Push for more faculty diversity at colleges made only modest gains before Trump ban

Deploying a wide range of strategies, these schools made modest progress toward their racial diversity goals. The number of underrepresented faculty increased by a third, The Post found, from 9 percent in 2015 to 12 percent in 2024 among faculty whose race was known. That’s higher than ever but, in virtually every case, lower than diversity among undergraduate students.

Now most of these efforts are on ice or abandoned as the Trump administration attacks schools for their diversity, equity and inclusion work. Federal agencies have opened investigations and withheld billions of dollars in federal funding as leverage. Some conservative states have banned these diversity efforts altogether.

It’s part of the federal government’s wholesale flip of its interpretation of the Civil Rights Act, which was used for decades to ensure opportunity for people of color but is now being used to go after diversity programs and alleged discrimination against White people.

Underrepresented faculty growth among top research universities

Published faculty diversity commitment

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12 universities had at least 10% growth.

At least 10% growth

65 universities had at least 5% growth.

At least 5% growth

92 universities had less than 5% growth.

Less than 5% growth

18 universities had no change or decrease.

No change or decrease

Shows change between 2015 and 2024 among R1 research universities

Of the 184 universities that made faculty diversity pledges, at least 108 have fully or partially rolled them back, according to a Post survey and analysis of public statements and news coverage. Another 30 have renamed or reorganized their DEI offices but not necessarily eliminated the programming. There was no evidence of a rollback at 34 schools.

When asked by The Post if they were still committed to their diversity programs, only 12 schools said yes.

In 2020, the University of Virginia vowed to double the number of underrepresented faculty. The school was responding to demands from Black students, who had long campaigned for greater representation on the faculty.

“We must — absolutely must — be a community that is diverse, inclusive, and equitable,” Jim Ryan, then-president of U-Va., wrote at the time. “Diverse because talent exists all around the globe and within every demographic, and because the very best ideas emerge from the consideration of diverse viewpoints and perspectives.”

Under pressure from the Trump administration and the state, U-Va. ended its DEI programs last year and agreed to abide by a July memorandum laying out the Trump administration’s interpretation of civil rights law. Ryan resigned.

In that memo, the Justice Department said “unlawful practices” include any policy that “prioritizes candidates from ‘underrepresented groups’ for admission, hiring, or promotion, bypassing qualified candidates who do not belong to those groups.”

Advocates for greater diversity among faculty say these programs are not discriminatory and are needed to find qualified people who bring a wider range of experiences, which they say benefits all students. A diverse faculty, advocates say, ensures diverse perspectives in classrooms and research and offers role models, in particular for students of color. They reject suggestions that more diversity means less merit.

Nonetheless, programs have unraveled across the country. At New Mexico State University, the diversity initiative has been “refined” and no longer focuses on faculty hiring but on “creating cultures of belonging for every group,” a spokesperson said. A spokesperson for Case Western Reserve University said, “Our initiative has evolved. … We are now in compliance with federal executive orders.”

The University of New Hampshire dismantled its program to comply with a state law that took effect this year, a spokesperson said. And a spokesperson for William & Mary in Virginia said the school “shifted to a values-based and merit-based framework.”

This is good news to conservatives, who have long argued that these programs wrongly prize diversity over merit. They were buoyed by the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that race-conscious college admissions amounted to unconstitutional discrimination. That decision did not address race-conscious hiring but may signal where the court is heading.

John Sailer, director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said that when programs reach their hiring goals, it’s largely because they are “overtly discriminatory.”

“These kinds of programs have certainly discriminated against White candidates,” he said. “They’ve certainly discriminated against men. They’ve certainly discriminated against Asian candidates. To be fair, you have to judge individuals on their individual performance.”

Experts in the field do not consider Asians to be underrepresented. In 2015, they made up about 13.6 percent of all faculty at top research schools compared with 10.5 percent of undergraduate students. That increased to about 17.3 percent by 2024 versus 13.6 percent of students.

Now advocates for greater diversity fear progress toward their goals will stall or reverse.

Before the concentrated push began, the share of Black and Hispanic professors at top research universities barely moved — inching up 1.7 percentage points between 2005 and 2015. There was slightly more growth after the wave of university commitments. Between 2015 and 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, the share of Black and Hispanic professors increased by 3.1 percentage points.

Absent focused diversity efforts, faculties will remain overwhelmingly White, said Freeman Hrabowski, president emeritus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a national leader on faculty recruitment.

“People tend to choose people who look just like themselves,” he said. “That’s just nature.”

Protests spur action

In August 2014, an unarmed Black teenager named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, propelling a wave of activism and the Black Lives Matter movement. About a year later, large-scale protests followed a series of racist incidents at the University of Missouri. Soon, similar protests spread to dozens of other campuses.

More than 50 student groups published lists of demands and, according to an analysis at the time by the website FiveThirtyEight, the most common was to increase the diversity of professors.

Universities responded. By 2015, at least 88 of the nation’s top 187 research universities had made public commitments to diversify their faculty, with most coming around 2014 and 2015, The Post found. Another 96 schools did so in the years since, with commitments gaining new momentum after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 sparked a national racial reckoning.

Those numbers show the effort is a “significant shared value,” said Mark Schlissel, who championed DEI efforts when he was president of the University of Michigan from 2014 to 2022.

“There was a striking consistency to how the majority of research universities and their leaders spoke about the need to diversify their faculty and their students and their staff,” he said.

Strategies ranged widely. Universities including Johns Hopkins and Columbia provided funding targeted for hires that added diversity. Search committees began posting open jobs in untraditional places. Some — such as the University of Illinois Chicago and the University of Connecticut — required people on hiring committees to participate in antibias training. “Diversity advisers” were added to search committees. And schools such as Stanford University and the University of Michigan embarked on “cluster hiring,” by which they would simultaneously hire multiple people studying one area, often related to social justice or diversity.

A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Arkansas found that 68 percent of nearly 1,000 faculty job postings nationwide in September and October 2020 mentioned diversity and 19 percent required a “diversity statement,” in which applicants are asked to describe their contributions to or plans to help promote diversity and inclusion.

Another popular approach: Postdoctoral fellowships designed to bring early-career scholars of color and women to campuses, with funding for their work and a shot at a tenure-track faculty position. The website MinorityPostdoc.org tallied nearly 200 diversity-oriented postdoc programs sponsored by universities, government agencies and nonprofit groups.

At the University of California, leaders nurtured one of the oldest postdoc programs in the country, providing a salary subsidy for departments that hired postdoctoral fellows from the program onto their faculties. Some departments required applicants to submit diversity statements, and through an Advancing Faculty Diversity program, UC awarded grants to recruit and retain faculty from underrepresented backgrounds.

At Yale University, administrators responded to high-profile student protests over racism in 2015 with a five-year, $50 million program. Among other initiatives, the fund covered up to half the salary for three years for certain hires, including “faculty targets of opportunity who would enrich diversity or contribute on another dimension of strategic importance to the university.”

“An excellent faculty … is a diverse faculty, and that diversity must reach across the whole of Yale — to every school and to every department,” said a letter to the community announcing the initiative.

Yale and several schools within the University of California system were among the universities that saw results, The Post analysis found. UC-San Francisco, for instance, added 237 underrepresented faculty between 2015 and 2024, growing about 4.6 percentage points.

At Yale, the number of Black and Hispanic faculty had barely budged in the decade before the initiative launched in 2015. But in the nine years after that, the share of Black faculty rose from 3.6 percent to 6.1 percent. The share of Hispanic faculty also increased, from 3.4 percent to 6.7 percent.

Until recently, there was scant disagreement about the value of boosting diversity, said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities.

“There were always questions about what is within appropriate boundaries of how to achieve that. But the idea that this was a goal to reach for was not disputed,” he said.

Today, Fansmith said, it is very hard to find a university willing to discuss these initiatives.

“Now even talking about it will get them subject to funding freezes and reputational attacks and disrupt their ability to function,” he said. “If they are happening, then it’s quietly.”

How the diversity efforts ended

It took years for universities to build and embrace faculty diversity initiatives. They fell much faster — first in conservative states and then, after Trump took office, in response to federal pressures.

Several federal postdoc programs that brought underrepresented scholars to universities ended last year, as did some of the private-sector versions. The University of California system stopped allowing departments to require diversity statements and ended its Advancing Faculty Diversity program. A month after Trump was reelected, Yale voluntarily ended its hiring program. A spokesperson said the initiative was always meant to be “a short-term effort.”

The federal Education Department launched investigations at several universities based on DEI initiatives including faculty hiring. That included George Mason University, where President Gregory Washington had said that creating a diverse faculty was a “North Star” guiding their work, and Cornell University, where a conservative group produced emails showing how hiring committees were aiming for a “diversity hire.”

A Cornell spokeswoman said the school complies with the law and trains its faculty to do the same.

Critics of diversity initiatives say explicit efforts like those alleged at Cornell are typical.

Jay P. Greene, a senior fellow at the Defense of Freedom Institute, said he was regularly pressured to hire women and racial minorities when he was chairman of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas from 2005 to 2021. He said this happened more frequently after 2015.

“In certain searches, we only gave serious consideration to people in categories that we felt under pressure to get,” he said.

John Thomas, a spokesman for the University of Arkansas, said he “couldn’t speculate on how a former employee may have felt about hiring in the past.” He said hiring decisions are made based on qualifications, without regard to race and “in compliance with applicable law.”

But he also said that “casting the net widely and proactively inviting individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds to apply for open positions” helps the university develop the strongest pool of candidates.

To avoid allegations that they were employing overt racial preferences, university officials sometimes employed coded language, said a former leader of a prominent university, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

“They couldn’t say, ‘We’re hiring Black scholars.’ They would say, ‘We are hiring scholars whose research and teaching interests are consistent with promoting a diverse academic community,’” the person said.

He said that race was never the only factor considered when departments had many qualified applicants.

Fansmith, whose organization represents universities, said he is not aware of any circumstances in which search committees had explicit goals of “only hiring someone of color” or knowingly discriminating against White applicants.

“The law is clear you can’t discriminate on the basis of race in hiring decisions,” he said. “But it’s also not wrong to weigh many factors in determining who is the best person for the job.”

An unraveling in Virginia

For decades, the calls for action rang across the University of Virginia campus. One generation of Black students after the next demanded that the faculty look more like the student body it served.

The first set of demands — from the Committee on Attracting Black Faculty — came in 1972, just five years after the university hired its first Black professor. Similar reports followed in 1975, 1987, 2007 and 2015. Then came George Floyd’s murder. U-Va. committed itself to a broad set of DEI goals, including doubling underrepresented faculty by 2030.

Deborah McDowell, professor of literary studies, who has been on the University of Virginia faculty since 1987, called the goals a means of repairing “a long history of discrimination and exclusion.”

The faculty diversity plan had many elements, according to documents posted online. All search committee short lists were to include a diverse slate. Committee members would undergo antibias training. New faculty slots were created, as were postdoc jobs that could lead to faculty positions. Faculty demographics data was posted online.

In the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the goal was to hire about 15 new professors broadly studying the Black experience in a range of disciplines, said Robert Fatton, a political scientist who chaired a committee that considered proposals for the new positions.

The searches were not restricted by demographics, he said. “But there was a clear feeling that, everything being equal, we wanted people from underrepresented groups.”

The numbers moved — a little bit.

In 2020, 4.6 percent of U-Va. faculty were Black, compared with 6.8 percent of the undergraduate student body and about 18.6 percent of the state. By 2024, the percentage of the faculty that were Black rose to 6.2 percent. The Hispanic share, though, barely budged — from 3.3 to 3.6 percent.

These efforts soon drew attention from a group of conservative alumni called the Jefferson Council, which campaigned against Ryan and his support for DEI.

“I’m not saying they were not talented people, not smart people,” said Joel Gardner, president of the Jefferson Council. “I’m saying, ‘Were they the best? Were they chosen over other people with better academic qualifications?’”

The conservatives got support from Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who took office in 2022 and began replacing members of the Board of Visitors, as is typical. By 2025, conservatives controlled the board, and in March, they ordered a dismantling of U-Va.’s DEI offices.

Then the Trump administration engaged, alleging possible racial discrimination in admissions and hiring, among other things. Trump officials threatened to cut off federal funding if Ryan was not removed as president, according to Ryan.

The pressure from Washington and from the newly conservative board grew stronger, and Ryan resigned in June.

In October, the university and the Justice Department reached an agreement to pause the federal investigations. Among the concessions: The university agreed to abide by the Justice Department’s interpretation of antidiscrimination law.