Universities now find themselves at the frontlines of President Trump’s war against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
An executive order this week instructed federal institutions to investigate DEI programs at schools with endowments of more than $1 billion endowments.
Experts say the schools need to be “prepared to fight” as Trump has long been willing to target higher education.
“This is really just the first salvo, and I think colleges should be very concerned, and I think they should be prepared to fight,” said Jeremy Young, director of state and higher education policy at PEN America.
Out of the more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., only a couple hundred hold endowments over $1 billion, including top-ranked schools such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
The attorney general, Department of Education and other agencies have 120 days, according to Trump’s order, to conclude their investigation and provide the president “appropriate measures to encourage the private sector to end illegal discrimination and preferences, including DEI.”
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to go after DEI programs in higher education, but the stipulation on endowments of over $1 billion is raising eyebrows.
“If your view, which is theirs, is that these [programs] are discriminatory, I don’t know why you would confine yourself to only looking at the 60 or 80 or so institutions that have a billion dollars in endowments,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at the American Council of Education.
“It just makes it seem very clear that the goal here is more to go after a certain handful of highly selective elite institutions, rather than to really prioritize what you see as discrimination,” Fansmith added.
Trump has also threatened to tax endowments of “woke” schools, and in 2023, now-Vice President J.D. Vance proposed raising taxes on endowment investments for schools with more than $10 billion endowments.
“We are reviewing the news out of Washington and are working to understand the implications,” a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told The Hill when asked about the executive order. “As with any order, from any administration, we will look through the announcement closely and thoughtfully. MIT is committed to attracting the very best talent, supporting our diverse community, and complying with federal law.”
Republican states have also increasingly gone after DEI programs at their schools. Florida was the first to ban DEI at public universities, with Texas following close behind.
Lawmakers in Ohio and Iowa recently introducing bills to create or expand their own DEI bans, with the latter, like Trump, even going after private schools.
“When we think about the colleges that have an endowment over a billion, the majority of them are private institutions, and, for them, this is not the first sort of outreach or questioning of their DEI activities, but it’s different from how the public institutions have been facing this,” said Katharine Meyer, a fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy.
“Many higher education institutions have already rolled back DEI practices, disbanded offices, moved around staff as a result of state legislation. So, I think what’s notable about this is that in targeting these high-endowment institutions, it’s reaching more into the private institutions that have not been as impacted by the state legislation that we’ve seen over the past couple of years,” Meyer added.
After the investigations, it is unclear how Trump will proceed, whether issuing another executive order on the issue or trying to get legislative action passed through Congress.
It is almost certain though that the investigations will not be the last presidential action regarding the issue, and schools are already aware of that.
“I don’t think schools were necessarily surprised by the order coming out. I think the devil is going to be in the details of what guidance and kind of how the administration is planning to implement it,” said Scott Goldschmidt, partner at Thompson Coburn’ s Higher Education practice and a former university deputy general counsel.
