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Universitatea Harvard restructurează biroul de diversitate, echitate și incluziune, în contextul presiunilor politice ale administrației Trump și al unui proces intentat de universitate împotriva administrației. Schimbarea vine după ce administrația Trump a acuzat Harvard de discriminare rasială și a amenințat cu retragerea finanțării federale.
Harvard Restructures Diversity Office Amidst Pressure From Trump Administration
Harvard is restructuring its diversity, equity, and inclusion office in a move that appears to be yielding to pressure from the Trump administration, even as the university has sued the administration and accused it of unlawful interference in university affairs. An email sent to the Harvard community on Monday announced that the office had been renamed the Office of Campus and Community Life.
The decision follows similar reorganizations nationally by universities that appeared aimed at placating conservative critics who have attacked diversity offices as factories of left-wing indoctrination. The Harvard announcement stood out, though, because it came just hours after lawyers for the university and the Trump administration held their first conference in a lawsuit in which Harvard accuses the administration of invading freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court.
The Trump administration also opened another front in its fight with the university on Monday, accusing the Harvard Law Review, an independent student-run journal, of racial discrimination in its membership and article selection. In a news release announcing that the law review was under investigation, Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, said the journal “appears to pick winners and losers based on race, using a spoils system where the race of the legal scholar is as, if not more, important than the merit of the submission.”
In response to the announcement, Harvard Law School underscored its commitment to ensuring the programs it oversees comply with the law, but emphasized that the review is legally independent. A similar complaint against the Harvard Law Review was dismissed by a federal court in 2019. In the announcement that Harvard’s diversity office is being restructured, Sherri Ann Charleston, the former chief diversity officer, said that the university should bring people together based on their experiences and perspectives, and “not the broad demographic groups to which they belong.” Dr. Charleston’s title has been changed to chief officer for campus and community life.
The Trump administration included the dismantling of D.E.I. efforts in a long list of demands it sent Harvard two weeks ago that the university would have to meet to continue receiving federal funding. Among other demands, the administration ordered Harvard to name an outside overseer to monitor students, faculty and staff for “viewpoint diversity,” ban international students hostile to “American values” and remove activist faculty. The list of demands was sent in error, according to two people familiar with the matter, but the White House has continued to stand by the demands. Harvard responded to the demands by filing the suit in federal court. “No government, regardless of party, should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they admit and employ, and what areas of study and research they may pursue,” Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, wrote in a statement to the university. In retaliation, the administration has frozen over $2.2 billion in university grants and contracts.
Miles J. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.
