Identity Crisis

During a recent afternoon in the lounge of the $10-million Trotter Multicultural Center at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Jachin Ammons flopped down at the head of a long table where a half dozen Black undergrads were studying and catching up.

The Wolverine Pathways backpacks strewn across the table sparked an instant connection. Ammons is a graduate of the program, a staple of the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. A 2024 Michigan alum, he’s now a staff member for the program that paved his own path through middle school and high school and paid his way through four years at the flagship campus.

The Trotter lounge is covered with floor-to-ceiling mural-sized photos depicting decades of student activism, much of it geared toward breaking down barriers for students of color. At a campus where only a small percentage of undergraduate students are Black, the center, to many, feels like home.

As a teen, Ammons spent many Saturdays and summers in supplemental math, English, and science classes, college-prep programs, and career-exploration workshops instead of hanging out in his Detroit neighborhood. “The type of trouble you stay out of on a Saturday afternoon when you’re coming to the University of Michigan,” he said with a laugh. But recruiting students to campus, he said, isn’t enough. Offering support while they’re enrolled is also essential.

That’s a key issue the university will be grappling with during this spring’s budget negotiations as it considers whether to cut, or redirect, tens of millions of dollars being spent on its sprawling DEI program, widely considered the largest in higher education. Some regents are pushing to shift more spending into “race blind” programs like Wolverine Pathways that focus on expanding socioeconomic rather than racial diversity.

At Michigan and elsewhere, race-neutral scholarships and school-outreach programs are the features of the DEI portfolio that appear most likely to survive the intensifying national backlash fueled by President Trump, whose sweeping executive orders brand DEI as “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race-and-sex-based preferences.”

But will shifting attention away from race to socioeconomic status provide the kind of diversity Michigan — and other universities — are seeking?

Since 2006, when the state of Michigan banned affirmative action, the Ann Arbor campus has had to tread carefully around the problem of stagnant enrollment of Black students, whose numbers have recently inched up to about 5 percent of undergrads in a state where 14 percent of people are Black. In Detroit, which is less than an hour away, 77 percent of the population is Black.

In an amicus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, the university described how it had failed to achieve racial diversity “despite persistent and vigorous race-neutral efforts — including extensive efforts to consider socioeconomic status in admission and recruiting.” The case involved the lawsuits against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning affirmative action in college admissions.

“There are almost six times as many white students as Black students who both come from [low socio-economic status] families and have test scores that are above the threshold for gaining admission to an academically selective college or university,” the brief points out. “Pursuing socioeconomic diversity alone is thus not a realistic strategy for enrolling an academically talented class that is diverse in many ways, including with respect to race.”

Of the 483 Wolverine scholars currently enrolled in the program, 67 percent are Black. Program graduates make up about 16 percent of the in-state Black undergraduates. Still, since the university has an undergraduate population of more than 34,000, the Wolverine Scholars represent only a small fraction of the campus.

The high-school-age population in Detroit, one of the university’s main feeders for Black students, has been shrinking steadily, and some of the predominantly Black schools the Wolverine Pathways program recruits from have suffered the effects of years of unequal school funding and more learning loss from the pandemic. Such trends make it even more challenging to move the needle on Black enrollment.

Another program that enjoys widespread support is the GoBlue Guarantee, which offers free tuition to needy students. During its last meeting, in December, the university’s Board of Regents expanded the program to serve families earning up to $125,000 — an increase from $75,000.

The same day, though, university officials were taking aim at another DEI feature. The provost announced that the university would no longer consider diversity statements in faculty hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions. Such statements typically ask people how their scholarship, teaching, or service promote equal opportunity and diversity. The provost pointed out that they’ve also been criticized “for their potential to limit freedom of expression and diversity of thought on campus.”

Fearing additional cuts might be imminent, students and faculty members pleaded with regents to spare programs as protesters chanted outside. Regents tried to reassure them that they had no intention of abandoning programs like Wolverine Pathways and the GoBlue Guarantee. In comments during the meeting and in interviews later, some regents said they’d like to see money shifted away from administrative salaries toward programs that make a Michigan education affordable and attainable to students regardless of their race.

The board’s former Republican chair, Sarah Hubbard, called the pathways program “exactly the kind of meaningful, student-facing program I’d like to see us doing more of. Yet it does it in a way that’s without judgment with regard to race.”

The University of Michigan’s diversity, equity, and inclusion plan began in 2016, a decade after the state’s affirmative action ban took away one of the university’s key tools for building racial diversity. Ambitious and sweeping, it assigned responsibilities to hundreds of staff and faculty members across the Ann Arbor campus. The message was clear: Creating a more inclusive, welcoming university was everyone’s responsibility.

Each of the university’s 51 departments and units is expected to contribute toward a lengthy checklist of goals. Among them:

• recruiting and retaining more students, faculty, and staff of color
• making scholarship and teaching more inclusive across racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines
• creating an equitable and welcoming climate for all students and employees
• combating both overt racism and sometimes less obvious microaggressions

They’re the kinds of commitments campuses elsewhere had endorsed, often piecemeal, in the weeks and months since George Floyd’s 2020 murder. But in 2023, when other universities were succumbing to legislative pressure to scale back their programs, Michigan was re-doubling its own efforts. The goals of DEI 2.0, as the plan’s second stage was called, were posted on flags and signposts around campus.

Viewed by many as a model of how to infuse a diversity mindset throughout a university, Michigan’s DEI plan struck others as bloated and ineffective. The nearly $240 million spent since 2016 far exceeds DEI spending at most comparable universities. Michigan officials are quick to point out that the amount spent annually on the plan accounts for less than 1 percent of the flagship’s general-fund budget, which is $2.9 billion for 2025. Privately, however, some have wondered whether the university’s unapologetically expansive embrace of an increasingly embattled ideal had put a target on its back.

In October, a lengthy investigative piece in The New York Times Magazine concluded that the university’s efforts were widely viewed as a well-intentioned flop that had deepened divisions and barely moved the needle on stubbornly low Black student enrollment.

(Tabbye M. Chavous, Michigan’s vice provost for equity and inclusion, argued that the publication ignored tangible signs of progress, including a slight uptick in the representation of Black undergrads and an increase in Pell-eligible students.)

Three weeks later, the nation re-elected President Trump, who has made clear his disdain for DEI. Michigan’s vice president for government relations, Chris Kolb, warned the board in December that those in the incoming administration would “use whatever tools they have,” including cutting off finances, to achieve their goals. “DEI is one of those things they believe should be eliminated from higher education,” he said.

That warning has taken on new urgency as Trump, in his first weeks in office, has unleashed a blitz of measures aimed at eliminating diversity initiatives at public institutions and pressuring private colleges to drop theirs. That supercharged an attack that, until now, had mostly been conducted at the state level. Since 2023, The Chronicle has tracked 112 bills, in 29 states and the U.S. Congress, that would dismantle DEI activities. Fourteen have become law. But even when no state law requires such changes, and even before Trump took office, colleges were canceling trainings, closing offices, and laying off staff. The Chronicle has logged such instances across 242 campuses in 36 states.

University officials, including regents, have generally been tight-lipped about any specific plans to cut DEI spending, but The Chronicle has confirmed with sources that regents have held at least one private meeting with central university officials to discuss the future of the plan. Chavous, the university’s chief diversity officer, was not included in the meeting. University officials will propose a budget this spring, which regents must approve.

Jordan B. Acker, one of six Democrats serving on the eight-member elected Board of Regents, told The Chronicle it’s been challenging to get convincing data about the effectiveness of some diversity programs. “Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, we want to be sure the proportion of African American enrollees matches or is closer to that of the state demographics. We’re not there or even close to there. We’re trying to figure out why that hasn’t happened despite all the money being spent on it,” he said. “The numbers don’t lie,” he concluded. DEI “hasn’t achieved the goals it set out to.”

For years, some Black student leaders at Michigan have argued that, in making its DEI efforts more broadly inclusive, covering not only race and gender, but first-generation status, income level, religion, and whether someone has a disability or is a veteran, the university watered down its commitment to supporting Black students. The number of Black undergraduates at Ann Arbor has grown from 1,255 in 2016 to 1,796 in 2024. Still, that’s only increased their representation from 4 percent to 5 percent of the undergraduate population.

“The more we generalize, the more the most marginalized get pushed farther to the margins,” Princess-J’Maria Mboup, a senior and speaker of the university’s Black Student Union, told The Chronicle.

After The New York Times Magazine published its critique of DEI, in which Mboup was quoted as being skeptical about its effectiveness, she wrote an opinion piece in The Michigan Daily on behalf of the Black Student Union that said the use of student-leader voices by opponents of DEI was an “intentional weaponization.”

“As leaders of the Black Student Union, we have been unafraid to loudly voice our critiques of the DEI system … and we will continue to stand by our values and analysis,” she wrote. “Our critiques, however, have been flattened and conflated with critics who don’t believe in diversity, equity and inclusion — not only as a system, but as a concept.”

In the essay, Mboup states that she and other leaders of the Black Student Union were speaking out with “the intention of rolling up our sleeves and digging into the work, not discarding DEI and the values it represents.”

At a coffee shop near campus, Mboup said that when skeptics point to Black students’ critiques as evidence that DEI isn’t working, they project “a false sense of care.” Cutting DEI would be “placing the most vulnerable student populations in harm’s way — deliberately.”

When she arrived at the university as the only Black freshman from her high school in Kalamazoo, Mich., “it was very alienating,” Mboup said. “People don’t want to talk to you or work in groups with you. I hadn’t found my community.” She said a mentor from the SuccessConnects program, which is under the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives, helped boost her confidence and steered her toward a tutor during a difficult physics course.

She was grateful for the full, four-year scholarship she received, but says that affordability isn’t the only factor keeping Black students away. “My high-school classmates couldn’t believe I wanted to go to Michigan because its reputation for not supporting Black students,” she said. “Making it affordable doesn’t make the race problem go away.”

The university’s latest climate survey, in 2021 found that students, faculty, and staff were generally satisfied with the DEI plan’s progress. Black students, however, were 66 percent less likely than white students to report satisfaction with the overall climate, and Hispanic students, 48 percent less. Black and Hispanic students were also less likely to report that they felt they were treated fairly and equitably.

A petition signed by nearly 3,000 faculty and staff members, students, and alumni said the university’s diversity efforts have made the university more racially, socioeconomically, and gender diverse. It was circulated at a time when many feared regents were sharpening their budget knives.

Hubbard said in an interview that the regents should take a “very critical look at” the university’s DEI spending, including programs focused on faculty and staff. Some, she suggested, “are stifling free speech and diversity of thought.” She added that the program had “too much bureaucracy considering our goals and the return on investment we’re getting.”

Some faculty members said they’d welcome a reshuffling of priorities. Chandra Sripada, a professor of philosophy and psychiatry, said he supports a version of DEI “whose No. 1 cornerstone is generous financial-aid packages that reach out and allow opportunities for low-income students to come and flourish here.” Michigan’s program, he contends, relies on too many administrators, focuses too much on race and gender, and hasn’t done enough to attract low-income students.

Data from the flagship campus suggest some progress on the last point. Pell recipients grew from 4,713 in 2016 to 6,067 in 2023. About 18 percent of undergrads received the federal need-based grants in 2023.

The two regents who agreed to talk to The Chronicle — Hubbard and Acker — expressed support for slashing administrative spending on DEI and focusing more on making college affordable. But questions remain about whether Michigan can meet its diversity goals without explicitly thinking about race. Income, the university maintains after nearly two decades of being bound by an affirmative action ban, is a poor proxy for race. Some national scholars agree.

“The largest population of poor people in America are white people,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of African American Studies and public affairs at Princeton University. Shifting money away from race-informed practices and focusing strictly on income would do little to reach Black students who are either better off financially or just have doubts about whether the climate for Black students at Michigan is supportive, said Muhammad, who recently moved his Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project to Princeton from Harvard.

At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Black students called attention to the ways they experienced racism on college campuses. The hashtag #BBUM, or Being Black at the University of Michigan, started in 2013 and soon went viral, prompting similar campaigns across the country with entries like:

“I don’t believe these things were all made up, and that the climate produced less than a decade ago all of a sudden doesn’t require the policies and practices that were put in place,” Muhammad said.

Those policies and practices came with a price tag that some find hard to justify. At Ann Arbor, “you have a huge bureaucracy of more than 200 people” just in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, said Mark J. Perry, a retired professor of economics at the university’s Flint campus. Perry has filed nearly 1,000 Title IX and Title VI complaints against universities and considers his push to eliminate DEI “part of my civil-rights advocacy.”

He said he has no objection to programs that help low-income or first-generation students as long as they aren’t focused on race or gender. “Just because a Black student can’t get in to Ann Arbor,” he said, they could aim for another public university “that maybe would be a better match academically.”

An Ann Arbor spokeswoman, Colleen Mastony, called Perry’s analysis of the DEI workforce “flawed and misleading.” “First, it fails to recognize the broad nature of the university’s DEI programs, which support many communities with distinct needs, including first-generation students, individuals with disabilities, LGBTQ+ community members, religious groups, veterans, and numerous others,” she wrote in an email.

The work, she said, is integrated throughout the university. About $64 million of the approximately $236 million spent on DEI between 2016 and 2023 went to students through Wolverine Pathways and the GoBlue Guarantee. Fewer than a third of those designated as DEI leads across 51 units at the flagship campus devote more than 25 percent of their work to DEI, Mastony added. The university’s president, Santa J. Ono, declined requests for an interview.

With DEI covering so many different identity groups and initiatives, “We need to be careful that we’re not throwing out programs that are appropriate and compliant with state and federal law that have migrated into the DEI bucket,” Hubbard said. That would include programs required to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Regardless of its shortcomings, Mboup believes that Michigan’s DEI program is worth preserving and strengthening. The expectation that DEI was supposed to fix centuries of harm in a decade, she said, “is not realistic or fair.”