On February 7, the Department of Education canceled a $6.8 million grant to the University of St. Thomas that had been used, in part, to support precisely the sorts of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that the Trump administration has put on the chopping block. The funds—ostensibly meant for teacher training programs focused on special education—had in fact gone toward a bevy of ideological initiatives at the St. Paul-based school, including a “cultural assessment test” that quizzed teachers on “white privilege” and made them pledge to be “brave equity warrior[s],” according to grant applications reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
It didn’t take long for the recriminations to start. Calling the cancellation “unbelievable,” Senator Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) claimed on February 10 that the Trump administration had axed a grant “to recruit and train special education and elementary school teachers in Minnesota.” One day later, St. Thomas president Rob Vischer blamed the whole thing on the Biden administration, which, he said, had required the school to include DEI in its grant application.
“Under the Biden administration grant applicants were required to explain how use of the funds could advance diversity in the teaching profession” Vischer told local media. The grant program, he added, could easily be modified to comply with Trump’s executive orders on DEI.
What emerged from their protests was a picture of an apolitical university caught in the crossfire of the culture wars. St. Thomas, Vischer implied, had just been following orders.
But a review of archived webpages suggests that the school was hardly strong-armed by the Biden administration. Instead, St. Thomas appears to have used the grant to support an existing DEI apparatus that the school built of its own accord—one that demands allegiance from faculty and encourages overt racial segregation.
The grant was approved in 2022. But since at least 2021, the university has required all faculty and staff to “uphold” the school’s “commitment to diversity and sustainability,” according to an employee handbook. It also sponsors a series of racial affinity groups that the school’s own press department likened to “segregation” in a 2021 news bulletin, which described the “BIPOC gathering circles” that promote “healing” and “community.”
“The St. Thomas BIPOC Gathering Circle is … a space where people share an identity or an experience of being racially privileged or racially marginalized,” an archived copy of the bulletin reads. “It’s a concept … that can feel like segregation, but can be a tool to advance racial equity.” Sometime after the article’s publication, the line about segregation was removed.
The school’s efforts to muddy the record on its DEI initiatives comes as other universities are attempting to disguise their diversity programs without getting rid of them. The University of Michigan School of Nursing renamed its DEI office the office of “community culture,” for example, one of many such name changes at public universities. Other schools have added disclaimers to race-based fellowships noting that the programs are, technically, open to all.
St. Thomas says its commitment to DEI is rooted in “Catholic convictions to advance human dignity.” In practice, though, the school’s DEI office has all the trappings of a secular university.
It curates resources for “BIPOC” and “LGBTQIA+” students, urges professors to add pronouns to their email signatures, and metes out “restorative educational sanctions” to students accused of “bias.” The school’s “strategic priorities” include the use of “diversity statements in student applications and employee hiring practices,” according to the DEI office’s website, and the Catholic university even has a land acknowledgment that references the “sacredness” of native land.
“The University of St. Thomas occupies the ancestral and current homelands of the Dakota people,” the acknowledgment reads. “By actively committing ourselves to truth telling, relationship building, wound healing, and justice seeking, we humbly offer our respect to the Dakota Elders and people, to Indigenous communities beyond the Dakota, and to the sacredness of ‘the land where the waters reflect the skies’—‘Mni Sota Makoce.’”
St. Thomas has said that it will appeal the decision to cancel the $6.8 million grant. The school’s religiously rooted progressivism could complicate that appeal at a time when the Trump administration is taking a maximalist view on DEI, arguing that a wide range of diversity programs—not just overt racial quotas—violate federal law and could be grounds to revoke federal funding.
In a “Dear Colleague” letter last week, the Education Department said that many DEI trainings amount to unlawful discrimination. DEI programs “frequently preference certain racial groups and teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not,” the letter said. “Such programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes.”
That guidance could apply to the affinity groups at St. Thomas, which include “white accountability spaces” for students to “challenge white privilege” and “unlearn racism without asking people of color to do the emotional labor for them.” It could also apply to any number of materials on the university’s website, such as a guide to “becoming anti-racist” adapted from the work of Ibram X. Kendi.
Addressed to “all of us who were raised in a society built upon racism,” the guide encourages readers to “identify how I may unknowingly benefit from racism” and “yield positions of power to those otherwise marginalized.” Another webpage includes a “pronunciation guide” for the names of Asian Americans killed during the Atlanta spa shootings, which were never definitely linked to anti-Asian bias. Still another coaches students seeking jobs and internships on how to “assess an organization’s … commitment to the importance of DEI.”
The initiatives tie back to the university’s DEI strategic plan, launched in 2020, which set numerical targets for non-white students and called on the school to “recruit more … employees of color.” Noting that students were already required to take a course on “diversity, inclusion, and social justice,” the plan pledged to “improve academic excellence in DEI” by expanding “restorative healing circles for students of color around racial tension and trauma.”
It also “call[ed] out” the university’s “long history of acts of racism,” including the “racial writing in the dust on a window in one of our residence halls.”
“We recognize the pain and trauma that our university community has endured due to these acts and those in our community at large,” the plan reads. “We acknowledge the work ahead in dismantling racism, including decolonizing and seeking truth and reconciliation inside St. Thomas and in our broader society.”
A spokesman for the university, Bryce Butzer, did not respond to a request for comment.
