Opinion: Higher Education Caved to Trump’s Anti-DEI Crusade — It's Time for Academics to Fight Back

By **Pete Rottier

In a stunning and cowardly capitulation, many of America’s colleges and universities have erased any mention of diversity, equity, and inclusion from their mission statements, department pages, and even their grant proposals. Once proud institutions — built on the idea that knowledge should serve the public good — now scramble to appease an authoritarian regime more interested in erasing history than learning from it.

Let’s be clear: this is not just about DEI “offices.” This is about the soul of the academy.

President Donald Trump, in his latest culture war offensive, successfully framed DEI not as a moral imperative or educational enrichment, but as a dangerous left-wing ideology undermining “traditional values.” His administration has choked off federal funding to programs associated with DEI, blacklisted universities that engage in “woke” research, and empowered a new McCarthyism.

And most universities… surrendered.

Why? out of fear—fear of losing funding. Some administrators refer to it as “pragmatic adaptation.” But make no mistake: silence in the face of authoritarianism is complicity.

The impacts are already devastating:

Grants for studying racial health disparities have dried up.
Fellowships for first-generation college students have been “restructured” or quietly eliminated.
Disability Resource Centers are being defunded.
Faculty have been warned not to use the term “equity” in public-facing work.
Scholars of gender, race, disability, and LGBTQ+ issues are being targeted, isolated, and, in many cases, defunded.

Some universities now require DEI statements to be scrubbed from syllabi. We’ve reached a point where even acknowledging systemic inequality and racism is considered a partisan act — not a reflection of lived reality or decades of empirical research.

This is state-sponsored censorship — and it’s coming for the heart of academic freedom.

We need to respond, and we need to do it together.

I propose the formation of **AAA: Academics Against Autocracy** — a collective of educators, researchers, students, and administrators committed to resisting the forced erasure of equity work from the public university system. This is not about politics. It is about preserving the integrity of higher education and its role in a democratic society.

What can AAA do?

Create a shared network to track and expose policies suppressing academic freedom and DEI-related research.
Host teach-ins, digital conferences, and public webinars to educate the public on what DEI actually is — and why it matters.
Demonstrate the actual cost of eliminating these programs by using research to show that such programs are cost-efficient and actually save society money.
Support at-risk faculty, especially those whose work challenges systems of oppression, through legal resources, mentorship, and solidarity.
Advocate fiercely for legislation that protects academic freedom, and reject the false narrative that equality is extremism.

We cannot wait for a more favorable political climate. The damage is happening now, in faculty meetings, in grant reviews, and in hiring committees that are afraid to utter the word “inclusion.”

Higher education cannot claim to prepare students for the future while pretending racism, sexism, ableism, and xenophobia are relics of the past. And we, as scholars, cannot hide behind apolitical posturing while the very purpose of our work — truth-seeking in service of the public good — is under attack.

If we do not stand now, we will soon have nothing left to stand on.

Let this be our call to action. Let us organize, resist, and educate — not just in classrooms, but in the public square. Let us be unafraid to name what is happening: the rise of academic authoritarianism.

And let us be just as unafraid to fight it.

_Interested in joining AAA: Academics Against Autocracy? Let’s build this together. Email me at rottier2@gmail.com