{UAH} UNIVERSITIES ARE SLOWLY BEGINNING TO WAKE UP

MIT scraps DEI office, ends programs amid Trump’s fight with Harvard

By Josh Christenson

Published May 28, 2025

 Updated May 28, 2025, 2:19 p.m. ET

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) shut down its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) office last week, The Post can exclusively reveal.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth officially closed the Community and Equity Office after earlier prohibiting the use of diversity statements in faculty hiring or student admissions, a university official confirmed.

A senior administrative position at the office will also be eliminated as part of a return to a merit-based focus kicked off by Kornbluth in January 2024.

The university earlier prohibited diversity statements in hiring.Getty Images

That process involved an assessment of the DEI office’s relative success as determined by senior faculty and staff members.

“MIT is in the talent business. Our success depends on attracting exceptionally talented people of every background, from across the country and around the world, and making sure everyone at MIT feels welcome and supported, so they can do their best work and thrive,” Kornbluth said in a statement shared by an MIT rep.

In March, the Trump administration expanded a civil rights probe into the Cambridge, Mass. school over alleged racial discrimination.

That deepened a Title VI investigation of reported antisemitic harassment and sex discrimination on campus, according to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

“Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin,” McMahon said in a statement putting MIT and 44 other universities on notice. “We will not yield on this commitment.”

President Trump has made dismantling DEI programs a top focus of his administration.REUTERS

Kornbluth’s move also comes amid President Trump’s ongoing battle with nearby Harvard University, which has refused to eliminate DEI programs and since lost more than $3 billion in federal funding.

Trump earlier this year signed executive orders ending federal support for DEI programs and his administration has made the issue a red line in the legal fight with Harvard over funding cuts.

MIT has also joined court challenges to the Trump administration’s reductions to National Institute of Health (NIH) and Department of Energy grants for medical and scientific research.

Last week, the university revealed the grant cuts had cost MIT up to $35 million and forced it to cut the number of available places for graduate students in its 2025-26 intake by roughly 100 — an 8% reduction from the 2024-25 academic year.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth officially closed the DEI office.Getty Images

Kornbluth was one of three college presidents grilled by Congress more than a year ago for allowing antisemitic harassment and intimidation to take root at their institutions after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel.

She told members of the House Education Committee in December 2023 that while students “have been pained by chants and recent demonstrations,” MIT has a responsibility to “ensure that we protect speech and viewpoint diversity for everyone.”

“Meeting those goals is challenging and the results can be terribly uncomfortable, but it is essential to how we operate in the United States,” MIT’s president said. “Those who want us to shut down protest language are in effect, arguing for a speech code, but in practice, speech codes do not work.”

The other two presidents at the hearing — the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay — stepped down in the months following their explosive exchange with New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who asked them whether they would condemn calls for the “genocide” of Jews on campus.

“It depends on the context,” Gay had said. Weeks later, she resigned amid the fallout over a plagiarism scandal.

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