Harvard Renames Diversity Office As Trump Demands Dismantling of DEI

Updated April 28, 2025, at 5:37 p.m.

Harvard will immediately rename its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging to “Community and Campus Life,” the University announced Monday.

The move comes as the Trump administration continues its campaign to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programming at universities. In two April letters outlining demands to Harvard, federal agencies urged the University to dismantle its DEI programming — or lose billions of dollars in federal funding.

Harvard publicly rebuffed the demands and sued the administration over the $2.2 billion funding freeze it imposed in response. But the renaming of OEDIB indicates that Harvard may be willing to concede ground as DEI initiatives face a tidal wave of political hostility.

The change was announced in a Monday afternoon email from Sherri A. Charleston — formerly Harvard’s chief diversity officer, now retitled as the University’s chief Community and Campus Life officer. Half an hour after Charleston’s email was sent, the OEDIB website did not reflect changes to its name or objectives.

“In the weeks and months ahead, we will take steps to make this change concrete and to work with all of Harvard’s schools and units to implement these vital objectives, including shared efforts to reexamine and reshape the missions and programs of offices across the university,” Charleston wrote.

Her email did not specify what the changes would involve.

Charleston wrote that while students, faculty, and staff reported a strong sense of belonging in the 2024 campus-wide Pulse Survey, fewer felt uncomfortable expressing diverging viewpoints or connecting across ideological lines. The findings, she said, were a sign of the urgency of reimagining how Harvard fosters community — with a focus on supporting free expression.

Under its new mandate, the Office of Community and Student Life will focus on expanding cross-cultural engagement programs, supporting first-generation and low-income students, and creating more opportunities for dialogue across differences.

While other universities, including several Ivy League institutions, have scrubbed mentions of DEI from webpages and reshuffled DEI offices, the Monday announcement marks Harvard’s first significant change to its DEI programming.

For months, even as peer schools scrubbed their websites and cut DEI initiatives, Harvard made no major moves to follow suit. At Harvard’s annual Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Forum in February, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 defended diversity as a “critical enabler of learning.”

“Exposure to different backgrounds, different perspectives, different experiences, leads to intellectual and personal growth,” he said at the forum.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.