Harvard Quietly Capitulates to Trump, Guts DEI Office and Affinity Events

Although Harvard University has been celebrated for resisting the Trump administration — including suing over threats to withhold $2.2 billion in federal funding after the university refused to comply with a series of demands issued by the White House — on Monday it effectively dismantled its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) office, rebranding it as “Community and Campus Life.”

The university also announced that it will no longer host or fund affinity group celebrations during Commencement.

“Such cowardly shit. Harvard is continuing to capitulate despite the lawsuit,” Harvard Law School clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo wrote on Bluesky. “They fundamentally changed the mission and mandate of the office. It’s a full on crackdown on support[] for minority students.”

This shift comes amid news that the Trump administration’s civil rights offices at the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services opened investigations on Monday targeting Harvard University and the independently funded Harvard Law Review, alleging “race-based discrimination” — a term that the administration has increasingly weaponized to attack DEI initiatives.

“Harvard will do what it always does, snuff out internal opposition with oppressive administrative policies while implementing them over the summer to limit student protest,” Caraballo said. “They’re remarkably efficient at this.”

Crimson Opinion Writer Violet T.M. Barron has similarly criticized the university’s posture. Earlier this month, Barron wrote that while Harvard President Alan Garber has publicly opposed Trump, Harvard continues to “execute[] deeply conservative agenda from behind a fading blue facade.”

In 2024, Harvard suspended five students and placed 23 others on multi-semester probation for participating in a Palestine solidarity encampment in Harvard Yard. Harvard also banned over 60 students who staged a silent “study-in” protest from Widener Library, and punished around two dozen faculty members for their participation in related protests, issuing two-week library suspensions. Harvard also suspended the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, a leading pro-Palestinian student organization at the university, and barred 13 students from graduating because of their involvement in protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“Harvard’s shameful track record on Palestine is only the most glaring proof that in many cases, the University’s agenda converges with that of the government they ostensibly reject,” Barron wrote.

This March, Harvard’s School of Public Health suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University, a prominent Palestinian institution in the occupied West Bank. That same month, Professors Cemal Kafadar and Rosie Bsheer were removed from their leadership roles at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). In April, Harvard Divinity School announced the suspension of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI) and did not renew the position of Hilary Rantisi, the program’s associate director and the Divinity School’s sole Palestinian American staff member.

“Do not mistake Garber’s scramble to retain a semblance of liberalism as a stand — let alone fight — against the Trump administration. No number of strongly worded statements nor invocations of ‘independence’ or ‘constitutional rights’ will allow Harvard to claw its way out of the hole it has dug itself into for over a year now,” Barron wrote. “In this hole, academic freedom is not reality but myth, proved fictional by the systematic exclusion of Palestine from its bounds.”