University leaders across the country and in North Carolina are privately reeling from a string of mandates, policy changes, and threats directed at higher education by the Trump administration.
The most pressing came a little more than two weeks ago in the form of a “Dear Colleague” letter, sent by the Department of Education’s Civil Rights office.
In language more often heard at a political rally than in a legal policy directive, it threatens to end federal funding to any school that supports programs that embrace “repugnant race-based preferences” via “woke ideologies” like DEI, gender identity, and others.
Almost across the board, university leaders are remaining quiet on what changes they may implement to adhere to the letter.
Stakes could not be higher
Billions of dollars in federal funding are at stake, across all of North Carolina’s institutions of higher education.
It ranges from Pell Grants that are awarded to students but distributed directly to universities, and research funding from federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, among many others.
The letter comes at a time when higher education institutions in North Carolina have already made significant moves to end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
The president of the UNC System directed chancellors to remove DEI offices and jobs from their campuses after the UNC Board of Governors passed a policy enshrining “institutional neutrality.”
Duke University, the state’s largest private university, ended a decades long scholarship program for Black students. In 2021, Duke alone received nearly $650 million in federal funding, including student aid and research.
The Dear Colleague letter pushes for universities to take efforts like these even further, saying that collegiate programming that considers race in any aspect of student, academic, or campus life is racially discriminatory.
“The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions,” Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, stated in the letter. “The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.
What are NC universities saying about compliance?
WUNC reached out to officials at more than two dozen public, private and community colleges to inquire about their plans to comply with the new directive. The majority did not respond to the request for comment or stated that their university’s legal teams were reviewing the guidance. No one would go on the record about what their campuses were doing to comply.
This follows a national pattern in which most college leaders are choosing to remain silent and not publicly push back against the Trump administration’s sweeping federal funding changes.
“(They) have an extraordinary amount of uncertainty whether they’ll be investigated,” said Robert Kim, a director of the Education Law Center in New Jersey who previously served as a deputy assistant secretary at the US Department of Education during the Obama administration. “There was an indication in the Feb. 14 guidance of potential enforcement and loss of federal funding for schools that don’t comply with the guidance … and so, there might be this feeling of let’s wait and see, let’s see what other schools do.”
At a press conference last week — held the day before the OCR’s deadline — UNC System President Peter Hans told reporters the Dear Colleague directive was “largely consistent with the System’s “equality policy.“
“Although we are in the process still of digesting exactly what the federal government expects of our universities, I think that is absolutely the case across the country in higher education,” Hans said.
What programs could be at stake?
The UNC Board of Governors passed its “equality policy” in May 2024. To comply, chancellors across the state shuttered their campus DEI offices and eliminated nearly 60 DEI-related positions overall.
This year, the UNC System took its anti-DEI stance a step further, prohibiting universities from having any general education or major-specific curriculum requirements that involved DEI. The move, System leadership said, was in response to a January directive from President Trump railing against DEI.
Faculty criticized the UNC System’s decision, stating in a letter addressed to Hans that the policy change undermined their academic freedom. Typically, faculty set curriculum and general education requirements, but this isn’t the first time the UNC System has overstepped those bounds.
The letter was drafted by the UNC Faculty Assembly, led by UNC Greensboro professor Wade Maki. He said the Dear Colleague letter is also causing confusion among faculty, as they fear another “rush to comply” from the UNC System.
“No one is clear on exactly what the rules are,” Maki said. “We have directives from the federal government. We have directives from the Board of Governors via the UNC System, and we’re just not sure what the rules are and what counts.”
Maki said the Dear Colleague letter could put a range of programming at stake — from private donor scholarship programs for students of color, student support offices designed to address gaps in performance, to so-called “pipeline programs” that are designed to increase underrepresented groups on university campuses.
“There’s not clarity on which things (the guidance) is actually covering,” Maki said. “If the answer is all of them, well, that’s going to have an impact on who comes to college. That’s going to have an impact on who succeeds in college. We have evidence-based programs that attract students and support them — that is a deep concern to faculty, that this would harm student groups that are already or historically have been underrepresented.”
An example of such a program has had a significant impact at North Carolina’s community colleges.
‘Without MCSI, I’m not sure where I would be’
Courtesy of Jeremiah Artacho
Jeremiah Artacho was like so many of his fellow students when he graduated from high school, unsure of a path forward and wrestling with whether to pursue a “dream job” or a safer vocation.
An advisor at Durham Tech introduced him to the Men of Color Scholars Institute (MCSI), a program established on 21 campuses in the NC Community College system. It was created in 2003 to improve graduation and retention rates of minority male students. Just this past year, 9,400 students took part.
“If this program never existed, I would have never made the connections that I have today,” said Artacho, who plans to enroll at UNC-Chapel Hill this fall to study journalism. “Without MCSI, I’m not sure where I would be … through being in that group at Durham Tech, I’ve been able to meet a lot of different people and create relationships that I know will last for a long time.”
MCSI, a state-funded program, has been a rousing success, leading to a 22.4% jump in retention, according to a three-year study on the program’s effectiveness.
The Dear Colleague letter appears to target programs exactly like this one. About 56% of the students in the NC Community College system receive federally-funded Pell Grants.
The NC Community College system did not respond to WUNC’s questions about the program’s future.
Further guidance and deadlines
On March 1, the OCR sent out a FAQ list to clarify its ‘Dear Colleague’ guidance. It said that institutions are prohibited from considering students’ race when distributing benefits or resources, “even if race is only being considered as a positive or plus factor.”
“Schools may not grant preferential benefits to members of certain races for the purpose of achieving a student-body composition that mirrors the racial makeup of the country, remedying general societal discrimination, or otherwise rectifying societal injustice,” the FAQ states.
Kim, the education law center director, said because the Dear Colleague letter is so broad schools are likely to over comply with the guidance.
“That schools overreact and that they immediately pause or cancel any programs that might provide critical supports for students who might need them. Even colloquia lectures, classroom discussions and curricula around issues that could pertain to race or issues of equality,” Kim said. “Schools scaling back so much on their activities, teaching, campus life that then if courts determine that the guidance is actually unlawful, which I believe it to be, that the damage will have been done in the interceding time.”
Kim said it’s also likely the Office for Civil Rights will launch investigations, either through following up on public complaints of racial discrimination on college campuses or through its own systems.
“OCR doesn’t have tremendous capacity on its own to initiate hundreds and hundreds of investigations,” Kim said. “So this ability to actually go out and investigate violations pursuant to this guidance, I think it’s going to be fairly limited … but even a smaller number of investigations could have a further chilling effect.”
According to the March FAQ list, the OCR said it will first attempt to reach a “voluntary” agreement with institutions accused of racial discrimination before pursuing “administrative or judicial proceedings.”
WUNC partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
