, vibrant space that was rich with culture that had employees … who helped to make it a home away from home.”
To him, the darkened space was a symbol of what’s been lost.
DEI Professionals Under Fire
Harper said he’s been especially disheartened to see DEI professionals lose their jobs.
Institutions dismissed “good, innocent, hard-working people who were expert at bringing campus communities together across racial, religious, ideological and other important divides,” and who pushed for some widely-cared-about issues like pay equity for women and access for students with disabilities, he said. “The loss of those people has been catastrophic to higher education, to the students that they were serving and to those people’s careers.”
A former diversity professional at a public higher ed institution in the South told Inside Higher Ed that DEI officers were wrestling with the “trauma,” “shame” and “humiliation” of suffering such a forceful, nationwide rejection.
The ex-diversity officer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of career repercussions, spent years working to make their institution a more welcoming place for students of color—and it worked, they said. Over their tenure, faculty diversity increased and the percentage of underrepresented students in the university’s entering class more than doubled.
But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the institution’s website, the former diversity officer said. It makes no mention of the diversity office, which was dissolved. The university stripped any evidence of its work, including videos of events and educational programs, data reports and online community platforms. Unlike many of their co-workers, the former diversity officer retained an unrelated position at the institution, but their former role feels like a “scarlet letter” on campus and in the job market, they said.
They worry not only for their colleagues but also for students and faculty members left unserved.
“I can tell you that students of color who had community, don’t,” they said. “They’re spitting on Black kids, they’re calling them the N-word, and kids don’t know where to go. They don’t know what office is going to support them.”
The former diversity professional believes DEI is officially “dead,” at least as a label.
But “the underlying work of creating welcoming, diverse, inclusive, supportive cultures on campus and communities is not dead,” they said. The “benefits of diversity, of inclusion, those are still there. It just can’t be called that.”
Students in Ann Arbor protested the University of Michigan’s decision last spring to close its DEI offices, putting up posters criticizing President Donald Trump and former UM President Santa Ono.
Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
DEI’s Murky Future
Harper argued that the work can’t really go on without using the term “DEI.” He believes replacement terms like “culture” and ”community” lack specificity in a way that makes them meaningless.
“It’s giving weak sauce,” he said. “I am a person who still believes, and I will forever believe, that it is important to call it diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism.” The same goes for “antisemitism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. It’s important to call those things by their names.”
Whether DEI will continue in some form is an open question currently under debate by current and former DEI officers and researchers. Some retain their optimism; others argue it’s going to take years, even decades, for campus infrastructure to recover from the full extent of this year’s losses—if a comeback is even possible.
The DEI rollbacks mark a retreat from “60-plus years of effort to broaden access and address inequities,” said Paulette Granberry Russell, who’s stepping down as president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education in January after five years at the helm. “So, do I see this work coming back? Bouncing back? No.”
Regardless of who wins the next election, she believes federal funding cuts and stymied DEI-related research will cause long-lasting damage. She’s spoken with scholars studying issues related to race and gender who have been doxed and threatened, and who fear continuing the work they’ve done for years.
“What we’re doing is reducing opportunities,” Granberry Russell said. “You’re not going to make that up in two, three, four years.”
But she’s not without hope. She emphasized that a “systems approach” to improving academic outcomes for students—making such work the entire university’s responsibility—could be the next phase of these efforts as diversity offices fade. Doing so would require leaders to express “their commitment, which at least at this point, requires a certain amount of courage, given the very heavy-handed … taking away of resources to bring colleges and universities into line,” she said.
A chief diversity officer who lost their job in a state with a DEI ban but now works in the same role at an east coast institution, said they’re doing a “post-mortem” on where DEI went wrong. They believe the DEI movement might have tried to accomplish too much too fast, without explaining the research behind the practices developed to boost student outcomes.
Practitioners introduced concepts “really new to people” and sometimes “began to cancel people quickly” who didn’t get it, said the CDO, who asked to remain anonymous. But “you can’t run a marathon with people who are not fit. You have to bring them up to where you want them to be. And that requires teaching. It requires patience.”
They noted that the field of DEI grew rapidly in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Scholarship on improving campus climate flourished, and diversity professionals enjoyed a wide berth to try new strategies to close equity gaps. But it was short-lived. Less than a year into the CDO’s role at their previous institution, the anti-DEI movement gained traction in the state. An anti-DEI law ultimately passed, and the diversity office later closed for good.
“That great rebirth or Renaissance” was “like a star that just had its last final flash of wonder—and then the death began,” they said. “We didn’t know at the time that the star was shining brightly to die.”
They believe DEI could be on the brink of a new era, one that rectifies some of its past mistakes and garners more support. “My fear is that we won’t be given the opportunity to do so,” they said. But they’re confident diversity professionals won’t give up on the programs, practices and strategies they believe students need.
“Fear not. Rest up, my friends,” they said. “We will be back.”
The D.C.-based higher education consultant and lawyer believes DEI isn’t dead; it’s just shifting. Campus DEI work has never been unlawful, they argued, so colleges and universities simply need to emphasize that fact, not scale back their work. They encourage campus leaders to state explicitly that cultural centers and programs are open to all, and to train everyone on campus, including student group leaders, how to frame their programming that way—even though the programs didn’t discriminate in the first place.
“Many times, I’m just trying to remove language that I know is going to draw scrutiny and then trying to offer them a way to continue to live out their values,” they said. “There may be ways to thematically describe the intended purpose of a program without using an identity marker that really just is a lightning rod in this moment.”
They acknowledged that “this transition has been really painful” for all invested in diversity, equity and inclusion work.
“But I think people are resilient,” they said. “They’re evolving, and they’re trying to figure out a pathway to make the work of universal access and opportunity evergreen.”
by Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report December 4, 2025
Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.
The Trump administration’s policies may soon end that advantage that has been enjoyed by men, admissions and higher education experts say.
While much of the president’s recent scrutiny of college admissions practices has focused on race, these experts say his ban on diversity, equity and inclusion is likely to hit another underrepresented group of applicants: men, and particularly white men — the largest subset of male college applicants.
“This drips with irony,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, or ACE, the nation’s largest association of universities and colleges, who said he expects that colleges and universities are ending consideration of gender in admission. “The idea of males, including white males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.”
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For years universities and colleges have beentryingto keep the number of men and women on campuses evened out at a time when growing numbers ofmen have been choosing not to go to college. Some schools have tried to attract more men by adding football and other sports, promoting forestry and hunting programs and launching entrepreneurship competitions.
Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal anti-discrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses.
But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. The White House has so far largely not succeeded in its campaign to press a handful of elite schools to agree to the terms and sign a wide-ranging Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education in exchange for priority consideration for federal funding.
“The racial parts have gotten a lot more attention, but I know from having spoken with practitioners who work in college admissions, they have read very clearly that it says ‘race and gender,’” in the administration’s pronouncements about ending preferences in admission, said Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center.
“What I think they don’t understand is that taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of white males,” Harper said. “It is likely to impact them the most, as a matter of fact.”
At some private colleges, male applicants are more likely to get in
School
% of males admitted
% of females admitted
Brown University
7.0
4.4
University of Chicago
5.6
3.7
Yale University
4.6
3.4
University of Miami
22.5
16.5
Middlebury College
12.2
9.6
Baylor University
56.8
47.9
Pomona College
7.6
6.7
Tulane University
14.9
13.4
Vassar College
20.4
17.6
SOURCE: Hechinger Report calculations from universities’ Common Data Sets
Agreements that the administration has reached with Brown, Columbia and Northwestern universities to settle allegations of antisemitism discrimination also include language about gender.
In a statement announcing the Brown deal in July, Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”
Asked if that meant male applicants would no longer be admitted at higher rates than female applicants — which has helped Brown keep its undergraduate enrollment at almost exactly 50-50, even with twice as many female applicants — spokesman Brian Clark said, “We have made no changes to our admissions practices in this regard.”
The Trump administration has also vowed to make all higher education institutions submit details about the students they admit, including their gender, to find out whether they’re “discriminating against hard working American” prospective students, McMahon said in another statement.
Spokespeople for the Department of Education did not respond to questions about whether advantages in admission based on gender will be scrutinized in the same way as purported advantages based on race.
Universities are looking at the administration’s edicts “and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’d rather be cautious than stick our neck out’” by continuing to give advantages to male applicants, said ACE’s Mitchell, who was undersecretary of education under President Barack Obama. “I think we will see people dropping gender preferences, even though it is still within the law.”
Colleges that have been accepting men at higher rates are trying to avoid a marketing problem they fear will happen if their campuses become too female,said Madeleine Rhyneer, who headed admissions offices at four private universities and colleges and is now vice president of consulting services and dean of enrollment management for the education consulting firm EAB. Colleges worry, “Will men look at that and think, ‘That’s essentially a women’s college, and I don’t want to go there’?”
“For the Browns and Columbias and highly selective and very competitive institutions, it is a problem,” Rhyneer said. “They want to create what feels like a balanced climate.”
The results of ending this practice could be dramatic, experts predict. In 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, 817,035 more women than men applied to universities and colleges, federal data show. Boys also have lower mean scores on the SAT in reading and writing, score lower overall on the ACT and have lower grade point averages in high school.
“If we were going to eliminate preferences for men, the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight,” Mitchell said.
Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the right-leaning think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that similar predictions were made after the 2023 Supreme Court decision effectively ending affirmative action based on race.
At the time, he said, colleges spoke “in apocalyptic terms of the implications for the racial composition of student bodies.” But the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled at universities and colleges the next year rose, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Then, said Hess, “there was a lot of, ‘Never mind.’”
The country’s top 50 private colleges and universities have 2 percentage points more male undergraduates than the top 50 flagship public universities, which do not consider gender in admission, according to research by Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer. He said this suggests that at least some are putting a thumb on the scale for male applicants.
Columbia took 3 percent of women applicants last year and 4 percent of men. At the University of Chicago, 5.6 percent of male applicants were accepted last year, compared to 3.7 percent of female applicants. The ratio at the University of Miami was 22.5 percent to 16.5 percent; and at Vassar College, 20.4 percent to 17.6 percent.
Besides Brown, none of these universities would respond when asked if they will continue to accept higher percentages of men than women, Neither would others that do it, including Yale, Baylor and Tulane universities and Pomona College.
Private institutions are allowed to consider gender in admission under Title IX, the federal law otherwise banning discrimination by universities and colleges that get federal funding. That’s due to a loophole dating from when the law was passed, in 1971.
At the time, the gender ratio was exactly reversed, and men outnumbered women on campuses by nearly three to two. One of the universities’ congressional allies, Rep. John Erlenborn, R-Illinois, successfully amended the measure to let private colleges and universities continue to consider gender in admission.
Erlenborn said at the time that forcing colleges to stop considering gender would be “one more giant step toward involvement by the federal government in the internal affairs of institutions of higher education.”
There’s little ambiguity for admissions offices now, said USC’s Harper.
“It says here, in writing, ‘no discrimination on the basis of race and gender,’” he noted. “It says that explicitly.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected]orjpm.82 on Signal.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/an-unexpected-target-of-federal-college-admissions-scrutiny-men/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
If you’re not a supporter of the progressive DEI agenda, you’re not career ready. That’s one of the messages that the National Association of Colleges and Employers, America’s leading professional association for career placement, is sending to students.
First established in 1956, NACE boasts a current membership of more than 17,000 dues-paying career services and recruitment professionals. Career counselors and others in higher education often cite NACE’s eight career readiness competencies to help students prepare for the job market and workplace.
I was planning to use the NACE competencies this semester in a class on how liberal arts education equips students for the professional world and was dismayed to find that partisan criteria had crept into this valuable resource. The list includes—alongside things like teamwork, effective communication and technological proficiency—a competency called Equity & Inclusion. According to NACE, this means that a prospective professional will “engage in anti-oppressive practices that actively challenge the systems, structures, and policies of racism and inequity.”
If you’re fully career ready, the group says, you will not merely “keep an open mind to diverse ideas and new ways of thinking.” You will also “advocate for inclusion, equitable practices, justice, and empowerment for historically marginalized communities” and will “address systems of privilege that limit opportunities” for members of those communities. In other words, you will subscribe to the view that American society is characterized by systemic racism and will work to break down America’s allegedly racist structure.
NACE defines “equity” in this light: “Whereas equality means providing the same to all, equity means recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances.”
While these beliefs and attitudes might make someone a good fit at one of a diminishing number of “woke” corporations, they have little to do with career readiness in the ordinary sense of the term. Rather, the language NACE employs in its official materials implies a commitment to an ideological agenda that the organization has mixed into its definition of professional competence. NACE could be teaching students how to navigate the political diversity that characterizes most workplaces. Instead, through its influence in the college career counseling world, it is teaching them that acceptance of progressive orthodoxy on disputed questions of racial justice is a prerequisite for professional employment.
NACE also does a disservice to students by signaling that workplace political engagement is universally valued by employers. In fact, many companies discourage it, and with good reason. In most work environments, political advocacy is more likely to cause tension and division than it is to foster cooperation and trust.
As a college teacher and administrator, I’m especially troubled by the fact that NACE is conveying to students that their education should lead them to adopt a certain viewpoint on some of the most contentious political issues. The relationship between equity and equality, for example, is something that should be studied, discussed and debated in college, not taught as authoritative moral and political dogma.
More generally, the way NACE talks about diversity, equity and inclusion ignores—or perhaps disdains—the political disagreement that is a normal and natural part of life in a democratic society, including the workplace. The organization undermines its professed commitment to open-mindedness when it implies that all open-minded people must be capital-P Progressives on issues such as systemic racism and equitable hiring practices. Like many institutions in recent years, NACE appears to have given in to pressure from activist members and embraced the “antiracist” worldview, sidelining the principles of openness and neutrality that are, or ought to be, hallmarks of professionalism.
Notably, NACE indicates on its website that its equity and inclusion standard is under review. The organization cites recent “federal Executive Orders and subsequent guidance, as well as court decisions and regulatory changes, [that] may create legal risks that either preclude or discourage campuses and employers from using it.” This is encouraging. Better still would be for NACE to free itself from the ideological commitments that make its materials legally and politically risky in the first place. Let’s hope this venerable organization will get out of the business of DEI advocacy and focus on its core purposes of connecting students with employers and preparing students for professional life.
Andrew J. Bove is the associate director for academic advising in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Villanova University.
House Republicans have accused George Mason University President Gregory Washington of lying to Congress about diversity practices at his institution, ratcheting up pressure on the president to step down.
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee alleged in a report released Thursday night that Washington made “multiple false statements to Congress” in testimony about diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at GMU. The public university has been under fire for months over allegedly illegal DEI practices as the Trump administration has sought to crack down on such initiatives, claiming they are discriminatory and violate federal civil rights law. The Judiciary Committee report also alleged that the university “likely violated federal civil rights law by discriminating based on race in its hiring practices to advance Dr. Washington’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative.”
Washington has denied breaking the law through efforts to diversify GMU’s faculty and staff, telling Congress that the university did not practice illegal discrimination under his leadership.
The report is the latest salvo from Republicans who have launched federal investigations into GMU over its hiring policies, including demands that the embattled president apologize for allegedly discriminatory practices, which he has refused to do as he denies any wrongdoing.
What’s in the Report
The House Judiciary Committee’s report zoomed in on an effort by GMU, launched shortly after Washington took office in July 2020, to diversify employee ranks. The Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence initiative the president introduced aimed to make faculty and staff “mirror student Demographics” at GMU, which is among the most diverse institutions in the country. As part of that effort, GMU tasked schools and departments with hiring more underrepresented individuals.
But in Congressional testimony, Washington denied the initiative was a strict mandate.
“These are overall goals and they’re aspirational in focus,” Washington said, according to a transcript of his Sept. 17 interview released by the House Judiciary Committee Thursday.
Though the Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence initiative stemmed from his office, Washington told Congress that faculty in each department developed plans for their unit. He also cast the creation of such plans as optional, telling Congress “if units did not want to develop a plan, they did not have to.”
But the House Judiciary Committee claimed Washington lied about that.
“Documents and testimony obtained by the Committee … show that Dr. Washington and his deputies actively sought to punish schools that did not comply with his racial discrimination mandates,” the committee report states. “A senior GMU official told the Committee that GMU financially punished any school that resisted Dr. Washington’s unconstitutional initiative.”
Congress pointed to testimony from Ken Randall, the dean of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, as evidence that Washington lied about the plan being optional.
“You’d get fired if you didn’t have a plan,” Randall said, according to an interview transcript.
Washington also denied the administration formally reviewed plans to diversify faculty hiring. Republicans accused him of lying about that, too, pointing to internal remarks from then-vice president of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Sharnnia Artis (who now has a different title), in which she said the DEI team “consistently reviewed, monitored, and supported” such plans.
“Again, the evidence contradicts Dr. Washington’s testimony,” the report states.
However, Douglas Gansler, a lawyer representing the GMU president sharply disrupted claims that his client lied to Congress, which he accused of carrying out a “political lynching” in an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed.
“The political theater of the politicians accusing Dr. Washington of misrepresenting anything to them is unadulterated nonsense. Dr. Washington has never discriminated against anybody for any reason and did not utter one syllable of anything not verifiably completely true,” Gansler wrote.
What Happens Next
The GMU Board of Visitors has said little in the immediate aftermath of the report.
“Today, the Board of Visitors received an interim staff report from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary. We are reviewing the report and consulting with University counsel and counsel for Dr. Washington,” board members wrote in a brief statement. “The Board remains focused on serving our students, faculty and the Commonwealth, ensuring full compliance with federal law and positioning GMU for continued excellence.”
While the board is reviewing the report, it appears unlikely members would be able to take action against Washington. GMU’s board, which is stocked with GOP donors and political figures appointed by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, is currently without a quorum after Virginia Democrats blocked multiple appointments in recent months. Now a legal battle over those blocked appointments is slowly winding its way through the judicial system. While the Virginia Supreme Court heard arguments in the case last month, it has yet to issue a ruling on the matter. In the meantime, with only six of its 16 seats filled, GMU’s board is hobbled.
Youngkin’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
The George Mason chapter of the American Association of University Professors offered a fiery defense of Washington, arguing in a statement the committee was carrying out a politically motivated attack designed to erode institutional autonomy and impose partisan control over the public university.
“The Committee’s unfounded accusations, dependence on clearly compromised sources, and selective presentation of ‘evidence’ represent an unprecedented abuse of congressional power—designed not to find the truth, but to silence leadership that refuses to yield to political pressure,” the GMU-AAUP chapter wrote in an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed.
GMU students, employees and community members rallied in support of president Gregory Washington earlier this year, amid concerns the board would fire him.
With Washington under pressure from Congress, state and national Democrats have rallied to his defense, accusing the GOP of waging an ideological war on universities and hypocrisy by focusing on the GMU president’s alleged dishonesty while federal officials brazenly lie in court.
“In Donald Trump’s Gangster State, they pick the target first and figure out the charges later,” House Judiciary Democrats wrote on X. “Today’s target: GMU President Gregory Washington. The Trump Education Department failed to find evidence of employment discrimination at GMU. So [House Judiciary committee] Chairman [Jim] Jordan opened his own investigation. When that one only confirmed Dr. Washington followed Virginia law, Jordan pivoted and conjured up an absurd and convoluted criminal referral based on an alleged lie that takes 8 pages to explain.”
Representative James Walkinshaw—a Democrat in Virginia’s 11th district, which includes GMU—called Washington “an exemplary leader” in a biting statement posted on Bluesky.
“Make no mistake, this is an attack on free speech and academic freedom,” Walkinshaw wrote. “It’s cancel culture at its worst and the American people are tired of right-wing snowflakes like Jim Jordan trying to silence anyone who doesn’t bend the knee to their bizarre MAGA ideology.”
After yet another rocky year for higher education, student success administrators retain high confidence in their institution’s core mission: Some 95 percent rate the quality of undergraduate education delivered as good or excellent, according to Inside Higher Ed’s second annual Survey of College and University Student Success Administrators with Hanover Research.
This survey was conducted Aug. 20–Oct. 6 with Hanover Research. Respondents number 204 student success leaders, most of whom work in student affairs at the executive level at public and private nonprofit institutions. The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus seven percentage points. A copy of the free report can be downloaded here.
This independent editorial survey was made possible by support from the Gates Foundation and Studiosity.
Most student success administrators (85 percent) also report strong feelings of connection to students served, and nearly as many say they’re satisfied in their roles. Yet leaders continue to worry about the forces holding students back. Selecting up to three options from a longer list, administrators cite mental health challenges (51 percent describe this as a top challenge), financial constraints (49 percent) and lack of adequate preparation before college (48 percent) as the top barriers to student success at their institution. Community college leaders are disproportionately concerned about students needing to work while enrolled (67 percent).
Just about half of all administrators believe their institution is highly responsive to student needs for flexibility, such as in times of personal or academic crises.
A larger share of respondents, 61 percent, believe their institution is highly effective in prioritizing student success. Just 35 percent say it’s highly effective in using student success data to drive decisions, however. Both of these figures are similar to last year’s survey, meaning the gap between aspiration and data-driven change remains.
Student affairs leaders who responded to NASPA’s own annual Top Issues in Student Affairs survey this year flagged “using dashboards and other data communication tools to help senior administrators translate data into actionable insights for decision-making” as a top issue for institutions, behind only “protecting the institution against cyberattacks” and “navigating political and legislative pressures affecting institutional policies and practices.”
Colleges can certainly do more to harness the extraordinary number of student data points available to them every day. But Amelia Parnell, NASPA’s president, told Inside Higher Ed that she’d give student success leaders “a little more credit” for their use of data—especially the qualitative kind.
“We need both quantitative data to see scale and impact and qualitative data to understand the nuances,” including around learning and engagement, she said. “I think professionals have quite a bit of qualitative context about students’ experiences because they spend a lot of time connecting directly with them.”
Other top areas of concern for student success administrators include affordability, artificial intelligence and policy impacts on campus life, finds Inside Higher Ed’s survey.
Affordability and Value
A third of student success administrators say that their trust in higher education has waned in recent years, and many point to concerns about affordability (64 percent) and long-term value of a degree (62 percent) as top drivers of declining public confidence. Leaders also highlight tighter alignment between academic programs and career pathways as a key lever for rebuilding trust.
About six in 10 respondents are highly confident that their institution is actively working to keep costs affordable, with public institution leaders especially likely to say so (69 percent versus 49 percent of private nonprofit peers).
But just 11 percent of leaders think students at their institution clearly understand the total cost of attendance, beyond tuition. They raise similar concerns about students’ awareness and understanding of emergency funding resources at their institution.
In Inside Higher Ed’s main Student Voice survey this year, just 27 percent of students said they understand the total cost of attendance fully and can budget appropriately. More than three in five didn’t know if their college offers emergency aid. Yet 61 percent of student success administrators say this kind of help is available at their institution.
Some additional context—and evidence of misalignment between student experience and administrator perception: In Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers, most CBOs (88 percent) said that their institution is transparent about the full, net cost of attendance, including tuition discounts and counting fees and other expenses—though just 42 percent said this of colleges and universities as a whole. Most CBOs also said that their institution’s net price is sufficiently affordable.
Parnell of NASPA noted that financial aid “is but one part of the cost of attendance discussion for some students.” But she added that financial aid offers represent an opportunity for colleges to improve clarity and transparency around total cost—something the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and others have urged.
Preparing Students for an AI Future
Just 2 percent of student success leaders say their institution is very effective in helping students understand how, when and whether to use generative artificial intelligence in academic settings. On promoting academic integrity, specifically, 77 percent endorse educating students about ethical AI use rather than emphasizing punitive measures. Faculty and staff development and efforts to standardize use policies also rank high.
In the Student Voice survey, just 13 percent of students said they didn’t know when, how and whether to use generative AI for coursework—but most of the remainder attributed their knowledge to individual faculty efforts rather than broader institutional ones.
Student success administrators also describe a gap between the extent to which high-impact teaching practices, such as those endorsed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, are highly encouraged at their institution and widely adopted (65 percent versus 36 percent, respectively). And while 87 percent agree that students graduate from their college ready to succeed in today’s job market, half (51 percent) believe their institution should focus more on helping students find paid internships and other experiential learning opportunities.
Tawnya Means, an innovation consultant who recently joined Bowling Green State University and its Schmidthorst College of Business as a strategic innovation and AI adviser, said that all three of these concerns—lack of institutional guidance on AI, high-impact teaching practices and other opportunities for experiential learning and internships—are connected.
“Schools treating AI as a catalyst for pedagogical redesign are simultaneously increasing high-impact practices and preparing students for AI-augmented careers,” she said. And institutions doing this well are using some common strategies: making faculty development about pedagogy, not just “AI compliance,” and designing assignments where AI supports real learning. Unpacking the latter point, Means praised approaches that are experiential, teach discipline-specific or contextual AI use versus abstract rules, and mirror actual workplaces.
While business schools have long understood the power of “messy real-world case studies,” Means said they’re ripe for use across undergraduate education in the generative AI era and “resist simple AI shortcuts.”
Parnell suggested on-campus employment as yet another way to provide “work experience and support students in their learning journey.”
On AI specifically, Asim Ali, executive director of the Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Auburn University, who’s worked with many institutions on faculty development, said the “biggest gap I see is not engaging students in the process.”
At Auburn, he said, student government leaders have taken a “focused interest directly in shaping how we support GenAI learning.” And in discussions between student leaders and faculty, “both groups emphasized that students must also take responsibility for learning the ethics and appropriate use of GenAI.”
The biggest gap I see is not engaging students in the process.”
—Asim Ali, executive director of the Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Auburn University
Financial worries and uncertainty about the future top the list of students’ postcollege stressors, as ranked by student success administrators. And just a quarter of these leaders say their institution makes postgraduate outcomes are easily accessible.
Policy Impacts and Campus Climate
Almost all leaders say students feel welcomed, valued and supported on their campuses, and 87 percent say their institution is doing a good or excellent job promoting a positive campus climate. Yet regional differences emerge: Leaders in the South are somewhat less likely than peers elsewhere to say their institution is highly effective in encouraging diverse perspectives among students.
Nearly two in three leaders (62 percent) say recent federal restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have negatively impacted students, and the rate is higher among public institution leaders than their private nonprofit peers.
In the Student Voice survey, 48 percent of students said such changes had negatively impacted their college experience or that of peers; most of the remainder saw no change, rather than a positive one.
Most administrators also believe new student aid policies, such as those included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will limit access to college rather than expand it. And many already report moderate (39 percent) or significant (29 percent) declines in international student enrollments tied to recent federal actions, such as visa appointment restrictions and targeted actions at specific institutions.
Leaders estimate that 40 percent of students participate in no extracurricular activities, a figure that rises to 67 percent among community college administrators. Respondents are mostly like to say involvement would increase if students saw a clear connection between activities and their career goals.
For institutions struggling to get students in involved, Parnell highlighted the importance of effectively communicating and delivering available activities to students: Are any activities at community colleges, which serve many working students, available after 5 p.m., for example, she asked?
Mike Gavin, the founder of Education for All, a grassroots group of community college administrators fighting legislative attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, will step down as president of Delta College in January. He has been in the post since 2021.
Gavin informed the Delta College Board of Trustees last week that he would resign to lead a national coalition focused on defending equity in higher ed.
“My whole career has been focused on equity and how higher ed is situated in the democratic experiment, so when I was asked to do the next thing, I felt compelled to do it,” Gavin told Inside Higher Ed.
“I was not looking for a job. Delta has been amazing. The faculty and staff are some of the most insightful and student-centered I’ve ever seen,” he said.
More information about the coalition, including its priorities and funding model, will be released soon, he added.
Since the early days of the second Trump administration, Gavin has been a leading voice in defending DEI work in higher ed, especially at community colleges. Participation in Education for All surged at the beginning of the year as college leaders sought advice on protecting programs and navigating compliance with Trump administration mandates.
“My scholarship rests on the great thinkers of our past, from Benjamin Franklin to James Baldwin. It is also grounded in the belief that our country depends on a higher education sector that must be free from partisan interference, in order to democratize higher education for all,” Gavin wrote in a letter to the Delta College community.
Delta College trustees said they will begin the process of appointing Gavin’s successor in the coming weeks.
