The Rise and Fall of DEI at Harvard
TThree years ago, Harvard sent its top lawyers before the Supreme Court to extol the value of diversity in higher education.
“A university student body comprising a multiplicity of backgrounds, experiences, and interests vitally benefits our nation,” said Seth P. Waxman ’73, the former solicitor general representing Harvard in a lawsuit over the University’s consideration of race in its admissions decisions. “Stereotypes are broken down, prejudice is reduced, and critical thinking and problem-solving skills improve.”
It took less than two years for the pendulum to swing.
Colleges became ground zero in American culture wars — and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were held up in Washington as a sign of academia’s moral rot. Despite Harvard’s efforts, affirmative action fell in summer 2023. After Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and Israel’s war in Gaza, campuses erupted in protest, and some of Harvard’s most ardent critics claimed that DEI initiatives “fueled” antisemitism.
When Harvard President Claudine Gay was appointed as Harvard’s first Black president, the New York Times heralded the announcement as a “historic first.” On campus, students said they were “overjoyed” and “optimistic.”
But at the end of Gay’s presidency, which collapsed amid controversy over a plagiarism scandal and her handling of the post-Oct. 7 tension on Harvard’s campus, her detractors insinuated that she faced lower standards because she is a Black woman. “Everyone knows that she was not fired sooner because of diversity considerations,” right-wing activist Christopher F. Rufo told The Crimson last year.
By the time the Trump administration set its sights on Harvard, slashing billions in federal research dollars and demanding “merit-based” changes to its hiring and admissions practices, the national backlash to DEI had taken root at Harvard, too.
Diversity statements in faculty hires were axed. Key DEI-related positions were left unfilled. Support for affinity group celebrations at Commencement was suddenly ended. And the University’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging was abruptly renamed in April.
And the upper echelons of Harvard’s leadership, which has long been dominantly white and male, have grown less diverse in recent years. The University’s new president and provost are both white men. Harvard officials once touted the growing diversity of its deanships — four Harvard schools were led by Black women in 2018, a record. Now, two are. And all four school deans appointed since Gay’s departure have been white.
Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 — who is Jewish — has invoked his identity to say he is well-positioned to confront challenges on Harvard’s campus. And as president, Garber has been subject to attacks on and off Harvard’s campus, and has cited his own experiences with antisemitism repeatedly. But unlike his predecessor, Garber has not faced a drumbeat of allegations that he was an unqualified “DEI hire.”
As Harvard stares down the White House — and embarks on a legal fight over “the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth,” as Garber wrote to affiliates in April — it is increasingly confronting an uncomfortable and divisive debate over the future of DEI on campus.
“We have gotten lost both in the thicket of debates about the First Amendment and in the swamps of particular tenets of anti-racism,” University Professor Danielle S. Allen, who served on a 2018 task force on inclusion at Harvard, wrote in a December 2023 op-ed in the Washington Post. “How do we find our way back?”
A Cascade of Changes
At first, Harvard seemed slow to react to the Trump administration’s assault on DEI programming — or perhaps more willing than many of its peers to offer a defense of diversity.
Other universities had been walking back DEI initiatives for months. The University of California, Los Angeles, renamed its DEI office in October 2024, while the University of Michigan shuttered its DEI office last March. The University of Pennsylvania removed references to DEI on official websites within weeks of Donald Trump’s inauguration.
But at Harvard, little seemed to change off the bat. University officials even offered public defenses of diversity. In April, when the Trump administration ordered Harvard to immediately axe all of its DEI programs in its two April demand letters, Harvard sued.
Even so, the websites of Harvard schools’ diversity offices have reflected subtle shifts in Harvard’s approach to DEI for months, according to an automated tracker maintained by The Crimson that scraped online changes since February.
Mentions of “unconscious bias” were removed from the website of Harvard Medical School’s diversity office starting in mid-April. On the website of the Harvard Divinity School’s diversity office, a mission statement promoting a “restorative, anti-racist, anti-oppressive HDS” and “a world healed of racism and oppression” was scrubbed later that month.
Then, in the spring, Harvard started to walk back the public face of its DEI efforts — condemning the government’s “sweeping and intrusive demands” while defending internal changes on its own terms.
OEDIB was renamed in late April. Hours later, the office sent a second email — still signed with its old name — that Commencement celebrations for affinity groups such as Black students or veterans would no longer receive University support, including funding.
Two leaders of student affinity groups told The Crimson that staff from Harvard’s former diversity offices were not permitted to provide any support or guidance — including information on previous years’ celebrations such as agendas, contractors, or attendance numbers — to student affinity groups hosting their own celebrations.
Eli M. Visio ’26, co-president of the Harvard College Queer Students Association, said a Harvard administrator told him that student affinity groups can be penalized if any University funding is used to host unofficial events or affinity spaces that are meant to replace the formal celebrations.
Another student affinity group leader said they have felt University offices beginning to distance themselves from programming.
The student said that, while their organization would typically collaborate with offices — like the Academic Resource Center, in addition to diversity offices — to publicize or sponsor events, they have stopped receiving responses regarding inquiries related to affinity event programming.
A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on the students’ allegations.
The Winds Shift
In 2014, Black students contributed to a multimedia campaign on Tumblr – “I, Too, Am Harvard” — where they shared experiences of hurt and alienation on Harvard’s campus. Many participants held up signs displaying offensive comments — like “You Don’t Sound Black” and “You’re LUCKY to be black… so easy to get into college!”
The project went viral, and Harvard administrators noticed.
“What the students are doing is pointing out to us that perhaps we need to work even harder and that’s what we plan to do,” Donald H. Pfister, then-interim dean of Harvard College, told NPR.
Over the course of the 2010s, students and faculty were vocal in their demands for an inclusive campus — and Harvard undertook an unprecedented effort to reckon with its own history and build formal structures to support marginalized students and faculty. In 2016, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust launched the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. Two years later, Harvard created its central diversity office.
In 2019, Harvard’s then-president Lawrence S. Bacow launched what would become an explosive research effort into Harvard’s historical ties to slavery. Harvard also launched an effort to return the remains of Native Americans held in museum collections. And, after the Covid-19 pandemic, Harvard ended a dorm cleaning program, which often employed low-income students looking to make some change. Many attended a dedicated pre-orientation for first-generation and low-income students instead.
Not all the efforts would be classified as DEI, but all grappled with Harvard’s complicated history in a time when it felt more pressure than ever to accommodate, and celebrate, its diversity.
The moment reached its apotheosis in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a nationwide reckoning against racism and police brutality. University leadership responded publicly: “I believe that one measure of the justness of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members,” Bacow, the former president, wrote in a statement to affiliates.
Khalil G. Muhammad — a professor of African American studies at Princeton University and a former Harvard Kennedy School professor — taught a class on race and racism that HKS made mandatory in fall 2020.
“Do I genuinely think that the dean, all of a sudden, had a realization that such a course like this needed to be offered because it was so important? No,” Muhammad said. “Do I think that the political climate of the country, which saw 20-plus million people protesting for racial justice that summer, changed the political calculus for resisting such a class that the students were demanding? Yes.”
But something began to change as diversity initiatives faced internal and external skepticism, and DEI became a term of derision on the right.
Harvard adopted a policy against taking public stances on political issues in May 2024, saying that they convince students and employees to fall in line with institutional orthodoxy — a stark change from the vocal positions University leadership had taken in the past on current events. Some argued the change should go hand-in-hand with an end to DEI.
Archived versions of OEDIB’s website show a log of fluctuations in the office’s mission statement, which changed in tune with the politics around DEI at Harvard.
“We will lead Harvard toward inclusive excellence by fostering a campus culture where everyone can thrive,” the website read until October 2021. “We seek to catalyze, convene, and build capacity for equity, diversity, inclusion, belonging, and anti-racism initiatives across the University.”
The reference to “antiracism” stayed until mid-2023. By early June, OEDIB’s mission statement had become a single line: “A place where everyone can thrive.”
That motto stayed until the OEDIB website was removed, redirecting traffic to the Community and Campus Life site. That homepage has a different message for visitors: “Our work is evolving and so is our website.”
Moving Forward
When Faust’s 2016 task force released its final report in 2018, it recommended that Harvard’s vision of “inclusive excellence” include equipping students and faculty with the “skills for difficult conversations.
It was what W. Kent Haeffner ’18, a former president of the Harvard Republican Club who served on the task force, described as “a vision that is tailored for Harvard, that is inclusive of viewpoint” as well as other forms of diversity, such as by race, culture, or disability.”
But Haeffner said he thought that vision — of cultivating viewpoint diversity, in particular — “has fallen by the wayside” in the last seven years.
Indeed, Harvard’s pivot seems to be in part a response to criticisms like Haeffner’s that DEI has failed to promote the exchange of diverse beliefs.
In her email announcing the OEDIB renaming, Sherri A. Charleston — the head of Community and Campus Life, who until recently was Harvard’s chief diversity officer — wrote that the work ahead for Harvard “requires us to build a culture in which our differences and disagreements serve as a source of learning and growth.”
The message signals a shift in Harvard’s programming: less focus on race, more on “viewpoint diversity.”
Not everyone sees the former OEDIB as antithetical to the University’s new vision. Philosophy professor Edward J. Hall said that in his experience working with the former OEDIB, he found the office to be focused on creating the necessary conditions “for people to engage in a meaningful way with viewpoints that differ from their own.”
“I found them to be focused in a way that I thought was pretty encouraging, on that more fundamental issue: how do you make use of the diversity you’ve got?” Hall added.
Harold S. “H” Lewis ’85, president of First Generation Harvard Alumni, said he thinks some of Harvard’s diversity efforts made a real difference since his time as an undergraduate, when “there was no recognition at all for the particular challenge of a first-generation student.”
But he said, despite his own misgivings, that it made sense to rebrand the office because doing so could remove the “lightning rod” that has been used to attack and misinterpret the University’s diversity and inclusion initiatives.
“Given the overall litigious climate, and how the words diversity, equity, inclusion have been politicized,” Lewis said, “it’s fully and perfectly understandable why it is now the office of Community and Campus Life.”
—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel contributed reporting.
—Staff writer Matan H. Josephy can be reached matan.josephy@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @matanjosephy.
—Staff writer Annabel M. Yu can be reached at annabel.yu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @annabelmyu.