Trump wants to change colleges nationwide. GOP-led states offer a preview

Nearly a decade ago, intense protests over racial injustice rocked the University of Missouri’s flagship campus, leading to the resignation of two top administrators. The university subsequently hired its first-ever vice chancellor for inclusion, diversity and equity. Tensions rose so high that football players threatened a boycott and a graduate student went on a hunger strike.

Nowadays the whole diversity office has disappeared, there is an example of that changes major universities in states led by conservatives, and a possible harbinger of what will happen nationally.

“I feel like this is the future, especially for the next four years of Trump’s presidency,” said Kenny Douglas, a history and black studies major at the Columbia, Missouri, campus.

As president-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, both conservative and liberal politicians say changes in higher education in red parts of America could provide a road map for the rest of the country.

Dozens of diversity, equity and inclusion programs have already closed in states including Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, Iowa, Nebraska and Texas. In some cases, racial and gender identity classes have been phased out. Support and resources for underrepresented students have disappeared. Some students say changes in campus climate have made them consider dropping out.

During his campaign, Trump promised to put an end to “wokeness” and “left-wing indoctrination” in education. He pledged to dismantle diversity programs that he said amounted to discrimination and to impose fines on colleges “up to the full amount of their endowments.”

Many conservatives have taken a similar position. Erec Smith, a free-market researcher at the Cato Institute whose study examines anti-racist activism and black conservatism, said DEI sends the message that “whiteness is oppression.” Diversity efforts “profoundly rob black people and other minorities of a sense of agency,” he said.

The New College of Floridaa small liberal arts institution once known as Florida’s most progressive public campuses and a haven for LGBTQ+ students became a focal point of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’ “war on woke.” DeSantis overhauled the school’s Board of Trustees in 2023 and appointed a new majority of conservative allies, including culture war strategist Christopher Rufo.

Many faculty members left last year, leaving vacancies that the new leadership has filled with a variety of conservative academics – and non-academics, including British comedian and conservative commentator Andrew Doyle, who will teach a new course in January called ‘The Woke Movement’. ”

“This is just the beginning,” Rufo wrote in the foreword to President Richard Corcoran’s new book, “Storming the Ivory Tower.”

Trump’s opponents dismiss his depictions of liberal indoctrination on campuses as fiction. But conservatives point to diversity programs and the the student debt crisis because evidence colleges are no longer in touch.

“What happens when you are an institution trying to change society?” asked Adam Kissel of the conservative Heritage Foundation — the group behind Project 2025, a sweeping anti-DEI blueprint for a new Republican administration that Trump has denied while some of the authors were nominated for administrative positions. “Society will push you back.”

Pushback is exactly what DEI programs have had to deal with.

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed a bill into law in March except for state financing for public colleges that advocate “divisive concepts,” including that someone should feel guilty because of their race or gender. The law also stipulates that people in schools and colleges must use the toilet that corresponds to their gender assigned at birth.

The effects of the anti-DEI law trickled down to campuses including the University of Alabama and Auburn University, the state’s two largest four-year colleges. DEI offices and designated spaces for LGBTQ+ and Black students are closed when classes started in late August – just before the law came into effect.

Dakota Grimes, a chemistry graduate student, was disappointed when Auburn University closed the campus’ Pride Center, a designated safe space for LGBTQ+ people and allies. Grimes’ organization, Sexuality and Gender Alliance, still meets regularly at the library, she said, but LGBTQ+ students don’t feel as welcome on campus. Students are subjected to homophobic and transphobic slurs, Grimes said.

“They don’t feel safe just sitting in the student center because of the type of environment that a lot of students and even faculty create on campus,” Grimes said.

Julia Dominguez, a senior in political science at the University of Alabama and president of the Hispanic-Latino Association, said funding for the group’s annual Hispanic Heritage Month festival was cut two weeks before the September event. Students who were once excited about being at a school that celebrates Latino culture, they say, now feel dejected and disillusioned.

The organization is not giving up, Dominguez said.

“We are still here,” Dominguez said. “We are still working on the work. It’s just harder now. But we will not allow this to take away our joy, because joy is resistance.”

In Idaho, DEI programs have been under fire for years, with Republican lawmakers dismissing efforts to build an inclusive culture as “divisive and exclusionary.” In recent sessions, the Legislature has blocked colleges and universities from using taxpayer dollars for DEI programs on campuses. A 2024 law banned written “diversity statements” in higher education hiring and student admissions.

In December, the State Board of Education eliminated DEI offices, sending shockwaves through the University of Idaho. PhD candidate Nick Koenig is considering leaving the state.

“Where are your true values?” asked Koenig, who decided to move to Idaho to research climate change after a Zoom call with the then-director of the school’s LGBT center. “It is not the students who are the most marginalized.”

So far, almost all of the threats against DEI have come from state lawmakers, says Jeremy Young of the free expression group PEN America.

“There hasn’t been a lot of support at the federal level to do anything,” he said. “Now that is of course going to change.”

Young expects that diversity considerations will be eliminated for research grants and possibly for accreditation. The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights typically investigates discrimination against people of color, but under Trump that agency could begin investigating diversity programs that conservatives say are discriminatory.

Republicans may also have more leeway to take action at the state level, thanks to an administration that will “get out of the way of the red states and let them pursue these policies,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow who studies higher education policy. at the American Enterprise Institute.

That’s what colleges are also cut some programs or majors are considered unprofitable. Whether politics plays a role in decisions to cancel certain courses remains to be seen.

Douglas, a student at the University of Missouri, is concerned. He said the promise of change that followed the earlier protests on Columbia’s campus has disappeared.

This fall, a student group he is part of had to rename the Welcome Black BBQ because the university wanted it to be “welcoming to all.” The Legion of Black Collegians, which started in 1968 after students waved a Confederate flag at a football game, complained that the change erased visibility on campus.

For Douglas and many others, the civil rights struggle that spawned diversity efforts is not a thing of the past. “White people may have moved past it, but black people are still experiencing it,” he said.

___

Hollingsworth reported from Kansas City, Missouri; Gecker of San Francisco; Richert of Boise, Idaho; Morris from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. AP Education writer Alia Wong contributed from Washington.