Background
Following the Trump Administration's February 2025 “Dear Colleague Letter” demanding that universities eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs under threat of federal funding loss, DEI programs at universities across the United States began to close or face significant change. In order to understand the effect this letter and its associated federal guidance had on higher education the author of the article chose to analyze the Big Ten universities. The author chose the Big Ten specifically for three main reasons:
He attends a Big Ten institution and as a result the analysis was able to compare the experience he was having at his university to peer institutions;
The Big Ten offers a sample of universities that includes a mix of geographic locations and public versus private schools; and,
All of the Big Ten universities are flagship institutions in their respective states, which makes their decision-making impactful to other institutions that may have less students, alumni, and financial resources.
The eighteen universities of the Big Ten Conference responded to Trump Administration pressure to end DEI related practices in three distinct ways: ending their DEI programs entirely, restructuring or renaming them, and maintaining them. This website contains analysis of what each university did following the letter and why they belong in their respective category of actor.
The institutional categorizations of the Big Ten Universities were developed through a structured review of publicly available information. For each of the eighteen Big Ten universities, research proceeded by looking for types of sources from each university, though not always all types of sources were present with each school. The types of sources used in the placement of these universities were (1) official university statements, press releases, and announcements relating to DEI programs issued after January 20, 2025; (2) local, campus, and regional news coverage of institutional DEI changes; (3) faculty and staff union statements and press releases; (4) relevant state legislation and state governing board resolutions; (5) any litigation involving the institution and DEI; (6) the publicly accessible web presence of any current or former campus DEI office, department, division, or officer; and (7) federal agency press releases or enforcement documents referencing the institution by name. The primary research tool was targeted Google searches using the institution's name in combination with terms including “DEI,” “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “Dear Colleague Letter,” “restructure,” “rename,” “compliance,” and related variants.
The information gathered through this process was organized into an excel spreadsheet tracking, for each institution: the nature of any structural change (closure, restructuring, renaming, or continuity); the stated rationale; any accompanying state legislative or governing board action; and any litigation involvement. That matrix serves as the analytical foundation for the categorical framework used to categorize each of the schools.
It is worth noting that the relative ease with which this information was located using standard search queries carries its own evidentiary significance. Institutions that have restructured or renamed DEI offices in the hope of reducing federal enforcement exposure should understand that the underlying programs, their personnel, and their history of operation remain readily discoverable by anyone — including federal enforcement officials — willing to spend an afternoon conducting basic research. The strategy of terminological camouflage is, in practical terms, unlikely to provide the protection it is intended to create, for the same reason that changing the name on a building's directory does not conceal what happens inside it.
Spreadsheet of Sources Used to Categorize