So far, President Trump’s actions on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” have seen federal DEI offices shuttered and DEI officials placed on mandatory leave. But that isn’t the end of the story. Greater enforcement of civil rights law is coming, and American colleges and universities should be worried.

In President Trump’s first anti-DEI Executive Order, he sought to eliminate all DEI (both legal and illegal) across the federal government—a broad stroke that extends to all agencies’ “‘equity-related’ grants or contracts.”

This directive includes many grants that directly or indirectly reach colleges—and it has already had some effect.

According to Arizona State University’s provost, several agencies have told grantees to “cease and desist all DEIA activities required of their contracts or grants.” Already, Rutgers University has canceled an equity-related conference supported by Jobs for the Future, a national nonprofit using funds from the Department of Labor.

Trump’s second anti-DEI order—designed to uproot and destroy illegal treatment throughout the country—will hit colleges even harder.

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This order notes that institutions of higher education are among those that “have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences,” and instructs federal officials to prepare investigative, legal, and regulatory action against universities that engage in such illegal activities.

Far too many American colleges and universities make violating civil rights laws part of their daily routine.

More than simply operating DEI offices (which themselves often blatantly violate civil rights law), many colleges support discriminatory scholarship programs that violate civil rights laws so clearly that even the Biden administration regularly found them illegal.

These scholarships boldly discriminate based on race or sex by explicitly limiting themselves to, for example, members of “historically underrepresented U.S. racialized minority group[s]” (as in one scholarship offered by the American Anthropological Association and advertised by the University of Chicago).

More examples include a scholarship limited to “Asian/Pacific Islander lesbian, bisexual, or queer women or transgender individuals” (advertised by the University of Rochester), or the Brown and Caldwell Minority Scholarship, which is limited to those who identify as members of minority groups (advertised by the University of Michigan, Yale University, and many others). 

Closer to home, University of California, Berkeley’s Cal Alumni Association, a separate nonprofit organization, offers a scholarship only available to those who “identify as Black/African American/African.” Berkeley proudly includes this scholarship on its own website.

These all are examples of external scholarships, where off-campus organizations (those offering the scholarships) are the ones discriminating and violating civil rights laws. But when a federally-funded college advertises such opportunities to its students, it too is violating civil rights and must be held accountable.

Heritage Foundation interns have found hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of such violations.

But external scholarships aren’t the only issue. In other instances, universities act on the behest of the government to execute federal programs that discriminate because Congress requires it.

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As one example, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) operates a Maximizing Access to Research Careers (MARC) program that is funded by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and which only funds students who are from “historically underrepresented racial or ethnic groups,” have disabilities, or are from “low-income background[s].”

This program operates under the authority of the HHS’s National Research Service Award (NRSA) program—a program Congress specifically instructed the HHS to run “in a manner that will result in the recruitment of women, and individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds (including racial and ethnic minorities), into fields of biomedical or behavioral research.”

Needless to say, this blatantly violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

The second anti-DEI Executive order instructs federal officials to issue guidance on how institutions of higher education must comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard.

In that decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” That means discriminatory DEI offices and scholarships must go.

The clock on DEI is ticking. Within 120 days, the guidance—and recommendations for enforcement—will be released.

Under current law, violating civil rights can mean the end of all federal funding. We can expect the Trump administration to use this tool vigorously to incentivize change throughout the education sector. Unless they start cleaning house immediately, colleges have a lot to worry about.