Since taking office, Trump has cracked down on diversity, equity and inclusion programmes that aim to uplift marginalised groups who have faced historical inequity. He has cast those steps aimed at helping minorities as discriminatory against groups such as white people and men.
Harvard University said on Monday it was renaming its office for “equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging” to “Community and Campus Life”. Trump has passed executive orders aiming to dismantle DEI in the government and private sector.
Harvard’s announcement in an internal email did not lay out what would happen as a result of the renaming. It added that the work ahead “requires us to find new ways to bring people of different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives together as one community, focusing on the unique experiences and contributions of the individual and not the broad demographic groups to which they belong”.
Earlier in the day, US District Judge Allison Burroughs, during a brief hearing in Boston, set a Jul 21 hearing for the case after Harvard warned that the freeze and additional threatened cuts were putting research at risk.
Monday’s hearing was the first she has held since Harvard sued last week after refusing to cede to what the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based university’s president said were illegal demands from an administration antisemitism task force “to control whom we hire and what we teach”.
Those demands included calls for the private university to restructure its governance, alter its hiring and admissions practices to ensure an ideological balance of viewpoints, and terminate certain academic programmes.
Harvard has said that while it is committed to combating antisemitism, the administration’s sweeping demands violate the free speech guarantees of the US Constitution’s First Amendment.
Rather than seek a preliminary injunction blocking the freeze pending the outcome of the litigation, Harvard has opted to skip straight to the merits of the case, which both it and the US Department of Justice asked the judge to quickly address.
