Renaming Is Not Resourcing

Co-authors: 

• Mya Haynes, Ph.D. Student, USC Rossier
• Shawntae Mitchum, Ph.D Student, USC Dornsife
• Alexia Oduro, Ph.D Student, USC Rossier
• Glenda Palacios Quejada, Ph.D Student, USC Rossier
• Kendrick Davis, Ph.D, Research Faculty, USC Rossier

Across the country, higher education leaders are confronting a policy environment that is reshaping how colleges and universities organize student support, administrative oversight, and campus opportunity. Although public debate often frames diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as a conflict over language, offices, or ideology, the more consequential issue is structural. As anti-DEI policy expands, the central question is no longer simply whether institutions retain the term “DEI.” It is whether they preserve the support systems that help students navigate college, remain enrolled, and succeed. 

Recent developments have intensified this landscape. In February 2026, a federal appeals court allowed key anti-DEI executive orders to remain in effect while litigation continues, extending federal pressure on colleges and universities that rely on public funding. In Texas, the Higher Education Coordinating Board launched a new ombudsman portal in January 2026 to accept statutory complaints related to Senate Bills 17 and 37, adding a more formal oversight mechanism to a state policy environment already shaped by anti-DEI restrictions. At the same time, lawmakers in Kansas and Iowa advanced new proposals that would push anti-DEI policymaking further into curriculum, funding, and classroom oversight 

Taken together, these developments suggest that anti-DEI policy has entered a new phase. Policy restrictions on campus offices and programming, which the American Association of University Professors has described as part of a broader pattern of political interference in higher education, are increasingly becoming a governance project that shapes what institutions can fund, how they organize services, and which forms of student support remain visible and coordinated.

What This Moment Reveals

A recent USC Critical Policy Collective report, DEI Under Fire: Policy, Politics, and the Future of Campus Diversity, helps clarify why this shift matters. Authored by the same research team as this blog, the report focuses on six states with high levels of anti-DEI activity—Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas—and examines how these policies reshape the institutional architecture through which students experience support, belonging, and opportunity.

How Institutions Are Responding

The analysis draws on a DEI Ban Tracker from Inside Higher Education to identify a recurring pattern of institutional restructuring. Some colleges and universities have closed DEI offices, centers, or programs outright. Others have renamed divisions, reassigned staff, or shifted responsibilities into broader units such as student affairs, compliance, human resources, or general student success. In some cases, institutions have removed DEI language from websites, made trainings optional, ended targeted programming, or restructured scholarships and initiatives once designed to support Black, Latine, Indigenous, and other historically marginalized students.

That pattern can look less disruptive on paper than it feels in practice, and the state examples in DEI Under Fire make this concrete. In Indiana, institutions closed DEI offices and redistributed responsibilities to broader administrative structures. In Iowa, some campuses eliminated offices, laid off staff, renamed divisions, and redirected resources into broader student-success frameworks. In Texas, institutions closed multicultural and LGBTQ+ centers, eliminated DEI divisions, cut programs, rebranded some services, and shifted support into more generalized structures. The details vary, but the pattern is consistent: campuses are not only scaling back language; they are reorganizing the institutional landscape through which support is delivered. A university may claim that support still exists, but organizational restructuring can weaken the authority, visibility, staffing, and coordination that once made that support accessible. Renaming may preserve a function in some limited sense, but it does not necessarily preserve capacity or institutional commitment.

Why Student Support Is the Real Measure

These changes matter most when viewed through the lens of student experience. Higher education policy often emphasizes access—who gets admitted, who enrolls, and who appears in institutional diversity metrics. But access alone does not ensure success. Research on equity gaps in higher education has long shown that student outcomes are shaped not simply by individual effort, but by the institutional conditions, practices, and structures through which support is organized. This is why student support becomes such an important measure of institutional change: students persist when they can navigate complexity, find guidance, build trust, and remain connected through challenge.

The consequences of anti-DEI policy should therefore be examined not only in relation to campus politics, but also in relation to student experience, persistence, and completion. These shifts raise questions about whether student-facing supports remain coordinated, accessible, and adequately resourced. If mentorship networks weaken, culturally affirming spaces disappear, or reporting channels lose credibility, campuses may become harder for students to navigate. The same may be true when support is absorbed into generic structures with less institutional clarity and coordination.

This is especially important for Black, Latine, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, first-generation, low-income, and other historically marginalized students, for whom changes to targeted outreach, culturally relevant support, and spaces that signal recognition, safety, and care may alter the conditions that make persistence possible. Recent work on belonging in higher education emphasizes that students’ connection to campus is shaped by institutional policies, relationships, and environments rather than by individual adjustment alone, while research on culturally engaging campus environments shows that culturally responsive institutional contexts are connected to students’ sense of connection and broader campus experience.

Retention, then, offers a concrete way to understand what is otherwise easy to dismiss as administrative change. Students experience institutional restructuring through whether they know where to go for help, whether they trust the people and offices around them, whether they feel connected to the campus, and whether they remain long enough to graduate.

How Anti-DEI Policy Becomes Institutional Practice

The 2026 policy landscape also suggests that higher education is moving from a period of legislative retrenchment into a more formalized phase of enforcement and oversight. Texas is an especially important example. In January 2026, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board announced the launch of its ombudsman website, which includes a portal for statutory complaints related to Senate Bills 17 and 37. The same announcement explains that SB 17 prohibits DEI offices, programs, and mandatory DEI training at public colleges and universities, while SB 37 increases oversight and accountability across Texas higher education.

This development matters because it extends the reach of anti-DEI policy beyond formal prohibition alone. It adds a monitoring and reporting structure that can intensify preemptive compliance and encourage more risk-averse institutional behavior. In that sense, Texas illustrates the broader trajectory of this moment: anti-DEI policy is not only narrowing what campuses are encouraged to build; it is also shaping how institutions manage compliance, how they interpret risk, and how aggressively they pull back from targeted forms of support.

Looking Ahead

Taken together, these developments suggest that anti-DEI policy in higher education cannot be understood only as a debate over terminology, branding, or campus offices. The patterns described above raise a set of empirical, legal, and political questions: what institutional capacities are being preserved, reduced, or relocated, and how are students experiencing those changes?

Measure Capacity, Not Just Continuity: Future analysis should look beyond whether a service formally remains in place. A program or function may continue under a new name or administrative unit, but the central question is whether students can still access it through clear, coordinated, and well-resourced pathways.

Track Student Experience and Outcomes: Because the consequences of restructuring are likely to appear through students’ day-to-day interactions with institutions, future research should examine changes in help-seeking behavior, campus climate, sense of connection, retention, persistence, and completion. This analysis should be disaggregated across student groups, particularly for Black, Latine, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, first-generation, low-income, and other historically marginalized students. The goal is not to assume a uniform effect across campuses, but to understand whether changes in support infrastructure are associated with different student experiences and outcomes.

Study Implementation Across Policy Contexts: The 2026 policy landscape also raises questions about how institutions respond when anti-DEI restrictions are paired with complaint portals, reporting systems, funding consequences, curriculum oversight, or expanded state authority. Texas’s ombudsman portal, for example, illustrates how anti-DEI policy can move beyond prohibition into monitoring and enforcement. At the same time, institutions are not responding in a single uniform way: some have closed offices or eliminated programs, while others have renamed units, shifted responsibilities, or folded equity-related work into broader student-success, compliance, or administrative structures. Comparing these responses across states and institutions can help clarify when restructuring reflects narrow legal compliance, broader risk avoidance, or a substantive change in student-support capacity.

The broader implication is that anti-DEI policy is not only changing how higher education talks about equity; it is changing how institutions organize support, manage risk, and define the boundaries of permissible equity-related work. The evidence reviewed here suggests that future research and policy analysis should focus less on whether institutions retain particular labels and more on how restructuring affects capacity, access, coordination, and student experience. In this sense, the future of student success in higher education may depend not only on formal access to college, but on whether institutions maintain the organizational conditions that help students navigate campus, access support, and complete their degrees.

About the USC Critical Policy Collective

The Critical Policy Collective (CPC) is an immersive, multi-school training and research endeavor based at USC, designed as a precursor to the future Critical Policy Institute. Led by faculty and students from the Rossier School of Education and the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, CPC envisions evolving into a nationally recognized hub for justice-oriented policy scholarship and student-driven impact across the P–20 educational landscape.