Federal Grants, Racialized Eligibility, and Ideological Control: The New (E)quality Politics of Higher Education

Never before has the role of the federal government in underwriting U.S. higher education been more visible than in the early months of the second Trump Administration. The Administration’s aggressive anti-“DEI” and anti-science attacks have exposed the reliance within higher education, especially among research institutions, on federal grantmaking infrastructure. We find that the Administration’s anti-DEI policy moves mark a decisive shift in the operation of (e)quality politics: away from stratifying advantage among elite institutions and toward a systematic project of political purification in higher education, driven by white racial resentment. By juxtaposing these racialized attacks with successful collective resistance to proposed federal research funding caps, we expose the asymmetry in how IHEs defend science but often abandon equity. Finally, we show that the Administration’s deliberately vague and coercive use of (e)quality politics fragments institutional solidarity and installs a racialized compliance regime. Bringing this theoretical model into conversation with present-day empirics allows us to not only parse the underlying, racialized ideology of these political moves but to surface political and practical insights for organized resistance.