While the second Trump administration’s campaign against EDI (or DEI) in higher education is receiving a lot of praise from many free speech advocates, the speed and breadth of that campaign poses a threat to academic freedom equal to if not greater than EDI itself.
It is a mere two months since Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States for the second time. To many of us, however, it feels closer to two years. One reason for this is the breakneck speed at which the new White House is moving.
Trump has already signed upwards of 90 executive orders, targeting everything from border enforcement and federal workforce reductions to offshore wind developments and the Paris Climate Agreement.
A number of presidential actions have also been focused on higher education, especially EDI-programmes at universities in receipt of federal funding. While some of these programmes have been in blatant violation of anti-discrimination laws and deserve scrutiny on behalf of the taxpayers subsidizing them, several of Trump’s directives go beyond mere enforcement of such laws.
Two prongs of Trump’s campaign against EDI are most concerning: the cuts to federal research grants, and the ideological screenings of course material. Moreover, the general atmosphere of uncertainty which that campaign has created is itself damaging to a culture of free enquiry.
Trump’s actions have caused a great deal of confusion within federal funding agencies, leaving many researchers unsure when, or if, their grants will resume. In particular, two orders from 20 and 21 January respectively directed the federal government to end “Radical and Wasteful […] DEI Programs” and “Illegal Discrimination”.
Federal agencies were given 60 days to comply and began taking immediate action. References to EDI initiatives vanished from government webpages overnight and major agencies such as the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) paused funding while a systematic review of all recipients could be carried out.
Federal agencies were required to ensure that no funding would continue for diversity, equity, and inclusion projects, gender ideology, and other controversial topics. However, the Silicon Valley ethos of “moving fast and breaking things” has lead to perfectly normal research getting caught in the crosshairs of the culture wars.
“I have no idea if I’ll still be granted the funds, or if my project is still eligible,” an NSF-funded PhD-candidate at Northwestern University told Inside Higher Ed, though he asked to remain anonymous out of fear that an already approved grant could be revoked in reprisal for speaking out.
Agencies like the NIH and the NSF are responsible for allocating billions of dollars in funding to universities each year, including for many STEM-related research topics. However, the vagueness of Trump’s executive orders and the lack of communication from the agencies are making it difficult for administrators to determine which researchers and projects may lose funding.
“Our institution is just scrambling to figure out what DEI is and what programs will be affected,” the PhD-candidate explained. “I study the development of disease, which tends to affect populations of certain ethnic and cultural backgrounds more than others. Is that DEI?”
Apparently, part of the grant review at the National Science Foundation is a list of keywords, which, if included in a project description, will attract special scrutiny and increase the likelihood of funding being withdrawn.
According to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post, the list of flagged terms include the usual EDI buzzwords of “Intersectional”, “Implicit Bias” and “Antiracist”, but also seemingly innocuous descriptors like “Historically”, “Socioeconomic” and “Polarization”. The list even stretches to include “Women”, “Female” and “Ethnicity”.
In fairness, merely being flagged for including one of these words does not mean that funding will necessarily be cut from a project, but it increases the risk of a grant being pulled and certainly prolongs the funding pause.
The broad scope of the executive orders also means that actual research with real potential is being negatively affected. Last month, several datasets stored by government health agencies suddenly went offline, and even though some have since returned, researchers worry that others may not.
Moreover, because EDI has infected so much of higher education over the past few decades, many grants actually require researchers to include language that could fall afoul of the Trump language police in their applications.
“I don’t explicitly do DEI work. I work on plant genomes,” Ben Stone, a researcher at the University of Southern California, told Inside Higher Ed. Stone’s research and salary is covered entirely by the NSF’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology program – not exactly critical race theory. However, according to Stone, “the executive order is vague enough that it can encompass a lot of things that are in almost every NSF program”.
Indeed, for almost thirty years, the NSF has required all grant applicants to fill out a “Broader Implications” section, which often references increased diversity or improved participation of underrepresented groups in STEM. These are rarely the actual topics of research, but will nevertheless appear in the project description, which could easily attract the ire of Trump-appointed bureaucrats.
This problem is compounded by the CHIPS and Science Act 2022, in which Congress directed science agencies to focus on increasing “accessibility and enhancing demographic, geographic and institutional diversity in STEM”. This further incentivised researchers to emphasise the broader impacts of their projects on improving participating of various groups in science.
For example, the grant for Ben Stone’s project on plant genomes has now been classed as an “archived funding opportunity”, seemingly signalling its discontinuation by the NSF. This is because the grant – not Stone’s project – mentioned “broadening participation of groups underrepresented in biology” as one of its goals.
Another example of non-ideological research being negatively impacted by the funding pause is a longitudinal neuroscientific study at the University of Southern California. Professor Darby Saxbe received a $2 million NIH grant to conduct the study, but is now unsure if she will be able to collect the remaining instalments or if the project will be cut as wasteful EDI.
“You want to recruit a representative sample to avoid bias”, Saxbe explained to Inside Higher Ed. “If you describe any of your procedures around […] the racial makeup of your samples, or cultural considerations, it’s totally unclear to me if that’s DEI”.
Even if funding for the project is eventually reinstated, significant damage may already have been done by the pause. Saxbe’s team has been scanning the brains of the same group of children for seven years now. “If we don’t have the funds and can’t collect that data”, she said, “we can’t just go out and find new families to do the study”.
The crackdown on EDI also goes beyond research funding. A recent letter from the Department of Justice to the dean of Georgetown Law School raised concerns that the University “continues to teach and promote DEI”.
This was followed by an ominous announcement that the Department had “begun an inquiry into this” and a request to know if Georgetown had “eliminated all DEI from the school and its curriculum”. Finally, the letter demanded a promise that “if DEI is found in [Georgetown’s] courses or teaching in anyway, you will move swiftly to remove it”.
Again, there is no definition of what counts as DEI in this context, but the mentions of “teaching” and “curriculum” makes it clear that the letter is not merely demanding an end to positive discrimination in hiring or admissions. Rather, the Department of Justice seems to be demanding the censorship of certain ideological viewpoints in Georgetown’s curriculum.
This is clearly overreach from the government. No one who considers themselves to be in favour of free speech or academic freedom should be comfortable with the government deciding which topics can and cannot be taught at a university.
Anyone struggling to grasp this point should remember that when the occupant of the White House changes, the powers of the executive branch remain the same. Even if you like Trump intimidating elite schools into changing their curricula, just imagine what a Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom administration might want to ban universities from teaching. This box of government tools is better left unopened.
Finally, the general lack of certainty regarding what might come next is having a dampening effect on research in American universities. The flood of executive orders seems unstoppable and both university administrators and individual researchers are left guessing about the future of their projects.
Last month, the Office for Management and Budget issued a memo threatening to freeze all federal grants and loans, only to rescind it shortly afterwards. If it had been implemented, it could have had huge implications for the entire higher education sector. The haphazard nature of the Trump administration’s approach is leaving researchers in limbo regarding future funding opportunities.
President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities David Harel recently published an op-ed warning that the White House’s attacks on academic freedom could have broader implications for the “international scientific ecosystem”.
Indeed, the US is a vital hub for research in many fields and sudden disruptions to key funding mechanisms could delay technological breakthroughs and sever decades-old collaborative networks.
We hope that the Trump administration will reverse course and think more carefully about how best to combat the pernicious influence of EDI in American higher education. In the meantime, it should reinstate federal funding while the relevant review processes are carried out to minimize the harm to research and teaching in US universities.