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.
Yet during this same period, when the administration moved to slash billions in research funding by capping indirect cost rates at the NIH and NSF, universities responded very differently. Rather than comply, they mobilized. Academic associations coordinated litigation. Presidents and provosts spoke publicly. They framed the issue not as a technical budget matter, but as a threat to scientific innovation and the national interest. Courts intervened. The policy stalled. The sector held the line.
The lesson from these funding battles is not simply that resistance is possible. Universities clearly know how to fight when they decide to. It is that how institutions frame the fight determines whether resistance can take hold. When universities defended research dollars as a collective public good, they galvanized courts, policymakers, and the public. But when they accepted the federal administration’s framing that equity and inclusion are ideological, risky, and legally suspect, they lost the fight.
Equity, academic freedom, and inclusion must be defended not as optional values or institutional preferences, but as foundational public goods—without which higher education cannot fulfill its democratic mission. Anything less invites continued fragmentation, anticipatory retreat, and the quiet normalization of ideological control.
The proposed GSA rules raise the stakes further by combining the chilling ambiguity of the Dear Colleague Letter with the direct financial leverage of research funding threats. Together, they amount to a single ultimatum: keep your federal dollars, but only if you certify compliance with an ideological agenda that undermines equity, academic freedom, and democratic inquiry.
Under the proposal, all colleges, universities, and nonprofits who receive federal funding would be required to certify compliance at the point of registration and at each annual renewal. The certifications would create a uniform, government-wide attestation requirement. No longer can institutions quietly rebrand or deprioritize equity work under the radar. These certifications demand explicit affirmation of compliance—on the record, under penalty of law. Critically, the certification standard is derived not from statute but from a July 2025 Department of Justice guidance memo. In other words, universities would be certifying compliance not with the law itself, but with the administration's own authoritarian recasting of it.
This is not merely an attack on DEI. It is an effort to restructure the way that higher education is funded — one whose effects will outlast any single administration. Once ideologically based eligibility to access any and all federal funding becomes normal, what universities can teach, what scholars can research, and what agendas institutions can set will be permanently narrowed.
The fight ahead will be uncomfortable. But the alternative is worse: a university sector that certifies compliance rather than confronts injustice, and a future in which the boundaries of legitimate knowledge are set not by scholars or students, but by political decree.
The question is no longer whether higher education will be reshaped. It is whether universities will help decide what it becomes.
