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Garber sued President Trump after the administration froze $2 billion in funding to the school and claimed that funding was only allotted to Chinese students. The Harvard compliance review determined if China-based donor funds were limited to only benefit students from the country. A federal judge determined the funding freeze unlawful and reversed the action, giving the school a major win.
But recently, Yale students and alumni called out the irony of the award, saying McInnis bestowed an honor she herself would be ineligible to receive due to her consideration, and later acceptance, of a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice restricting diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in their admissions processes, among other things.
Alex William Chen, Yale Student Council president, said on a July 2026 press call that, in the wake of the new settlement, many of Yale’s international students are hesitant to return to their homelands in fear of not being able to return due to their visa now being restricted. New international bans restrict reentry for students from a list of 39 countries including Laos and Cuba and up to 27 African countries.
A Scramble to Comply
Four years after the Supreme Court ruled in Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College that race-conscious admissions programs violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, more than 50 higher education institutions are facing off or settling with the DOJ over similar concerns about preferential treatment through diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on campus.
As part of an ongoing mission to reverse years of progress for students of color and international students, U.S. Department of Justice officials are going after housing, financial aid and scholarship programs, academic disciplines, and admissions policies. Threats include stripping funding from institutions that don’t comply, compromising funds institutions use to support students and maintain and strengthen college programs.
A Dear Colleague Letter – which was later rescinded – written by Craig Trainor, assistant secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, posted on the Department of Education’s website stated that: “Federal law thus prohibits covered entities from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life. Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race.”
Mike Gavin, CEO and founder of the Alliance for Higher Education, calls it an “egregious binding by the Supreme Court and those who brought the case against Harvard at the time under a perverted sense of civil rights.”
“The fact of the matter is that the higher education sector never really did true diversity equity and inclusion work in the systemic way,” Gavin continues. “School administrators haven’t truly done the work of making big changes to ensure that everyone actually feels like they belong.”
Gavin, a former president of Delta College in Michigan, believes that the current chipping away of diversity, equity, and inclusion priorities at colleges and universities around the country reflect misguided conceptions of who is benefitting from the diversity that institutions of higher education have in place to help first-generation and underserved students.
“There’s a misconception that somebody’s getting something that another is not, when that is not the case,” Gavin says. “If funding is going away because of different legislation, or if there’s not a racial studies or office on campus, you’re being told you don’t belong.”
Alumni, students, and college leaders have voiced their opposition of the investigations and settlements that would alter the student experience.
Workforce Effects on College DEI Cuts
“The impact on what the workforce will look like will be monolithically white. It’s the access element and then also the curricular element. For instance, in medicine and law,” he explains. “Where they eliminate their DEI requirements for accreditation, that has real world consequences, in healthcare where there are diseases that an African American might have, or more likely to get, than a white person. And if you’re not trained on that, that will have real world impact. Same thing with diversity equity inclusion for law, when diversity is taken out of the accreditation standards.”
Dr. Royel M. Johnson, associate professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California and the Director of Student Engagement in the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center, has studied race relations in higher education and has written books on the topic of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
“The loss of levers on campus that would otherwise promote positive and supportive cross-racial interactions that would also facilitate critical consciousness and awareness of difference groups that tend to reduce the issues and reports of violence and challenges, I think we’re going to start seeing that in the workforce,” Johnson says.
Leader, Student Impact and Pushbacks
Some argue that institutions are already diverse and therefore there’s no longer a need for dedicated DEI efforts on campus. Still others contend that DEI is a divisor akin to “reverse discrimination,” stoking heightened prejudices or animosity toward students, faculty of color and creating an unwelcoming environment.
I think the other misconception, which I think higher ed could improve on, is that it’s based on people’s experience with bad training,” he says. “Sometimes we have people who are training on equity and inclusion, who might have the heart for DEI, but haven’t done the reading or gotten rigorously trained and they train people, making it a bad experience.”
But Gavin says tearing down DEI initiatives on campus creates a major impact on the student body, community, and the economy of the cities they serve. Students who benefit from DEI practices often are left behind and overlooked at larger institutions, or they simply cannot afford tuition costs. Scholarships and race-based programming offer open doors and opportunities that they otherwise wouldn’t get. These opportunities can lead to internships, jobs, and entrepreneurship opportunities.
For smaller, less resourced schools, an investigation into a school with fewer students, faculty, staff and resources would leave programming and funding in danger – and that’s exactly what the Trump administration is betting on with its onslaught of Dear Colleague letters and DOJ inquiries. Despite the legality of the actions, which in many cases is still being worked out in the courts, the administration’s threats to withhold funding increase their chances of folding to the administration.
“There should be a database approach to whether or not the higher education sector writ large from community colleges from medical schools is serving the democracy,” Gavin says. “That data should include everything from the enrollment, retention, completion of all students disaggregated by race and ethnicity. And subsequently, among other things, reallocation of federal and state money to those institutions that need a little help that are doing good work, so that those outcomes improve over time.”
Gavin shares that the opposite is currently true for most institutions. “Institutions that might need a little more help are punished. We don’t fund institutions that are certainly the most likely to open their arms to first-generation or underserved students who might need the most help at the same level as those who are the most elite,” he says.
This story originally ran in The EDU Ledger's September 3, 2026 edition. Subscribe here for full access.
