U.S. Colleges Should Not Abandon Their Principles

For years, the Republican party has presented itself as the stalwart defender of free speech on America’s college campuses, which it argues are inhospitable to conservative ideals. The longstanding trope still animates the party’s base, which encourages Republican lawmakers to continually rail against the liberal bastion of higher education, with promises to inject “diversity of thought” into academe.

During President Donald Trump’s first term, his answer to this alleged ideological asymmetry came in the form of a few executive actions. This included ordering in 2019 that the federal government tie colleges’ federal research money to their adherence to the First Amendment (for public institutions) or their own free speech policies (for private ones). Legal experts panned this and other of Trump’s free inquiry policies as performative virtue signaling. After all, colleges were already bound by laws and policies protecting free speech, the most obvious being the U.S. Constitution. But for Trump, the move wasn’t about governance, but rather embracing the GOP’s manufactured outrage over free speech.

Today, Republicans still cast themselves as free speech watchdogs of college campuses. But new dissonance has emerged between how Republicans continue to present themselves—as referees of civil liberties—and the reality, which is that Trump and his administration are dictating the boundaries of acceptable campus speech with an authoritarian hand.

Trump and his surrogates have threatened to yank federal funding from colleges that teach or promote diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, a stunning government encroachment, underscored by the absurdity that the president was urging more free speech on campuses not just a few years ago, but also in the present day. During his remarks to Congress this week, Trump claimed that he “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” even as the administration broadly attempts to root out DEI initiatives from U.S. institutions.

Most recently, news reports revealed that Ed Martin, whom the administration named as Washington, DC’s interim acting U.S. attorney, wrote to Georgetown Law School last month and demanded it extract DEI-related topics from its curricula. Martin pledged in the letter that his office wouldn’t hire anyone affiliated with a law school that “continues to teach and utilize DEI.”

A political appointee attempting to dictate what a college can or cannot teach is wrong. And it plainly violates the First Amendment, which Georgetown Law Dean William M. Treanor highlighted in his response to Martin. Policymakers across the political spectrum should condemn Martin’s letter, too, in defense of U.S. democracy.

In addition to being harmful and illegal in itself, the Trump government's campaign to kill diversity efforts in American schools seems intentionally vague. Martin’s letter doesn’t define DEI, as Julian Sanchez, a former senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute, pointed out in a series of recent social media posts. This makes it impossible for Georgetown Law to actually know whether it’s complying with Martin’s directive, Sanchez wrote.

Sanchez posed questions: Would teaching a course on antidiscrimination law constitute DEI? How about discussing Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled segregation in schools unconstitutional?

“I actually can’t imagine how you’d teach constitutional or corporate law without getting into material someone might be conceivably construe as teaching DEI,” Sanchez wrote.

More likely, the Trump administration actually doesn’t have a precise target as it tries to erode diversity efforts across the country, no specific lesson or class it wants gone.

Part of Trump officials’ strategy seems to be testing boundaries, issuing indistinct mandates to gauge how far schools will voluntarily allow their freedom of speech to be curtailed.

That appeared to be the case when the U.S. Department of Education issued a public letter to K-12 schools and colleges this month, instructing them to wind down programs that consider race, like certain scholarships — and said institutions risked the agency pulling their federal funding should they not fall in line.

The department claimed a 2023 Supreme Court ruling striking down race-conscious admissions applied broadly to other programs.

But that’s not true. The ruling only pertains to admissions, as legal scholars have noted, meaning many DEI programs are still lawful. The Education Department was stretching its argument—and its authority—to push Trump’s agenda, and it seemed to recognize this, as it later walked back its legal interpretation that all DEI programs are illicit.

Still, damage was done.

After the Education Department released its letter, one of the most prominent American public colleges—the flagship institution Ohio State University—killed two of its DEI programs, its Office of Diversity and Inclusion and its Center for Belonging and Social Change.

The university’s president, Ted Carter Jr., pointed to the potential loss of federal funding as one of the reasons for abandoning the two offices, according to the institution’s student newspaper, The Lantern.

Similarly, the University of Alaska’s governing board last month directed the system to delete all references to “DEI” and “diversity” throughout their programs, and in print and digital materials, following the Education Department’s order. High Point University, a private nonprofit institution in North Carolina, went so far as to establish a list of terms that would be banned in all of its documents, events and presentations, which included “equality,” “gender,” and “white supremacy.”

Colleges should not obey in advance, even as the Trump administration issues vague ultimatums, apparently designed to intimidate, not enforce clear legal standards.

The battle over DEI in education is in part a test of whether schools will cave to political pressure or uphold their mission to serve all students.

Higher education institutions established diversity initiatives decades ago in recognition that they had long upheld policies that excluded vulnerable populations from accessing and thriving in college. Now they have a chance to be the real defenders of free speech, and not just for DEI efforts, but also for colleges’ right to teach without interference from political forces.

Georgetown’s Treanor did this in his retort to Martin, spelling out that Martin’s threats flouted the Constitution.

“Georgetown Law has one of the preeminent faculties in the country, fostering groundbreaking scholarship, educating students in a wide variety of perspectives, and thriving on a robust exchange of ideas,” he wrote.

Treanor’s letter was simple, not inflammatory, but stood firm in the college’s commitments to diversity, equity, inclusion, and academic freedom. Other institutions can do the same, or risk becoming complicit in a crusade that seeks to erase those values.