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. In this paper, we use the (e)quality politics framework to analyze the Trump Administration’s attack on federal grantmaking infrastructure as well as the response and/or resistance from targeted institutions and concerned advocates. 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.