As President Donald Trump unleashed a suite of executive orders targeting DEI, the University of Michigan School of Nursing began quietly revamping its website.
A “diversity” tab with links to DEI resources was removed from the homepage. Pages with “DEI” in the title were renamed and purged of the offending adjective, according to web archives reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, while the main page for the school’s diversity office—which stated, “We are not excellent if we do not reflect diversity, equity and inclusion in all aspects of our community”—was taken down entirely.
In its place was a new page for “Community Culture,” which declares that “culture is at the heart of everything we do.” None of the revised pages use the terms “diversity” or “DEI.”
The changes seemed to indicate that Michigan was finally downsizing a bureaucracy that employs more than 200 officials and has cost the university nearly $250 million since 2016.
But Mark Perry, a retired professor of economics at the university’s Flint campus, decided to take a closer look.
It turns out the new pages link to the same DEI materials as the old ones, including a “DEI 2.0” strategic plan that is in effect through 2028. And lo and behold, the office of “Community Culture” employs all the same staff as the former diversity office.
The title of just one official, Patricia Coleman-Burns, has changed from “DEI Strategic Planning Co-Lead” to “Strategic Planning Co-Lead.” The new office’s description also uses many of the same buzzwords associated with DEI, albeit not the acronym itself.
“When we talk about Community Culture,” it says, “we’re highlighting our commitment to addressing health disparities and making sure that equity and inclusion are integrated into every aspect of our work.”
Trump has promised to investigate universities as part of his sweeping crackdown on DEI. The tweaks to Michigan’s website illustrate how schools may attempt to disguise their diversity initiatives without getting rid of them, keeping the programs and personnel but dressing them up in new language.
“These changes might serve as a blueprint for other schools to follow with similar deceptive changes,” Perry told the Free Beacon. “Schools at Michigan like Nursing are now attempting to maintain the ‘DEI status quo’ while hiding their DEI programming and services from the regents, media, taxpayers, federal and state government, and the public.”
On February 8, Perry wrote to Michigan’s Board of Regents about his concerns. By February 11, the nursing school had removed many of the rebranded pages—as well as the list of staff members in the Community Culture office—from the public domain, though it appears they still exist on the university’s intranet.
Michigan did not respond to a request for comment.
Institutions have been attempting to rebrand their DEI offices since 2023, when red states began targeting diversity programs at public universities. The University of Tennessee renamed its DEI unit the “Division of Access and Engagement,” for example, while at the University of Colorado, the “Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” became the “Office of Collaboration.”
The Trump administration appears to have anticipated such switcheroos. After Trump signed an executive order banning DEI in the federal government, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) created a tip line to report efforts to “disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language,” adding that “failure to report this information … may result in adverse consequences.”
“These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination,” an email to government employees read. “If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024 to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to DEIAtruth@opm.gov within 10 days.”
The result has been a game of cat and mouse between DEI officials and their newly empowered opponents. To get around Trump’s executive order, which also applies to government-funded entities, PBS planned to reassign two DEI executives to another department at the network, according to a report in the Free Press, but scrapped the plans on Monday after the Free Press asked for comment.
“The employee population at PBS loves DEI,” a high-ranking source at the network told the Free Press. “They were trying to play chicken and move things around and try different things to circumvent the executive order.”
At Michigan, DEI was under scrutiny even before Trump’s reelection. In October 2024, the New York Times had published a 9,200 word exposé on the university’s diversity programs, which included trainings on “antiracist pedagogy,” handouts on “white supremacy culture,” required courses on “ethnic injustice,” and land acknowledgments in the English department.
The report implied that those programs were, at best, a waste of money, and at worst an engine of censorship. It also noted that the school of nursing had gone on a DEI hiring blitz, bringing on a chief diversity officer, Rushika Patel, whose title has since been changed to “Assistant Dean for Strategic Education,” according to the school’s online directory.
The change was one of the many made by Michigan in the wake of the New York Times report, which underscored how vulnerable the school could be when Trump returned to the White House. Michigan said in December that it would no longer require diversity statements in faculty hiring, becoming one of the first public universities to end the practice. Other changes, such as diverting some of the school’s DEI budget to financial aid programs, have also been batted around by the board of regents, prompting pushback from DEI officials facing an unprecedented threat to their sinecures.
While Trump has not directly outlawed DEI at colleges and universities, he has pledged to target schools that discriminate “under the guise of … ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’”
Several programs at the nursing school could run afoul of the administration’s directives. The school’s DEI strategic plan, which is still available on Michigan’s website, calls for expanding a “health equity” program designed for “disadvantaged and underrepresented minority (URM)” students, and notes that the success of the plan will be measured by “headcount and demographic diversity.” It also lists “increasing the demographic diversity of graduate and doctoral students” as an explicit goal of the nursing school, which conducts a biennial “DEI campus climate survey.”
In a section on “inclusive teaching,” the plan says that “DEI, social justice, and health equity” will be woven throughout the curriculum.
“[W]e are aware that we are up against many forms of oppression,” the plan reads. “Given this context, and during this next DEI 2.0 period, the [School of Nursing] remains committed to mobilizing the incredible strength and potential of our School.”
