This year, a certain silence has descended upon the offices of deans at prestigious professional schools. You’ll notice it if you stroll through the marble hallways of any of the top ten law schools in the early spring. The mission statements are still displayed on the walls. Photographs of students from clearly diverse backgrounds are still skillfully arranged in the brochures. However, the vocabulary has become thinner. Words like “equity,” “inclusion,” and “belonging” that were previously bold on landing pages have been subtly changed, switched, or hidden three clicks deep. These changes are not announced. They simply occur.
Not all of the pressure came at once. It appeared in fragments, each of which was sufficiently technical to appear like standard bureaucracy until you took a step back and recognized its overall structure. Due to two open positions on the five-member panel, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission withdrew its 2024 workplace harassment guidelines on January 22. Two commissioners, Chair Andrea R. Lucas and Brittany Panuccio, were sufficient to overturn the guidelines. The majority of Americans might not have noticed. General counsels noticed right away within elite schools.
Then, on February 6, a Maryland district court’s injunction against two of the administration’s DEI-related executive orders was overturned by the Fourth Circuit. The “Termination Provision,” “Certification Provision,” and “Enforcement Threat Provision” are examples of dry, capitalized language that obscures the fact that these orders grant the federal government authority to enforce. Contractors were now required to certify compliance. All of a sudden, agencies were told to close DEI offices. Administrators believe that federal grant recipients are not the sole target of the legal architecture being developed. The organizations that rely on them are the target.
The most impactful was the “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education dated February 14, 2025. It stated that Title VI may be violated by any consideration of race in hiring, financial aid, admissions, or “all other aspects” of campus life. The 2023 SFFA v. Harvard ruling by the Supreme Court served as the foundation for the letter, which went far beyond admissions to include hiring, programming, and classroom speech. About $7 billion in federal education grants were at stake, and by April, all state commissioners were being asked to certify compliance. D.C., Puerto Rico, and twenty-five states declined to sign.
Soon after, in unusually direct rulings, three federal judges temporarily blocked the directives. According to Judge Dabney Friedrich, the policy is “unconstitutionally vague.” In New Hampshire, Judge Landya McCafferty referred to it as “textbook viewpoint discrimination.” Judge Stephanie Gallagher of Maryland called it “a sea change in how the Department of Education regulates educational practices and classroom conduct,” and in her final decision in August, she also found First Amendment violations, stating that millions of educators had a legitimate fear that they would be punished for speaking out.
More is explained by that final sentence, “reasonable fear,” than by any decision. The legal issues are carefully noted and then largely ignored in prestigious professional schools. The chilling effect is what persists. Affinity dinners are discreetly canceled. In a single semester, a pipeline program for first-generation applicants is renamed twice. A pro bono diversity fellowship becomes just that—a fellowship—and loses its designation. According to David Glasgow of NYU Law, the majority of diversity initiatives are entirely lawful; they only cross the line when they distribute advantages or disadvantages based on race. However, legality is a different matter. Another is risk tolerance.
It’s difficult to ignore how the term “merit” has resurfaced, weaponized, and repurposed. Even though the law ostensibly protects them, elite professional schools cannot ignore the pattern created by the EEOC’s February 26 letter to Fortune 500 employers, the DOJ’s signals regarding the enforcement of the False Claims Act, and the lawsuit against a New Hampshire beverage distributor over a women’s networking trip. It’s still unclear what this means for the upcoming class and subsequent ones. Eventually, the brochures will catch up. They do it every time.
