In early April, without much fanfare, the public comment period closed on proposed rule changes to the U.S. General Services Administration's System for Award Management. These changes would move the federal anti-DEI strategy laid out in the January 2025 “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” Executive Order from blueprint to implementation. If they take effect, these rules will condition federal higher education funding on universities obtaining certifications of compliance with the administration’s interpretation of federal anti‑discrimination law—a move that poses one of the biggest threats to academic freedom yet.
It should be clear by now that, as universities await the administration’s decision, neither sound legal reasoning nor public outrage is likely to change the course of the proposed rules, at least at this stage. But that does not mean colleges and universities are powerless. It means they face a crossroads: will they accept a future of ideologically conditioned federal funding, or will they draw a line?
My research on higher education’s responses to federal funding threats over the past year suggests the answer is not simply a matter of courage or cowardice. The answer is shaped by politics: specifically, which institutional interests higher education leaders advance as legitimate, and which they frame as expendable, ideological, and risky. Higher education leaders need to recognize what worked against the administration's research funding threats over the last year—unified, public, coalition-based resistance—is exactly what this moment demands again.
When the administration issued the February 14, 2025, Dear Colleague Letter and related anti-diversity, equity and inclusion executive actions, it cast equity as ideological contamination. Without evidence, it claimed that DEI undermines merit, excellence, and even public safety, while recasting democratic values like inclusion as threats to institutional "neutrality” — a neutrality that, notably, the administration alone gets to define. This move was strategic: it reframed equity work not as a democratic obligation but as a liability, activating the false zero-sum logic that if some gain access, others must lose it. The result was to transform DEI from a shared institutional responsibility into a threat to federal funding eligibility, and to redraw the boundaries of what counts as legitimate activity within federally funded universities.
In turn, most colleges and universities did not wait for legal clarity before enforcement. Instead, they engaged in anticipatory compliance, which effectively translated the Trump administration’s illegal anti-DEI preferences into de facto policy without any formal law or regulation ever changing. Leaders described “legal uncertainty,” and campuses responded by scrubbing websites, pausing equity initiatives, rebranding programs, and eliminating roles—often before a single enforcement action ever took place. Scholars describe this strategy as repressive legalism: the use of vague, coercive law intended not to win in court, but to change behavior through fear and fragmentation.
And it worked. The administration realized its goal to normalize retreat—to erode expectations of academic freedom and democratic governance one institutional decision at a time. This fragmentation was the intent of the policy design—one that isolates units, encourages risk aversion, and makes collective action harder to sustain. And the result: by the time the Dear Colleague Letter fell to litigation initiated not by universities but by the American Sociological Association and the American Federation of Teachers earlier this year, the harm to campuses, people, and programs was already done.
