Arizona’s three public universities have quietly dismantled diversity, equity and inclusion offerings over the past year, renaming programs, consolidating resource centers and scrubbing websites—all while failing to detail the changes to students, faculty or the public.
The moves came after the U.S. Department of Education sent universities a letter in February 2025 threatening to cut federal funding if they continued to promote what President Donald Trump has called “radical” DEI programs. It advised schools they could not consider race in decisions about administrative support, housing and “all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”
In Arizona, university leadership has not publicly disclosed how or to what extent they’ve complied, shielding the public from understanding the impact of their decisions or how the changes might affect three of the state’s largest campus communities. It’s also unclear what changes, if any, have been reversed since a federal judge deemed the Trump administration’s guidance illegal last August.
Officials at Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona, which serve over 241,000 students and receive hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars annually, declined repeated requests for interviews and did not answer detailed questions from the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting over several months. Public records requests were either denied on claims of attorney-client or work-product privilege, deemed too burdensome to fulfill or closed citing a lack of responsive records.
AZCIR identified a number of changes through a review of university websites, course listings, past media coverage and communication with state officials. All three schools have been accused of burying resources for minority groups, and UA and NAU have also removed or renamed multiple webpages and references to diversity and inclusion—despite still claiming inclusivity as a core value. The largest known shift occurred at UA, which consolidated its cultural resource centers into one central hub.
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Higher education experts say the lack of transparency is likely tied to a “chilling effect” from the Trump administration’s broader assault on higher education, prompting attempts by officials to avoid further scrutiny.
Emelyn dela Peña, president and CEO of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, told AZCIR that transparency is crucial now “because when institutions feel like they can’t talk openly about how they support students, it becomes harder for the public to understand the role that these efforts have.”
DEI initiatives in higher education generally serve a range of groups beyond those more commonly considered vulnerable, including first-generation students and veterans, among others. Programming is often designed to emphasize things like belongingness, critical thinking and community engagement, according to the USC Race and Equity Center. The result, experts say, can be increased student retention and graduation rates.
Nolan Cabrera, an expert in racism and anti-racism in higher education and a professor at UA, said decisions made behind closed doors sends a negative signal to students and faculty.
“This isn’t your university anymore,” he said. “This isn’t a community.”
As those tied to universities and the public at large attempt to understand the impact of DEI changes to campus life, Arizona’s Republican lawmakers are advancing a ballot initiative that would pose the question of DEI’s place in schools to voters directly. The move would bypass Gov. Katie Hobbs’ veto power and amend the state constitution to restrict DEI initiatives further.
The potential of losing federal dollars—the single largest funding source for university research and development nationwide—prompted a number of schools to proactively comply with the guidance over the past year. Even as legal challenges to the February Dear Colleague letter and executive orders seeking similar restrictions on DEI made their way through the courts, some universities opted to publicly disclose their changes.
The University of Cincinnati, for example, issued a statement saying the institution had “little choice but to follow” the guidance and admitted to “removing references to DEI principles” and evaluating programming. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s leadership released a statement detailing changes to offerings for students after its university system suspended DEI course requirements. Similar statements were made by universities from Alaska to Colorado.
Megan Gilbertson, a spokesperson for the Arizona Board of Regents, which oversees Arizona’s public universities, declined an interview and did not say whether it advised schools on federal compliance. ABOR shifted 10 of its own policies last summer, removing references to “affirmative action,” and replacing “diversity” with “differentiation,” among other changes.
Presidents at NAU and ASU did not address the federal guidance in public statements, and campus community members said they had not received internal communication, either.
At UA, President Suresh Garimella began shifting diversity efforts shortly after Trump’s January 2025 executive order, which alleged higher education institutions have adopted “dangerous, demeaning and immoral” DEI practices and called for their end.
In a Feb. 17, 2025, email obtained by AZCIR from Garimella to Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen, who had called on the state’s public universities to eliminate DEI a week earlier, the university president said “we intend to fully comply with the order.”
The next day, Garimella announced the creation of a federal updates page that now states UA was “mandated to discontinue certain activities and programming,” but provides no details. He also said they would take “a proactive approach” to compliance, including creating an inventory of DEI-related activities.
AZCIR requested that inventory in September 2025, but was told the document was “protected under the attorney-client/work-product privilege.”
On Feb. 19, 2025, a spokesperson confirmed to the Arizona Daily Star that the school removed websites for its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Cultural and Resource Centers, but did not answer questions about what other changes were coming.
Vanessa Perry, a former professor at UA, said she only got more information after Petersen posted another letter from Garimella to social media updating him on actions the school had taken as of April 1, 2025.
The letter described a sweeping compliance effort—discontinued programming, internal “DEIA reviews,” instructions to college deans, changes to job postings—that the university has yet to detail publicly.
“It really told me that no matter what we could do as organizers, that Garimella would not be moved,” said Perry, who was also part of UA Resist, a collective against DEI changes on campus. “That he had that little valor in doing the right thing and standing up for us.”
AZCIR requested the information detailed in the letter, including communications sent to deans, the internal reviews and the action plans for change. The university withheld the records, again citing attorney-client or work-product privilege, and has not responded to repeated attempts to clarify the denial or provided further comment about changes made throughout its system.
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UA also announced last May it was consolidating six of its seven cultural resource centers, which served LGBTQ+ students, disabled and gender-based groups, along with several racial and ethnic minorities. The Native American student center was moved into the Office of Native American Initiatives.
UA officials did not say at the time whether the decision was tied to the federal directives and did not answer AZCIR’s questions about the consolidation. UA spokesperson Mitch Zak shared two messages sent to campus about the consolidation, one of which clarified that “activities, physical spaces, and embedded counselors” would also make the transfer, and student workers would remain in place “to ensure continuity of support.”
Zak said in the emailed statement that the school is focused on ensuring all students can access the same opportunities and resources for success, does not “engage in preferential treatment in employment or programming” and is compliant with federal and state nondiscrimination requirements.
“These (centers) were not just benevolently bequeathed from the institution. They were years of struggle, community activism, fundraising to create these spaces … that can just be eliminated by the whim of a president who has no idea what he’s doing,” Cabrera, the current UA professor, said.
“That is devastating to the community, because we’ve been struggling for these minor amounts of inclusivity.”
NAU’s spokesperson Kim Ott told AZCIR she was “not able to find anyone” who could speak to campus changes despite repeated outreach. She responded only that the school is focused on “ensuring that all students have the support and resources they need.”
The university denied AZCIR’s public records request for documentation of changes to DEI programs, positions or offerings, calling it “unduly burdensome” with more than 300,000 potentially responsive records.
An AZCIR review of NAU course plans showed that, as of last school year, some were described as meeting a “diversity” requirement. Plans for the current year show some of the same requirements now described as “inclusive perspectives.”
Websites for NAU’s “diversity strategic plan,” which was announced in 2020 and sought to make the school a “true diversity university,” as well as its Center For University Access And Inclusion, are no longer active. Some program specific pages, such as the Institute for Public and Professional Ethics in Leadership and the clinical psychology department, however, still note a commitment to diversity.
Sarina Cutuli, a third-year student at NAU and member of the Arizona Students’ Association, said that while the changes are subtle, they perpetuate fear among students and “it feels like this slow chipping away until there’s nothing left.”
Cutuli said she believes administrators are acting in good faith, but that not communicating changes to the campus community is eroding trust.
“Saying nothing feels like [leadership saying] ‘I don’t care, I come first. I’m protecting myself first. I’m protecting my funding first. Your security as a student does not matter as much as money does,’” Cutuli said.
Have you been impacted by changes to DEI offerings at ASU, NAU, UA or another institution in Arizona? If so, we want to hear from you.
The largest known change on NAU’s campus was the sunsetting of five diversity commissions covering Indigenous communities, disability, ethnic diversity, women and LGBTQIA issues, some dating back to at least 2006. The commissions previously hosted speakers and discussions for students, faculty and staff, and gave awards for diversity work.
According to minutes from a November 2025 faculty senate meeting, University President José Luis Cruz Rivera said the commissions were “not sustainable” in their current form but that he wanted to reorganize them. Documents indicate the university sought to create an “Inclusive Excellence Advisory Board,” but officials did not say how it has progressed or how offerings have changed.
ASU officials also declined to make anyone available for an interview and claimed “no responsive records” to an AZCIR records request from February seeking documentation for changes made over the past year. Spokesperson Nikki Ripley instead emailed a statement saying ASU fully complies with federal and state laws, noting that the school’s charter “commits to an inclusive approach welcoming every learner who is qualified.”
Ripley also pointed to a March 2025 interview in which President Michael Crow said the university never had “ethnic diversity goals” to begin with.
“Other people built that three word phrase, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion,’ and then built a rhetoric around that, and that’s what’s being attacked. We were past that,” Crow said at the time.
Hypatia Meraviglia, an ASU graduate student and member of United Campus Workers of Arizona, which represents staff at the three universities, said Crow’s response was left wanting.
“We’re stuck in a situation where the workers at ASU, the students and the faculty and the staff are getting the worst end of the deal, which is, there are no university resources, or very few university resources for minoritized workers of any kind. And the resources we have are pulled,” Meraviglia said.
ASU previously said it had not removed student support, though there were allegations last spring that online resources for LGBTQIA students were removed from public-facing websites. The university also renamed graduation events for minority students in May and was one of 31 schools spotlighted by the Education Department for ending participation with the PhD Project, an organization that supports underrepresented doctoral students and was being investigated by the administration for discriminating based on race.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon celebrated the program closures, saying it was “the Trump effect in action.” Ripley told AZCIR the university had already decided to end its partnership with the PhD Project before the federal government began investigating.
When the Education Department dropped its appeal in January of a federal ruling that found its guidance was largely illegal, some saw it as a “major victory” for diversity efforts in public education.
Shortly after, however, the Trump administration introduced a new plan requiring federal funding recipients, including universities, to certify that they do not have diversity programs before they’re eligible for federal dollars.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes was one of 23 attorneys general who signed a letter urging the federal government to abandon its proposal, noting it was unlawful, would “undoubtedly” create confusion and may “chill legitimate activities of funding recipients who fear punitive actions.”
Trump issued another executive order on March 26 saying federal contractors must agree to not engage in “racially discriminatory DEI activities,” and that their contracts may be terminated if compliance documentation isn’t provided.
In Arizona, Republican lawmakers are again trying to ban DEI from schools. Last year, Hobbs vetoed Senate Bill 1694, which would have cut public funds from universities offering DEI courses.
Speaker of the House Steve Montenegro, R-Goodyear, introduced House Concurrent Resolution 2044 this year, which would send the issue directly to voters—bypassing the governor’s veto. The measure would ask Arizonans to determine whether the state’s Constitution should prohibit public entities from “preferential treatment” based on race or ethnicity, and would bar public funding for diversity offices or training. As of April 8, the resolution passed the House and was progressing through the Senate.
At its most recent regular meeting in February, ABOR’s legislative update did not include the potential ballot measure, and it wasn’t discussed by members. When asked why it wasn’t introduced, Gilbertson said the board doesn’t take an official stance on every bill, but is working with the governor’s office and lawmakers on related legislation.
She did not specify how.
