BY NIMISHA BARTON

Following the infamous “Dear Colleague” letter sent out by the Department of Education in February 2025, colleges and universities rushed to shutter diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices in the hopes of avoiding the fate of so many other institutions—namely, incurring the wrath of the Trump administration that views such programs as giving an unfair advantage to people of color and contributing to “the disenfranchisement of white men.” As of this writing, over 392 colleges and universities across 46 states, including the District of Columbia, have dismantled their DEI offices. More are sure to follow.

For many, the present predicament of DEI in higher education seems uniquely hopeless, but we’ve been here before. Just like DEI hires following the 2020 George Floyd protests, diversity practitioners in the 1960s and ’70s were handed a vague mandate to engage in sweeping institutional reforms. And, like today’s most recent DEI hires, diversity practitioners watched dumbstruck when university leaders caved to federal and public pressure just a few years later. The way university leaders fumbled that moment offers us important lessons. Above all, it serves as a timely reminder of the utter predictability of whitelash—white resistance following moments of great social progress—and the wrongheadedness of capitulation in times of crisis.

Backlash has long been the quintessential American response to expansions in access to higher education. For much of this nation’s history, college was the unique preserve of wealthy, white, Protestant men. It was only in the late nineteenth century that the status quo was disrupted, first by the entry of wealthy and middle-class white women and later with the enrollment of Jewish students, especially those of Eastern European immigrant backgrounds. With the arrival of Black students on college campuses, backlash took on explicitly racial dimensions, morphing into whitelash.

Everything changed with the civil rights movement. As students of color moved to dismantle structural racism in every part of American society, they set their sights on the next frontier: historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs). Black students especially were at the forefront of the movement for racial equality at HWCUs. Forging multiracial alliances among fellow students, staff, and faculty, they compelled white senior leaders to confront and dismantle institutional racism.

As protests roiled campuses across the nation, students secured some long-lasting wins, including affirmative action to diversify the undergraduate student body. Colleges and universities also conceded to other demands, such as the establishment of interdisciplinary programs like ethnic studies, African American studies, and women’s studies, as well as offices of minority affairs, urban affairs, and Black student unions—the forerunners of today’s DEI offices and racial affinity centers.

Various DEI staff swept into office thanks to victories secured by successful student protest movements in those early years. Most significantly, they spearheaded institutional efforts to expand outreach and recruitment of students of color and to create support programming to ensure their success in unfamiliar institutions that operated according to unwritten norms and codes. But that progress was cut short by the backlash symbolized by Reagan’s America.

In line with a fervent faith in doctrinaire free-market beliefs on both sides of the Atlantic and in response to the specter of a nation run by radical leftists who believed in racial equality, the Reagan administration rescinded federal support of higher education. To be sure, as early as the ’60s, some white students and parents claimed that special services for minority students constituted “special treatment.” Though white students repeatedly brought legal challenges against affirmative action in higher education throughout the ’70s, it was medical student Allan Bakke who shifted the status quo on affirmative action. In 1978, the Supreme Court’s infamous Bakke ruling represented a sea change in American culture that had come to view policies like affirmative action as tantamount to reverse discrimination. It was a key moment when the fight for social justice was “derailed by diversity.”

In the wake of the Bakke decision and the rightward lurch in US politics, senior leaders in higher education rolled back early DEI initiatives, claiming that they were discriminatory against white students. Some dissolved ethnic studies departments; others liquidated racial affinity centers and eliminated programming for students of color. Along the way, they created a hostile climate for practitioners. One administrator at a large public research university in the ’80s recalled, “A wave of antipathy landed at my doorstep.” She wasn’t alone. By the 1990s, practitioners could pursue their work only if they used more “neutral” and “palatable” terms to discuss “difference.” Power-blind “diversity” language became a way to manage so-called difference, not to fight institutional racism.

There is an important lesson here: From Occupy Wall Street and the #MeToo movement to Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests, a resurgence of social justice activism throughout the 2010s has inspired student protests in ways that harkened back to the civil rights era. When we see the 2010s as a time of great social progress, the current onslaught against all things DEI is far less surprising; indeed, it is wholly predictable.

Unfortunately, the majority of today’s university leaders have taken the wrong lessons from the past. If their predecessors created the inhospitable conditions that watered down the struggle against institutional racism and tamed it with benign diversity and inclusion rhetoric, today’s senior leaders are going a step further—eradicating DEI altogether in ways that will hobble equity and justice work for years to come.

From Hungary to India and now the United States, modern authoritarian regimes have demonstrated a proclivity to attack higher education institutions as part of their larger agenda to undermine democracy. As various segments of our civil society bow to the pressure of the Trump administration, universities represent one of the last institutions of civil society capable of standing up against the hollowing out of American democracy. The question is: Will they rise to the occasion or will they back down again? The future of higher education—indeed, the future of us all— depends on what they do next.

Nimisha Barton is a lecturer at California State University, Long Beach and a DEI consultant in higher education. Her most recent book, A Just Future: Getting From Diversity and Inclusion to Equity and Justice in Higher Education, appeared with Cornell University Press in 2024.