UNIVERSITY STUDENTS have long delighted in fashionable slang. Now their administrators are joining in. In May George Washington University replaced its Office for Diversity, Equity and Community Engagement with an Office of Community, Culture and Inclusion.
Amid a growing backlash against “woke” programmes for minority students, campus leaders are finding new names for their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices—ditching words such as “diversity” and “equity” in favour of ones like “well-being” and “community”.
Earlier in the year the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign renamed its Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to the Office for Access, Civil Rights and Community.
Behind this linguistic makeover lies a Republican-led crackdown on DEI at public universities. But an analysis of university staffing data by The Economist suggests that, for all the political noise, the crackdown’s impact so far has been limited. The University of North Carolina system offers another example. In many cases, vague titles became vaguer still.
Since 2023 state lawmakers have introduced more than 150 bills targeting campus diversity programmes, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The campaign has yielded legislative results: 34 bills in 19 states have become law. Universities across the system responded by altering the job titles or department names of some 69 DEI employees. But headcount barely budged and salaries fell by just 5%.
President Donald Trump, who has called DEI “radical”, “wasteful” and “un-American”, has added to the pressure by issuing orders dismantling DEI programmes in the federal government and threatening to withdraw funding from universities that embrace them. the system’s board of governors anticipated the crackdown, revising its policy in May 2024 to reaffirm “nondiscrimination” and renounce “administrative activism” Although North Carolina did not formally restrict DEI offices until 2026. One well-paid associate dean moved from “inclusive excellence” to “well-being”; a vice-provost swapped “equity and inclusion” for “student health, well-being and thriving”.
Universities have generally responded to the legal and political pressure in one of three ways. A handful have resisted outright calls to dismantle their DEI programmes. Harvard is the best-known example: it rejected White House demands to abandon DEI, among other conditions, in return for continued federal funding. Others have publicly reaffirmed their support for DEI. The president of the University of Minnesota made a similar pledge. The second approach is compliance. Most universities, though, have opted for a third approach: renaming and reorganising their DEI offices, rather than eliminating them. This is not surprising. Dropping politically charged terms from office and job titles allows universities to retain staff and pursue the same goals while appearing compliant and attracting less scrutiny from conservatives. Even DEI advocates acknowledge this.
After Texas passed Senate Bill 17 in 2023, banning DEI offices at public universities in the state, the University of Texas at Austin said it laid off 49 employees (the American Association of University Professors, a trade union, counted 62).
Last year the chancellor of the State University of New York system told legislators that it had “no intention of backing away” from its commitment to diversity and inclusion. Jay Hartzell, then the university’s president, said DEI funding would be “redeployed to support teaching and research”. “A number of institutions have changed titles, changed names of departments,” says Jerry Cirino, sponsor of Senate Bill 1, which banned DEI programmes at public colleges and universities in Ohio. Mr Cirino says he’s broadly pleased with compliance, but that “the practice is still going on, they’re just calling it something different. “Some people have changed the language they use publicly, but the underlying work is very similar,” says Emelyn A. dela Peña, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, a trade group.
