- U-M ended its wide-ranging diversity, equity and inclusion plan a year ago
- Faculty and students are working to reinstate some programs
- Regents say the Go Blue Guarantee and Wolverine Pathways programs will continue
Yacine Lo remembers working with the University of Michigan president, provost and other leaders in meetings with the Black Student Union. They exchanged ideas on how to increase the population of Black students and support them, such as offering culturally relevant guided campus tours for future students.
It was among the first times when students collaborated with top officials — rather than protesting and issuing demands — to tackle U-M’s longstanding issue of low Black student enrollment.
But that ended when U-M announced in March 2025 that it was terminating its diversity, equity and inclusion initiative, which over eight years had become one of the largest and most costly in the country.
“Since DEI was cut … we don’t have that level of access and that level of commitment from them anymore,” said Lo, a U-M junior who is speaker of U-M’s Black Student Union. “Since then, we’ve not really been heard.”
U-M discontinued the effort after President Donald Trump’s threat of federal funding loss to schools with DEI programs. U-M has one of the nation’s largest research portfolios, $2.16 billion in 2025, which includes $1.25 billion in federal funding.
Related:
- U-M shifts funding from DEI into its free tuition program, Go Blue Guarantee
- The rise and fall of DEI at University of Michigan
- Facing deadline to end DEI, Michigan schools ask crucial question: What is DEI?
- U-M halts DEI plans as Trump administration takes aim at diversity efforts
- Opinion | MSU must return what they took — and add more
Lo’s group and others — including some U-M faculty members — are now lobbying U-M leaders to restore dozens of programs and scholarships that the university dropped.
U-M history Professor Derek Peterson, the faculty senate chair, is advocating for U-M to restore whatever it can under Trump, who has called DEI a form of racial discrimination. Conversations began with U-M officials after the Trump administration abandoned an appeal in January of a lawsuit challenging the president’s funding cut threat to schools with DEI programs.
“It’s important that our faculty and our students don’t look like an island of white people in the midst of a state that is racially, culturally, economically diverse,” said Peterson. “We have an opening here politically to reinitiate our leadership around racial justice concerns, and I hope that our university will seize the moment.”
The DEI shutdown led to the closure of two offices, a campus strategic plan, programs that were operating in 51 schools and administrative units and several job losses.
Some programs designed to diversify faculty and graduate students were dropped, along with initiatives such as “Enhancing Black Student Representation & Experiences.” A two-day observation of Juneteenth ended.
U-M also expanded universitywide its ban on soliciting “diversity statements” in faculty hiring; ordered staff members whose jobs involved supporting DEI efforts to “refocus their full effort on their core responsibilities” and called for websites, policies and programs to meet federal compliance.
Some observers say that the end of the DEI initiative began long before Trump threatened cuts. Critics said the program was too bureaucratic, expensive and wasn’t making enough impact on increasing underrepresented students.
Others heralded it as a success driven by evidence-based practices and metrics — outlined in annual reports since removed from the university’s website.
“The data clearly show that students, faculty, and staff became significantly more diverse in terms of race, gender, first generation status, and socioeconomic status … using approaches that were legal under (state law),” said U-M psychology Professor Robert Sellers, who was the university’s first chief diversity officer and oversaw the initiative’s first phase. “The entire community was not only highly involved but also saw this as a success.”
Three months before it ended, U-M officials said DEI spending between 2016 through 2023 had reached $236.2 million, which included $64 million for two student programs. This week, officials said that the cumulative cost was lower but did not provide a figure.
In a statement, U-M spokesperson Paul Corliss added that the university is “not currently engaged in conversations to reinstate programs, concepts or objectives related to the now closed DEI office.”
“U-M remains committed to serving the public good,” Corliss said. “As with any university initiative, ideas are evaluated based on their alignment with our mission, values and applicable law.”
‘Just less visible’
To some, such as retired U-M Flint Professor Mark Perry, the university didn’t go far enough.
Perry, a longtime DEI critic, said he analyzed what happened to the diversity offices and staff and little changed: the two offices that U-M shut down were replaced by two others, there were no layoffs of “diversicrats” or cost savings.
“Much of U-M’s commitment to advance DEI campuswide remains strong, perhaps just less visible,” he said.
U-M data shows that before the transition, 163 full-time positions carried job titles related to DEI, with the average worker devoting 36% of their time to non-DEI work. Of those 163 workers, 14 jobs were eliminated; 36 employees are no longer at the university and the rest remain in non-DEI jobs. Additionally, the closure of the DEI initiative resulted in savings that were funneled into student programs, primarily U-M’s free tuition program, the Go Blue Guarantee.
Regent Paul Brown, a Democrat, said there is a “misnomer of what we did.”
There was “an outsize ratio” of administrative to programming dollars so the university eliminated positions and drove the money into student programs, Brown said. Instead of organizing programs into one central office — where some felt there was another layer of administration that caused some friction – many were returned to units where they once operated while others were eliminated.
Regent Jordan Acker, a Democrat, added that shuttering the DEI initiative shifted significant funding to the Go Blue Guarantee, an 8-year-old program.
“What we heard from our students, especially African American students, was the biggest problem with our diversity, equity and inclusion effort is there weren’t enough students that looked like them … and the only way to do that was to increase our scholarships,” said Acker.
Tabbye Chavous, U-M’s former chief diversity officer, countered that a few programs aren’t enough to change U-M’s campus culture. Incorporating DEI throughout the university made the campus accountable. Some units may continue their work but there is no assurance that others will.
Without that accountability, some students are going to lose out,” said Chavous, who is now executive director of the American Educational Research Association in Washington, DC.
The push to restore
U-M’s DEI initiative — hailed as a national model and also nationally criticized for barely budging Black student enrollment — was created after Michigan voters in 2006 banned affirmative action in college admissions.
The DEI initiative went beyond strategies to increase Black, Hispanic and Native American student enrollment. It aimed to diversify the student body economically, geographically, culturally and politically, diversify the faculty, and address health disparities, disability concerns, LGBTQ+ issues and everyday and systemic bias.
For some students, that is important but representation matters too.
“Students across the campus should be able to come to our institution, see themselves and also have the resources to succeed,” said student body President Eric Veal Jr., who experienced what it’s like to be a Black student on U-M’s campus when a fellow student expressed surprise that he got into U-M in spite of where he grew up in Chicago.
In 2016, when the DEI initiative started, Black students made up 4.3% of undergraduate students, Hispanic students, 5.2%, U-M data shows.
In 2025, when the initiative ended, Black students made up 5.7% of U-M’s undergraduate student population; Hispanic students, 12.6% of students.
The Black Student Union wants to restore programs that were eliminated in the DEI initiative, continue programs pioneered last year such as the Multi-Ethic Student Affairs Welcome Program and resurrect scholarships that were not part of the DEI Initiative but ended amid federal threats, such as the U-M Alumni Association’s LEAD Scholars Program.
Lo, the Black Student Union speaker, said incoming U-M President Kent Syverud should publicly support DEI, invest in programs, increase Black student enrollment and foster a sense of belonging.
“When they say, ‘Go Blue,’ to really emphasize the idea that U-M is for all people,” she said.
Some view low representation at U-M as problematic because the university is publicly funded. Others see it as a moral issue. U-M has long declared that diversity is synonymous with academic excellence.
That’s why Peterson has spoken to university administrators about reinstating some eliminated programs; he also recently spoke publicly before the Board of Regents. He’s suggested reverting the Rackham Merit Fellowship Program, designed to bring marginalized students into the graduate school but he said was broadened; resurrecting the University Diversity & Social Transformation Professorship, which has been shelved; and reinitiating the Collegiate Fellows Program, which created a pipeline of diverse junior faculty into a tenured professorship.
Peterson also spoke recently to Syverud. Peterson noted that Syverud was previously a U-M law professor who provided expert testimony in favor of the university in one of the two affirmative action cases that challenged U-M’s admissions processes and led to landmark US Supreme Court rulings in 2003. One upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action, but another limited its use in admissions.
“He made a very effective argument about why having multiracial, multiethnic classrooms was good for education because students learn from each other,” Peterson said. “I presume he still thinks that’s true and I look forward to working with him to make that more centrally part of Michigan’s student body than it is now.”
From affirmative action to DEI
Diversifying the student community has been challenging for U-M and other public universities during the past 20 years because Michigan voters in 2006 approved a constitutional amendment known as Proposal 2 that banned affirmative action in college admissions.
U-M had to get creative to find ways to legally diversify the student population at the public university in Ann Arbor with the state’s second-highest tuition cost: $18,346 for Michigan residents in 2025-2026.
Among the most high-profile outcomes of the DEI initiative was the creation of the Go Blue Guarantee. U-M also launched Wolverine Pathways, a college preparation program for 7th through 12th grade students in Detroit, Southfield, Ypsilanti and Grand Rapid schools.
These programs have led to a 46% increase in first-generation undergraduate students, and a 32% increase in undergraduate Pell grant recipients, U-M officials have said previously. Both are continuing.
Regents have declined to directly address whether any other elements of the DEI initiative will be reinstated.
”There is a difference of opinion about how best to address these priorities but the notion that we’ve abandoned our commitment to these principles is false,” said Mark Bernstein, a Democrat and chair of the Board of Regents. “We remain committed to ensuring that our university reflects the diversity of our state, and our efforts now are far more focused on our students and less on a sprawling DEI bureaucracy.”
In the future, there is a hope to expand programs like the Wolverine Pathways into communities like Dearborn, Benton Harbor and Sault Ste. Marie, regent Brown said.
“We focused on those programs that had the biggest impact on creating and making the university more accessible and inclusive,” Brown said.
While Harvard University has sued the federal government for freezing federal research funds and other universities have reached settlements over policy and other issues, some say U-M has surrendered to pressure from the Trump administration and abandoned its long-held values. They point not only to the shuttering of the DEI initiative but also U-M’s elimination of its hospital’s gender affirming care for minors and the ending the university’s longtime participation in the PhD Program.
“The University of Michigan regents, including Democratic members, have clearly signaled to the Trump administration that they are complicit in undermining the progressive values of the University,” said art Professor Rebekah Modrak, past faculty senate chair. “We’re not flying under the radar. We’re fully capitulating.”
Regent Sarah Hubbard, a Republican, says U-M “is in a good place.”
“Things change over time,” said Hubbard. “Things go too far. Pedulums swing. I think that is what we are living through: A lot of changing ideas in our culture about how we support all of our voices.”
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