Universities are suspending research projects, canceling conferences and closing offices in response to a volley of orders from President Trump banning “diversity, equity and inclusion” across the U.S. government. The directives threaten vital federal funding and have thrown university leaders into disarray.
To avoid running afoul of the orders, which include “the termination of all discriminatory programs,” some school leaders have assumed a defensive posture on anything associated with DEI.
Arizona State University told researchers to immediately stop work on federally funded DEI-related projects and avoid using unspent funds.
Michigan State University canceled a DEI webinar and began a review of campus programs to understand how they could be affected by the executive orders.
North Carolina State University directed faculty to stop working on any projects that “included the terms diversity, equity and inclusion” in the program’s proposal.
President Trump pledged during his campaign to end DEI but the breadth of his executive orders last week still stunned university leaders who have spent years incorporating DEI practices, values and personnel into curriculum, hiring and research under the Biden administration.
Among the batch of executive actions issued last week, one order directs federal agencies to end “equity-related” grants. Another would require universities to certify that they don’t run“programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal antidiscrimination laws” when they get grants.
One researcher at an Ivy League school who studies public health and equity is worried that the broadly written directives will derail nearly two decades of work building up her lab. She asked not to be identified because it would draw attention to her work.
Federal funding in the form of research grants is critical to the financial health of major research universities.
For instance, the University of California, San Francisco, received about $815 million in research funding from the National Institutes of Health for fiscal year 2024, making it one of largest recipients in the country. The school keeps about 40% of that for administrative costs.
The University of Arizona is likely to lose more than $10 million in annual diversity-associated grants from NIH and the National Science Foundation intended to pay for current and future postdoctoral scholars and graduate students, said Jacob Schwartz, the associate director for cancer training and education.
“Science is not an assembly line job,” Schwartz said. “These are very skilled trainees. If you take them away, that project dies.”
Last week, the NIH emailed Northern Arizona University to terminate funding for a project Naomi Lee hosts for mostly Native American high-school students at science labs at the university. The NIH cited Trump’s executive order titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing.”
Lee said she was shocked. “We thought we were fine until the end of the fiscal year,” she said.
Universities are also facing a delay in getting money unrelated to DEI. The NIH and NSF both paused reviews of grant applications, following the Trump administration’s barrage of directives.
Johns Hopkins University computational biologist Steven Salzberg was reviewing graduate applications and set to make multiple offers for new students until last week. “Right now, I feel like I cannot make any offers because I don’t know when the funding situation will be resolved,” he said.
Scott Goldschmidt, a lawyer specializing in higher education at Thompson Coburn in Washington, D.C., urged universities to prepare by looking at how public institutions have adapted in states that have already passed legislation banning DEI.
More than a dozen states controlled by Republican legislatures and governors have moved to limit or prohibit DEI. In 2023, Missouri State University stopped requiring diversity statements from job applicants, eliminated diversity hiring policies and removed scholarship requirements that limited eligibility based on race and sex.
On Wednesday, the school announced it will stop DEI programs on campus and close its office of inclusive engagement.
“The world didn’t end, right?” Goldschmidt said. “They’re still able to fulfill their mission. They just have to adapt based on the law, and they’ve successfully done that for the most part.”
