COLUMBUS, Ohio (LifeSiteNews) — Ohio State University (OSU) has closed both its “Office of Diversity and Inclusion” (ODI) and its “Center for Belonging and Social Change” (CBSC) in a quick response to the Trump administration’s mid-February directive that gave public schools and universities until the end of February to eliminate their DEI programs or risk losing federal funding.
The announcement of the closures, along with the elimination of 16 staff positions associated with the school’s ODI and CBSC, came from the OSU president Walter “Ted” Carter in a letter addressed to students, faculty, and staff.
“We have seen a number of developments at both the state and federal levels regarding DEI in public education,” Carter wrote. “The federal government has signaled its intent to enforce guidance invalidating the use of race in a broad range of educational activities, including by withdrawing federal dollars that are so important to our student, academic and operational success.”
“Here in Ohio, a bill barring DEI is also making its way through the legislature, and the Attorney General of Ohio – our statutory counsel – has advised us that his office concurs with the federal government’s position regarding the use of race in educational activities,” Carter explained.
“This is a complex and rapidly changing environment, involving multiple court cases at various stages in the legal process,” Carter said. “We can’t predict the outcome of any one legal case, but what we do know is this: Taken together, the actions at the state and federal levels and the guidance we’ve received from our state and federal leaders provide a clear signal that we will need to make changes now in the way we have historically gone about our work in DEI.”
A third office at OSU with ties to DEI, the “Office of Institutional Equity,” will be renamed the “Office of Civil Rights Compliance” in order “to more accurately reflect its work,” Carter wrote, and “will continue to serve as a university-wide resource for receiving, investigating and resolving all reports of discrimination, harassment and sexual misconduct.”
Other universities across the country have also made moves to conform to the Trump administration’s anti-DEI directive.
The University of Southern California (USC) announced that its university-wide “Office of Inclusion and Diversity” would no longer exist as a separate entity while several schools or departments within the university have deleted or modified DEI references on websites or in faculty titles, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.
In a preemptive move, Missouri State University announced in January the end of DEI initiatives at the school, including abolishing its DEI office and DEI-associated events.
The University of Colorado has deleted its DEI webpage, replacing it with a page for an ambiguously titled “Office of Collaboration.”
Students at North Carolina’s public universities are no longer required to take previously mandated DEI coursework in order to graduate.
In a February 14 letter, the Trump administration’s Department of Education (DOE) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor notified school administrators that, per the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 Harvard decision striking down racial preferences in college admissions, “the test is simple: If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law. Federal law thus prohibits covered entities from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”
But unlawful discrimination can take more forms than that, the letter states. “DEI programs, for example, frequently preference certain racial groups and teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not. Such programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes. Consequently, they deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.”
“The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions,” Trainor declared.
More than 30 states have introduced legislation that would eliminate DEI programs from education as part of a broader push against woke ideology spearheaded by Republicans such as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Conservatives have long criticized DEI and other forms of identity politics for stroking rather than curing division and focusing education toward left-wing political indoctrination at the expense of traditional learning.