For months, Harvard has fought to preserve the image of a university that stands up to President Trump, accruing small wins as it took on the federal government in court to defend its research funding and international students.
But there is one area where the school has indicated it is willing to make concessions: diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Harvard and the Trump administration are negotiating behind closed doors as the federal government demands the university make changes to areas such as admissions decisions and faculty hiring. Before any deal has been struck, however, the university made changes including merging centers aimed at minority students, women, and LGBTQ students into one “Office of Culture and Community”; combining a recruitment program focused on attaining students of color with others; changing how student leaders are trained and identify themselves to peers; and altering campus signage rules, removing a prominent Black Lives Matter banner.
The moves alarmed some students who worry the university sees spaces where they had found homes as dispensable and could make additional changes that hurt the institution’s diversity.
“On the outside, people are praising Harvard for standing up to the administration. But as students, we’re watching them take preemptive actions to placate this volatile government,” said Gabriella Achampong, a Harvard law student and NAACP scholar. “To us, that doesn’t feel like standing up to a government that’s begun to take issue with free speech.”
A spokesperson for Harvard did not respond to requests for comment. Harvard president Alan Garber last May told The Harvard Crimson that the university had not “in any way stepped back from our commitment to diversity along an array of dimensions.”
Some students have encouraged these changes — and want Harvard to go further.
Evan Doerr, a Harvard sophomore and chair of the Harvard Institute of Politics’ Conservative Coalition, said changes to Harvard’s “DEI bureaucracy have been largely cosmetic.” Doerr said the university should “provide clear transparency” about campus programming and policies.
“Personnel is policy, and the same people remain in charge, many of whom were and still are true believers in the programs they were hired to operate,” Doerr said, adding he and other conservative students believe there are still “areas of campus where progressive ideology remains entrenched and unaddressed.”
Proponents of those initiatives said they feel hurt or abandoned by the changes. Olivia Data, a Harvard senior who previously worked as an intern at the Women’s Center, grew up in North Dakota, where she said women’s rights organizations faced attacks and pressure “to water down our language.”
“To come to a place like Harvard, which has so many resources and . . . that actively welcomes all identities, that has support systems for women, it felt so refreshing,” Data said. But now, “there are going to be women who come from the same background that I do that are going to come here and not know whether or not they belong.”
Harvard joins other colleges nationwide changing as the Trump administration has waged war on diversity initiatives and what it describes as left-leaning tilts on college campuses. The administration is investigating dozens of schools it says employ “racial preferences” in selecting students or faculty.
Those investigations come as the Trump administration tried to slash nearly $3 billion in federal funding from Harvard and bar the school from hosting international students — though it has so far lost in court. Harvard, since last summer, has negotiated with the government to resolve legal disputes, talks that Education Secretary Linda McMahon said were ongoing as of November.
To some scholars who study diversity and equity policies, changes made at Harvard and elsewhere indicate how expendable many schools see diversity initiatives.
“Institutions are making decisions prematurely that they don’t have to make, with the hopes of avoiding the ire or the attention of the Trump administration,” said Kevin Cokley, a University of Michigan psychology professor who studies race, equity, and educational achievement.
“It begs the question,” Cokley added, “of whether these institutions ever really truly valued diversity, equity, inclusion, as so many of them claim to have done, if they are so easily led to dismantle them without any legal mandate.”
In recent years, Harvard reinforced its commitments to DEI. Students called on the university to better support students of color years before the 2020 protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd. The university made changes including appointing its first university-wide diversity and inclusion officer in 2020.
Harvard fought in court for years to preserve its admissions process, which considered an applicant’s race. But in 2023, the Supreme Court barred schools from considering race in admissions, prompting Harvard and other institutions to overhaul application processes.
Some changes predated Trump taking office as institutions moved away from 2020-era commitments: Harvard in the summer of 2024 said its Faculty of Arts and Sciences would stop requiring a diversity, inclusion, and belonging statement in its hiring process.
But recent moves, some students said, feel a step further. After Harvard last summer removed a Black Lives Matter sign displayed in two lab windows since 2020, student unions organized to put up hundreds of posters with the slogan across campus.
James Chisholm, a spokesperson for Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said university rules “prohibit self-mounted displays except in designated areas” and without prior approval.
Denish Jaswal, a member of the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers, worried the university’s changes foreshadowed future restrictions.
“I wonder if my ability to teach about trans rights or patriarchy or white supremacy or other systems of oppression [and] domination will be the next chopping block,” Jaswal said.
Harvard also “restructured” five student recruitment groups, including one focused on students of color, into a “unified recruitment program.” Smaller changes involved tweaks to names, students said, such as a Harvard Law School seminar rebranded from “Critical Race Theory” to “The Jurisprudence of Race and the Law.”
Student groups last spring cobbled together thousands of dollars to fund affinity graduation ceremonies after the university withdrew its support for those events.
“It was definitely a really big disappointment to not just the undergrads, but to a lot of the alumni, seeing Harvard refuse to hold something that has been tradition and has been a really important institutional part of Harvard’s memory,” said Forest Moua, co-president of Harvard’s Asian American Association.
Residential proctors and tutors, once designated to help LGBTQ, first-generation, or low-income students, no longer expressly identify as assisting those particular students.
And students protested Harvard’s consolidation of its three former diversity offices, including the Women’s Center and Office for BGLTQ Student Life. Students in the Queer Student Alliance in September held a mock funeral for the center, gathering on Cambridge Common to share what it meant to them.
“Students are supporting other students, which is of course the purpose of QSA and other affinity organizations,” Eli Johnson-Visio, the alliance’s president, said. But “right now, it feels like we solely exist to make up for the lack of support that we used to have.”
Some students have criticized Harvard for what they perceive as a lack of communication. In one instance, a group of student organizations sent a letter to administrators over the summer urging them to continue promoting diversity efforts. Soon after, the websites for the centers went dark without warning, and the university reorganized them shortly after.
For Aaryan Rawal, a Harvard senior, the BGLTQ Center was a “second home” after facing homophobic attacks back home in Virginia. He was alarmed after finding out the university planned to restructure that center.
“It sends an incredibly damaging signal, not just to queer students at Harvard, but queer students across the country,” Rawal said. “People say things along the lines of, ‘I’m scared to even associate myself with the word advocacy,’ or ‘I just want to keep my head down.’ ”
Sara Speller, a graduate student studying music history and theory, said attending Harvard as a Black student meant navigating not always feeling “particularly comfortable or like people will respect my authority in the field.” Under the Trump administration and amid changes Harvard has made, Speller said, “I’m so much more tired all the time . . . from having to be alert and having to mind the way that I speak.”
“The constant threat of funding cuts is really difficult,” she added, “but it’s really muddying these other huge offenses that will very radically and negatively change the university for a long, long time.”
Anjali Huynh can be reached at anjali.huynh@globe.com.