Call It What Is Is — Universities Are Quietly Dismantling Black Student Life [Op-Ed]

If you want to piss off conservatives, you don’t accuse them of racism outright. You show how they’ve laundered power through policy language so cleanly and deviously, they can look you right in the face and say, “We didn’t do anything racist.”

This is what just happened at the University of Missouri, where administrators announced that five major multicultural student organizations—including the Legion of Black Collegians, the Association of Latin American Students, and the Queer Liberation Front—will lose their direct university funding starting in July 2026. 

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Instead, those groups will be reclassified as standard “Recognized Student Organizations” and forced to compete with more than 600 other campus clubs for limited funds in a shared pool. Their existing funding, often tens of thousands of dollars annually, will disappear and be replaced by capped, competitive allocations that student leaders say will make it nearly impossible to sustain their programming or operations. 

University officials say the move is necessary to comply with federal guidance tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, specifically a memo from the U.S. Department of Justice. The Trump administration has been explicitly signaling that schools risk losing federal money if they maintain DEI programs. And not just signaling, but building enforcement mechanisms around it. There are proposals requiring universities to certify that they are not engaging in what the government defines as “DEI practices” in order to receive federal funds. But that DOJ memo is not law. It’s nonbinding, interpretive, and ultimately optional guidance. 

So what does that actually mean in practice?

It means these universities are choosing to interpret that guidance in the most extreme way possible. They are choosing to preemptively dismantle programs, withdraw funding, restructure systems, and redraw the boundaries of who and what gets institutional support. And then they are presenting those choices as inevitable, as if their hands were tied, as if they had no discretion, and as if this outcome was forced.

It wasn’t.

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