The clock is running out on colleges as they mull how to respond to a sweeping federal order to end all race-based policies and programs.
In the face of an imminent Friday night deadline, college leaders are scrambling to determine how to navigate the Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter issued by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which declares all race-based educational programs and policies discriminatory and illegal. When they sent the letter on Valentine’s Day, department officials gave institutions two weeks to comply or face investigations and, possibly, the loss of federal funding.
For many colleges, the challenge is figuring out how to avoid drawing unwanted government attention without abandoning key services for underrepresented students and staff.
Institutions aren’t going to lose federal funding overnight. The investigative process is notoriously lengthy, and the Education Department has never revoked a college’s federal funding over civil rights concerns. The OCR may also be rendered impotent, at least temporarily, if a judge decides to halt enforcement while considering a lawsuit filed Tuesday challenging the letter.
But college leaders are anxious about the threat of federal funding cuts, which would be catastrophic for the majority of postsecondary institutions. Ray Li, who previously worked as an attorney at the Office for Civil Rights, said he expects the office to launch investigations shortly and that many colleges will buckle under the pressure, shedding practices that fostered campus diversity and belonging.
For now, colleges seem to be taking a slow and cautious approach, removing language about race and DEI buzzwords from the names of programs and launching internal policy reviews.
University of Nebraska president Jeffrey P. Gold said system campuses are in the midst of a comprehensive review of programs and policies, but no changes have been made yet. The Nebraska Board of Regents discussed possible tweaks to its bylaws at a recent board meeting, like removing references to “cultural diversity” and revising language on equal opportunity in employment, but no final decisions were made.
Gold said that as the review process continues, he doesn’t expect to “turn up anything that looks or feels like discrimination,” as the letter describes.
But it’s possible “we will turn up some things that require some language changes or possibly some changes in titles, changes in offices … that could be misinterpreted by the Department of Education just because of [the] use of specific terminology.”
He added that Nebraska banned affirmative action in 2008 and the state’s second attempt at an anti-DEI bill is pending in the Legislature, so “we have been changing websites [and] titles for years—that’s why I believe that there’s nothing substantive that we really have to change at this time.”
The University of Montana undertook a similar compliance review that tasked senior administrators with assessing whether their departments had any policies or practices at odds with the Dear Colleague letter.
“We made the decision to be as thorough as possible,” said Dave Kuntz, the university’s director of strategic communications. The review, however, led to “very minimal changes and really no changes at a programmatic or operational level.”
University leaders over all concluded that the institution was already in compliance, though some programs, like the Women’s Leadership Initiative, chose to tweak their webpages to clarify that they don’t bar anyone who wants to participate.
A spokesperson for the Education Department did not respond to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed in time for publication.
A Thorough Scrubbing
Many institutions are responding by scrubbing their websites of words like “diversity” and “inclusion.” The University of Cincinnati, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Alaska system and many more all did so after the Dear Colleague letter; some colleges had already begun revising their digital presence in response to Trump’s executive order on DEI in January.
The University of Colorado removed all references to a former DEI office and replaced them with a website for a new “Office of Collaboration.” The University of Pennsylvania scrubbed the websites for all 16 undergraduate and graduate schools of DEI keywords and removed references to diversity and affirmative action from its nondiscrimination policies.
Shaun Harper, a professor of education, business and public policy at the University of Southern California, said he’s been disappointed that higher ed leaders are heavily revising their institutions’ online presences in the hopes that it will appease the OCR—a project he believes will prove futile. In the Dear Colleague letter, acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor specifically warned against using “proxies for race” and promised to investigate race-neutral programs that “discriminate in less direct, but equally insidious, ways.”
“Scrubbing websites, launching reviews—these are the easy things to do while colleges are in ‘wait and see’ mode, to find out if that will take the target off their backs,” said Harper, an Inside Higher Ed contributor who authored a blog post last week recommending ways colleges can fight back against the Dear Colleague letter. “I think it’s both weak and reckless.”
Some institutions have gone one step further. Colorado State University issued a statement in which leaders simultaneously maintained that its policies are already race-neutral and promised to do more to comply with the new federal directives.
“The new administration’s interpretation of law marks a change,” the statement reads. “Given the university’s reliance on federal funding, it is necessary to take additional steps.”
And one day before the deadline, Ohio State University president Ted Carter announced the institution would shutter two DEI offices and eliminate more than a dozen staff positions, some of the most dramatic measures a college has taken during the new Trump administration.
In a particularly telling move, OSU’s Office of Institutional Equity will be renamed the Office of Civil Rights Compliance to “more accurately reflect its work,” according to an email sent to students Thursday.
‘We’ve Seen This Film Before’
For a glimpse of how anti-DEI compliance battles might play out between institutions and policymakers, consider the red states that have passed laws mandating similar cuts to race-conscious programs.
In Texas and Florida, public colleges reacted to impending or newly signed anti-DEI laws by changing the names of university offices and campus resources, moving personnel to student support services, and removing DEI mentions from university materials and websites. But in both cases, lawmakers came down hard to ensure the institutions took more strident action, leading to significant layoffs, spending cuts and policy changes.
“We’ve seen the prequel to this film before in Texas,” Harper said. “When that Senate bill was looming, many institutions thought they were very smartly getting ahead of it by just renaming things. That proved to be a failed strategy, and I very comfortably predict that some version of that will also happen nationally.”
In some states, the “review and revamp” strategy for avoiding DEI crackdowns appeared to work for a while. The University of Arkansas eliminated its DEI office in June 2023 in part to pre-empt a bill that state lawmakers were considering to force spending cuts. And last year, the University of North Carolina system Board of Trustees passed an anti-DEI resolution just as legislation was gaining steam to mandate enforcement from the state; that legislation was never brought to a full vote.
But circumstances have changed as the Trump administration launches direct attacks on DEI. Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law earlier this month that will “prohibit affirmative action and preferential treatment in state-supported institutions,” including public colleges like the University of Arkansas. Even in Texas, where public universities underwent broad layoffs and spending cuts in response to state legislation, lawmakers have threatened to cut $400 million in higher ed funding unless colleges do more to comply.
“If they don’t kick DEI out of their schools, they’re going to get a lot less,” Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick said at a policy forum last week.
What Happens Next?
Legal experts say it’s unclear what will happen after the OCR’s deadline passes. The Dear Colleague letter promised more detailed guidance, but none has materialized.
“We’re kind of all in agreement that [the letter] is really confusing and overbroad, and the timeline is really outrageous,” said Andrea Stagg, director of consulting services at Grand River Solutions, a company that works with colleges on legal compliance issues. She noted that many underresourced colleges don’t have in-house legal teams to assess their risk by the deadline.
“What actually happens after tomorrow? How fast will it be?” she said Thursday. “I don’t know.”
Typically, the Office for Civil Rights opens investigations based on complaints from students, families or legal advocates, but it can also launch its own direct investigations. Most cases end with a voluntary resolution, in which the institution agrees to make certain changes. But unresolved cases can be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice for litigation.
Li believes the OCR will likely receive complaints from anti-DEI groups as well as open some direct investigations into higher ed institutions with race-based scholarships, affinity group graduation ceremonies or other practices called out by the letter, starting next week. (He pointed out that the current OCR has already launched some direct investigations into universities related to Title IX.)
But that doesn’t mean the day after the Dear Colleague deadline “schools are just going to lose all their federal funding”—assuming normal procedures are followed, he said. Such investigations can take months, even years.
An investigation reaching the point of litigation is also “an incredibly rare step that, under most administrations, pretty much never happens,” Li said. And the Department of Education taking away federal funding over an OCR investigation would be completely unprecedented.
“But, also, rare things are happening right now,” Li conceded.
Stagg said it’s hard to tell to what extent normal processes will be followed, or how much the Department of Government Efficiency’s reductions to the federal workforce could affect investigations.
“There is a real question as to who will do these investigations” and how the OCR will choose institutions to focus on, she said. “Is there going to be an AI tool to search [college] websites for certain terms, the way we saw with the flagging of grants? It could be that the president has a bad interaction at a meeting with a leader and then they are targeted for investigation.”
An Education Department spokesperson did not respond to questions about planned investigations, agency capacity and enforcement mechanisms in time for publication.
It’s also unclear how much resistance colleges will put up. Li believes there’s a strong case to be made that some of the practices targeted in the Dear Colleague letter are perfectly legal. Higher ed institutions under investigation could refuse to make changes and go head to head with the Department of Justice. But they’d be signing up for an onerous, likely expensive process that puts their funding in jeopardy.
“The question is, is anyone willing to litigate it?” Li said.
Even if the Dear Colleague letter is rescinded, Li said the Office for Civil Rights has clearly signaled its plans for the next four years, and he believes higher ed institutions will continue working to rid themselves of anything that could attract scrutiny.
“I think there’s going to be an overcorrection,” he said. “It is going to lead to some perfectly legal programs that support fostering racially inclusive communities on campus being taken away.”
