The University of Michigan, one of higher education’s staunchest proponents of diversity, equity and inclusion plans, is weighing changes to its own program as colleges across the country brace for the second presidency of Donald J. Trump and a Republican assault on such initiatives in government and academia.
Regents overseeing the university said in interviews that they expected the board to seek limits on so-called diversity statements in hiring and promotion decisions. The board may also look to shift more of Michigan’s overall D.E.I. budget into recruitment programs and tuition guarantees for lower-income students.
The changes under consideration would make Michigan one of the first selective public universities to rethink D.E.I. from the inside, rather than under legislative pressure. Democrats have a 6-2 majority on the board, which is elected by state voters and generally operates by consensus. Michigan’s state constitution provides regents ultimate control over the university’s finances as well as general oversight of the school.
The regents will next meet on Dec. 5. But early discussions between the regents and other university officials have sparked intense pushback on Michigan’s campus in recent days. D.E.I. administrators have mounted a campaign to rebut criticism of their work and preserve their funding.
On Monday, hundreds of D.E.I. supporters gathered on the Ann Arbor campus for a rally.
“I don’t think a single person in this audience thinks that the D.E.I. initiatives at this university are perfect,” said one of the speakers, Pragya Choudhary, a junior. “But I know that every single person here knows that without those initiatives, this university would be a worse place yet.”
The debates have underscored broader confusion on campus over what the D.E.I. program does and what the regents intend to do. Some faculty and students have warned that the regents may seek a wholesale defunding of the school’s D.E.I. efforts — a drastic step that does not appear to be under consideration. Others have attacked the regents for supposedly planning to cut the school’s popular Go Blue Guarantee, which provides full tuition for lower-income students from Michigan. In fact, regents said, they hoped to expand it.
An investigation published by The New York Times Magazine in October found that Michigan had spent roughly a quarter-billion dollars on D.E.I. since 2016, creating one of the largest and most ambitious such programs among major research universities. Fifty-six percent of that amount went to salaries and benefits for D.E.I. staff across the university’s three campuses, according to an internal review conducted last spring by Michigan’s central D.E.I. office.
Some regents believe that figure may understate the extent to which Michigan’s D.E.I. budget goes to fund administrative positions.
“It is my hope that our efforts in D.E.I. focus on redirecting funding directly to students and away from a bloated administrative bureaucracy,” said Mark Bernstein, a Democratic regent.
Sarah Hubbard, a Republican regent, said she believed that the growing use of diversity statements across the school had led the university to hire too many faculty members with similar views. Critics say that such statements, typically testimonials of a job candidate’s commitment to D.E.I., amount to compelled political speech. Officials at two other selective institutions, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced this summer that they would no longer require job candidates to submit diversity statements.
“We must do better in hiring a wide variety of voices in our faculty so that they’re teaching a wide variety of opinions to our students,” Ms. Hubbard said.
Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, a professor of American culture, dismissed such concerns at Monday’s rally, calling them “a thinly veiled attempt at thought suppression on campus.”
Any retrenchment would mark a profound shift for Michigan, a school that has long played a central role in national debates over race and opportunity in higher education.
The board’s discussions come as a growing number of businesses and schools scale back, disband or rebrand their D.E.I. programs. At least a dozen states, led mainly by Republican lawmakers, governors or their political appointees, have banned or sharply limited D.E.I. programs at public universities, arguing that they promote left-wing indoctrination and racial division.
Mr. Trump has pledged a federal crackdown on D.E.I. programs and stiff penalties for schools that allow “unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity,” such as programs that restrict eligibility based on identity.
But Michigan’s program has also drawn criticism from some of the university’s own students and faculty members, who have argued that the D.E.I. effort has struggled to meaningfully improve racial diversity on campus while restricting the range of views and ideas that are taught or discussed there.
A survey conducted at Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus to help measure progress on D.E.I. found that students reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start in 2016 and less of a sense of belonging. Fewer than one in five domestic undergraduates last year were from racial or ethnic groups the school considers underrepresented.
Though the number of Black students on campus has increased in recent years, so has overall enrollment. As a result, they have remained a very small proportion of undergraduates. Only 5 percent of the students who arrived on campus this fall identified as Black, according to school data. Michigan voters banned the use of racial preferences in admissions and hiring in 2006.
In a statement to The Times, Michigan’s president, Santa J. Ono, said that “all of us at the university must strive for continuous improvement while remaining humble enough to realize that, for every person and program, there is room to grow.”
Dissatisfaction with Michigan’s growing D.E.I. bureaucracy — as well as worries about a narrowing of its intellectual and political culture — has been percolating on campus for several years.
In January, the regents approved a statement reaffirming the school’s commitment to diversity of thought and freedom of speech. In September, a faculty committee appointed by Dr. Ono found that many professors and students across the generally liberal university regarded some of the school’s D.E.I. efforts, such as requiring diversity statements of potential faculty hires, as “enforcing an ideological orthodoxy, contrary to its commitment to freedom of expression.”
An internal report submitted to Michigan’s provost this summer found that more than two-thirds of the academic units surveyed required job candidates to submit diversity statements.
In October, the regents unanimously adopted a bylaw requiring Michigan’s president, deans, department chairs and other senior administrators to observe a policy of institutional neutrality, barring them from issuing official statements on political issues or controversies off campus.
Under a strategic plan begun in 2016, D.E.I. at Michigan has come to encompass a staggering array of initiatives, some centrally run by the school’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and others by Michigan’s various colleges and graduate schools. The efforts range from special hiring programs for D.E.I.-oriented faculty to a laptop loan program for low-income students. Each of the school’s dozens of “units” is required to have its own D.E.I. plan. Many also have their own D.E.I. offices and staff.
The school’s chief diversity officer, Tabbye Chavous, attacked The Times’s reporting in a lengthy response posted on LinkedIn. She argued that it had mischaracterized aspects of the program she oversees, did not focus enough on what she considered its successes and failed to sufficiently discuss her own scholarly and professional credentials.
Her post was widely circulated by other D.E.I. administrators at the university, according to emails obtained by The Times. Last month, Dr. Chavous’s office began publishing posts on Instagram to debunk purported myths about D.E.I. on campus, such as “D.E.I. funding is just spent on staff and retreats.”
Supporters of the D.E.I. initiative have circulated materials that some regents view as an effort to generate support for Dr. Chavous by conflating her office with programs that are viewed more favorably on campus. A petition signed by more than 1,800 students, faculty and staff members stated that Go Blue was “run out of” the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Similarly, an email sent to the faculty on Sunday by D.E.I. supporters claimed that Dr. Chavous’s office had “awarded more than 1,750 full-tuition scholarships to low-income students via the Go Blue Guarantee program.”
A university spokeswoman said that Go Blue, though a component of the school’s D.E.I. strategic plan, was in fact “situated within and managed by” Michigan’s financial aid office.
The counterattack appears to have frayed Ms. Chavous’s relationship with the board.
“It is astonishing that we are not approaching this with any degree of self-reflection or curiosity,” said Mr. Bernstein. “And it is yet another example of how this area of activity considers itself to be beyond scrutiny. The moment of reckoning is fast approaching.”
In recent weeks, a group of professors and staff members met to discuss ways of supporting the D.E.I. program. According to notes of the meeting provided to The Times, Dr. Chavous’s husband, Robert Sellers — who preceded her as Michigan’s chief diversity officer — gave opening remarks. Attendees discussed organizing an administrative strike and placing supportive opinion pieces in local media.
Dr. Chavous and Dr. Sellers did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Dr. Chavous has sought allies on Michigan’s Faculty Senate, which has battled with the regents repeatedly in recent months, including over the school’s handling of disruptive anti-Israel protests on campus. The Senate voted last month to censure the regents for committing Michigan to institutional neutrality and for new rules they imposed to speed up student disciplinary proceedings, among other issues.
Dr. Chavous also appeared at a public Senate meeting in mid-November to rally support for D.E.I. At the meeting, Dr. Chavous said it would be difficult for the program she oversees to be “fully dismantled” because it had been successfully “infused across the campus,” according to a recording obtained by The Times.
But the Senate’s chairwoman, Rebekah Modrak, in a letter subsequently circulated to the faculty, warned against a “sweeping defunding” of D.E.I. out of “politics and personal animus, driven by a conflation of D.E.I. with pro-Palestinian protest.”
A third regent, who asked for anonymity so as not to prejudge the results of the upcoming board meeting, said that such an outcome “has zero votes on the board. To the point of absurdity.”
Dr. Sellers, who oversaw the creation of Michigan’s central D.E.I. plan and remains a professor at the school, also spoke at Monday’s rally, pointing to an increase in the raw number of students of color on campus as evidence of the program’s success.
Another attendee, Heidi Bennett, a project manager at Michigan’s school of education, defended the growth of D.E.I. staff. D.E.I. needed “institutional structures — whether that’s money or an office or staff members or committees — to make it actionable,” Ms. Bennett said. “Otherwise, it’s just performative, and we’re just perpetuating inequality.”
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