How Trump Learned to Stop Worrying and Love DEI 

Depending on whom you ask, Donald Trump has either heroically or horrifyingly declared open season on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education. During his first year back in office, the Department of Education launched at least 57 investigations into campus DEI initiatives it deemed illegal—and many more universities have preemptively complied by dismantling their own versions of such practices and policies. 

As such, it may come as a surprise that Trump and his underlings don’t want to get rid of DEI altogether. On some campuses, they’ve worked to preserve or even expand DEI programs. What they object to isn’t DEI itself, but who it’s for—which, until now, has been the “wrong” kind of student. 

The Trump administration has consistently struggled to define what, precisely, it means by DEI in higher education. (Its first salvo against academic wokeism targeted National Science Foundation grants that used terms like “female” or “socioeconomic.”) Only in July did the administration offer universities anything resembling a working definition of the term, via a memorandum issued by the Department of Justice. 

The memo prohibited universities from allocating “resources” exclusively for students of any particular racial or ethnic background. Identity-themed lounges or cultural events might still be illegal, even if ostensibly open to all, since “the perception of segregation” alone can “foster a hostile environment.” Universities were also told to halt recruitment strategies aimed at “specific geographic areas, institutions, or organizations” selected chiefly for their racial or ethnic composition—because even facially neutral initiatives may be unlawful if their intent is to “influence demographic representation.” 

But just one day after warning universities against these very practices, the Trump administration reached a settlement with Brown University—whose access to federal research funding it had suspended in April—requiring it to engage in them. 

One clause of Brown’s settlement with the feds requires the university to conduct “outreach to Jewish Day School students about applying to Brown” to “support a thriving Jewish community” on campus. That sounds an awful lot like the kind of demographic engineering the DOJ told universities to avoid. 

The same clause requires Brown to provide “support for enhanced security at the Brown-RISD Hillel.” But if the DOJ is serious about cracking down on identity-based resource allocation, that’s a strange demand. Hillel chapters, while formally open to all, are explicitly identity-based student spaces. The DOJ memo warns that labeling a campus space a “safe space” may constitute unlawful segregation. Hillel’s website, as it happens, uses exactly that term. 

Perhaps most brazenly, the agreement compelled Brown to stage a commemorative event marking “130 years of Jewish life at Brown.” The event, held last November, was nominally open to all students—but it clearly constituted a case of “resource allocation” with an “identity-based focus.” Per the DOJ’s own guidance, that’s the very sort of programming impermissible for any other protected group. What had been deemed legally impermissible on Tuesday was, by Wednesday, federal policy. 

Columbia, too, reached a settlement with the federal government that week. Under the terms of its deal, it agreed to hire a liaison to “support Jewish students”—followed, in the very next paragraph, by a blanket ban against providing “benefits or advantages to individuals on the basis of protected characteristics.” It seems that Columbia now has a DEI officer for Jews, and a ban upon DEI for everyone else. 

Hiring a coordinator for Jewish students and funding a Hillel chapter are hardly illegitimate campus policies. Nor is outreach to Jewish day schools, assuming it stops short of favoritism in admissions. In fact, such efforts might be warranted at many Ivies, where Jewish enrollment is falling. (Brown, notably, appears exempt from this trend.)  

Clearly, all-or-nothing thinking about DEI cannot withstand contact with reality. A university shouldn’t function as one big safe space. But designating a campus space for use by an affinity group is no more exclusionary than the existence of, say, the Jewish community center where I attended preschool. Clearly, the Trump administration can recognize this principle for Jewish students. That makes its refusal to extend it to other groups all the more indefensible. 

The real farce, of course, is that the Trump administration has adopted not only the most defensible mechanisms of DEI but also its most baroque and discredited excesses, all while claiming to oppose both. 

The federal government has yet to reach a settlement with Harvard, but it seems pleased to see the university adopt pro-Israel ideological programming. In April, as the Trump administration assembled its case against Harvard, a senior lawyer in the Department of Health and Human Services compiled a list of actions the university had taken to address antisemitism on campus. Chief among them was Harvard’s decision to mandate heavy-handed “antisemitism trainings”—precisely the kind of programming Republican legislators had insisted be dismantled when focused on other identity groups. 

The Trump administration’s deal with Northwestern University, struck last November, similarly requires that the university implement “mandatory antisemitism training for all students.” Northwestern’s training is comparable in zeal to the most extreme and alienating programs of the “peak woke” era: For instance, it labels the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria.” 

These contradictory attitudes toward mandatory ideological programming are visible well beyond the Ivies. Red-state “anti-DEI” laws tend to include de facto carve-outs for politically favorable DEI programming. Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, signed into law on June 27, forbids any “orientation or training course regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion” at public universities. But it includes a carve-out allowing universities to require DEI training if Ohio’s chancellor of higher education deems DEI necessary to comply with unspecified “state and federal laws or regulations.” Texas’s bill includes a similar provision, as do those passed or proposed in Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Nebraska, Kentucky, South Carolina, West Virginia, Kansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arizona.  

Progressives’ instinct will be to cry hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy is real. But it is, in a sense, beside the point. It was inevitable that the identity politics that swept American universities a decade ago would come to be repurposed by the political right. Having trained students to expect redress for every emotional bruise, the academy should hardly be surprised that groups outside the progressive mainstream now want in on the action. 

It helps, of course, that the pro-Israel right now has the perfect political ally: a White House both sympathetic to their aims and spoiling for a fight with higher education. But this retooling of DEI in their image isn’t purely a Trump-era invention. As early as November 2023, the Anti-Defamation League was already lamenting that, of the 55.8 percent of American college students who had undergone some form of DEI training, fewer than one in five had received any instruction specific to antisemitism. Even if Kamala Harris had won the White House, the progressive left would likely be struggling to fend off efforts to repurpose DEI toward ends it finds politically unpalatable. 

That conservatives have co-opted these tools so swiftly and effectively should force a reckoning among their original champions. But first, they’ll have to admit the obvious: Trump didn’t kill DEI.