Good morning, and welcome to Monday, February 3. Katherine Mangan wrote the first feature in today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Rick Seltzer wrote the rest. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.
The Race to Preserve DEI
The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is grappling with tough questions about the future of its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in what could prove to be a bellwether for the fate of many of the nation’s diversity programs in the Trump era.
Even before President Trump took office, a senior administrator at the University of Michigan warned that big changes could be coming. At a December Board of Regents meeting, the vice president for government relations said the incoming Trump administration would use “whatever tools they have” to get rid of DEI — at Michigan and elsewhere. The university, he said, “may have to trim sails” or “tack left” or “tack right.”
Michigan has one of the most extensive university commitments to DEI, and what Trump’s crackdown will mean is still not clear. The magnitude of the challenge of complying, though, is coming into focus. Days after taking office, Trump fired off a series of executive orders banning “radical and wasteful” DEI activities and urging government workers to turn in anyone trying to hide such efforts.
Trump’s war on DEI has supercharged pressures on colleges to either shut down programs or shift focus from racial diversity to socioeconomic, or class-based diversity.
- Two of Michigan’s most popular DEI programs — Wolverine Pathways and the Go Blue Guarantee — offer college preparatory classes, free and reduced tuition, and other support to students from underresourced communities.
- Regents have assured faculty members and students worried about potential DEI cuts that those programs were safe. They even expanded the free-tuition program to include families earning up to $125,000.
But as Michigan knows well, race-neutral approaches have their limits. The state banned affirmative action in 2006, and the percentage of Black students promptly plunged, despite millions of dollars spent attracting low-income students without considering race, the university said in 2022.
- Turns out that there were nearly six times as many white students as Black students from low-income families with test scores that would make them competitive applicants. Income, the university argued, is a poor proxy for race when seeking a racially diverse campus.