Dear Elizabeth Davis, it is Time to Cut Furman’s DEI Programs

Changes coming from Washington have made getting rid of DEI at Furman more urgent than ever.

President Trump returned to the White House on January 20, and during his first month in office, his administration has wasted no time shaking up the landscape for colleges and universities.

On January 21, the President signed an executive order “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.” The order specifically requires federal agencies to inform grantees to cease all DEI work, aims to identify nine institutions with $1 billion-plus endowments for special attention, and calls on the Justice and Education departments to prepare guidance for schools to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University.

To follow that up, on January 27, President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget suspended most federal grants and loans until the administration could review programs and determine the “best uses of the funding.” A federal judge temporarily blocked the order the following day. Still, the message coming from Washington is clear: This administration will aggressively cut federal spending for progressive priorities, especially DEI programs.

As the Furman Free Speech Alliance (FFSA) has exposed over the past year, DEI has seeped into every aspect of life at Furman. Now, these changes could affect millions of dollars in DEI grants that Furman has won from the federal government. Here are just a few examples:

• Furman, alongside Clemson and several Upstate non-profits, received a $1.5 million “Equity in Public Health” grant from the Department of Health and Human Services to target disparities in “Black and Latinx communities.”

• Furman received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation for 2020-25 to increase diversity in STEM fields.

• Furman received another $465,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in 2024 to host faculty and students from “Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions or women’s colleges.

Cutting funds for grant programs like these could pose a serious challenge. But it's not the only change coming from Washington. Schools like Furman—which have been unwilling to abandon DEI and other racially discriminatory policies that impede free speech and hinder academic excellence—could also see the Trump administration target their endowments.

According to the New York Times, endowments have not historically been subject to taxation. But in 2017, Republicans imposed a 1.4% excise tax on the investment “income of private colleges and universities with at least 500 students and assets of $100,000 or more per full-time student.”

Furman has an endowment of $812 million and about 2,500 students. That comes out to $324,800 in assets per full-time student, meaning a tax like this could apply to Furman.

And now, Republicans—who control the White House and both chambers of Congress—are floating figures as high as a 21% tax on endowments' investment income.

Some schools are responding to these changes by hiring Republican lobbying firms. Other schools are tweaking their policies to avoid being targeted by this administration. What is Furman doing?

We don’t know. The administration has not explained how it intends to adapt to any of these changes. In fact, as FFSA recently reported, Furman’s brand new strategic plan for the next five years reaffirms the university’s commitment to “diversity and inclusion as specified in previous strategic plans.”

This is not a sufficient response for such a dynamic and important issue.

I know many alumni who are seriously concerned about how Furman intends to respond to these changes. Many of them have donated generously to our alma mater for decades, and they don’t want their gifts squandered for the sake of DEI programs that they don’t support. Now is the time for President Davis to end these programs once and for all, but at the very least, she owes alumni an explanation of how Furman intends to handle the new policy changes coming from Washington.

Evan Myers
Washington, D.C.