Early this month, the University of North Carolina system told its component institutions that their general education requirements could no longer mandate that students take courses “related to diversity, equity and inclusion.” System officials further said majors couldn’t require DEI-related courses without university chancellors providing “tailored waivers” granting exceptions.

The North Carolina Conference of the American Association of University Professors labeled this an “overt attempt at thought control” and “educational malpractice.” The curricular ban across the roughly 250,000-student UNC system—including the flagship, UNC Chapel Hill; North Carolina State University; and 14 other institutions—could be interpreted as the system simply amping up its anti-DEI stance after repealing its DEI policy last year. But system officials said it was the result of Donald Trump retaking office.

UNC system general counsel Andrew Tripp explicitly told chancellors in a letter that the change was intended to comply with the president’s Jan. 21 executive order that mandated an end to “illegal DEI” and called for restoring “merit-based opportunity.” Tripp said noncompliance threatened the university’s roughly $1.4 billion in annual federal research funding. The White House Office of Management and Budget had already attempted to pause federal funding nationwide, saying in a since-rescinded memo that it wanted to stop bankrolling DEI and other activities that “may be implicated by the executive orders.”

Yet, despite ordering this far-reaching response to Trump’s directives, Tripp also told the UNC system chancellors that he didn’t know what the order really required. Trump’s order didn’t define DEI; at one point it even called for excising from federal grant procedures “DEI and DEIA principles, under whatever name they may appear.” Nor did Tripp’s memo explain to university leaders what DEI means, much less what a course credit “related to” DEI encompasses.

The string of vague and sometimes seemingly contradictory executive actions has left leaders of federally funded colleges and universities and their employees to wonder: Should they wait for clarification—legal or otherwise—before upending their DEI policies and programs? Or respond like the UNC system and start ditching things that might be perceived as DEI activities?

Some prestigious institutions are already scrubbing words from websites, and faculty are editing their online bios to remove their scholarship foci.

Yet Trump hasn’t fully renounced diversity himself. Ten days after he signed the anti-DEI executive order, he signed another one recognizing Black History Month. And a few days after that, Trump’s Justice Department announced “a multi-agency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism,” whose “first priority will be to root out antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.”

DEI critics and supporters have debated whether fighting harassment counts as DEI, and some Jews and Israel supporters have accused DEI of excluding Zionist perspectives. But influential anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo himself criticized the new task force, calling it a bad implementation of a “noble” cause.

“How is it reasonable to support a Task Force on Antisemitism while opposing an Ibram Kendi-style Task Force on Anti-Black Racism (i.e., DEI)?” Rufo wrote on X. “And by the same principle, how is it reasonable to support a Task Force on Antisemitism without also supporting a Task Force of Anti-White Racism and a Task Force on Anti-Asian Racism, both of which are widespread on campuses? How is it consistent for the administration to abolish DEI, then establish a special task force for one, rather than all, of these groups?”

The White House didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment for this article.

“My sense is that the vagueness is deliberate,” said Jay M. Smith, president of the North Carolina AAUP, of the Trump administration’s orders. “They would like to imagine that universities will rush to block any programs that smack of DEI values in order to secure their funding.”

Without a definition of DEI from the Trump administration, “public institutions as well as private institutions are left to guess,” said Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. She said that’s created “confusion, it’s led to chaos, it’s led to fear and apprehension.”

And it’s contributed to litigation. The administration’s failure to provide a DEI definition appears to be stymieing it in court.

Last week, a U.S. district court judge in Maryland blocked parts of two of Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders, including the one the UNC system cited. Judge Adam B. Abelson wrote that the orders are unconstitutional because they’re overly vague and abridge free speech.

They don’t “define any of the operative terms … let alone identify the types of programs or policies the administration considers ‘illegal,’” Abelson wrote. “Is ‘equity’ limited to one part of the acronym ‘DEI’ or ‘DEIA’? Is it meant as an umbrella term or synonym for some or all of the concepts encompassed by those acronyms?” Abelson said the word equity’s meaning “is unclear to a degree that risks arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement” impacting “billions of dollars in government funding.”

He wrote that the plaintiffs in the case—including the AAUP, NADOHE and others—showed that they and their members can’t tell which DEI activities cross the line. He said the executive orders make them “highly likely to chill their own speech—to self-censor, and reasonably so.” He also said the administration’s lawyers didn’t clear up the issue.

“When the court asked the government during the hearing a series of questions regarding hypothetical implementation of DEI by federal contractors and grantees, the government refused to even attempt to clarify what the Certification Provision means, or whether these hypothetical scenarios are legal,” Abelson wrote. He concluded that “even the government does not know what constitutes DEI-related speech that violates federal anti-discrimination laws.”

The case continues. Like the government’s lawyers, education secretary nominee Linda McMahon refused during her confirmation hearing this month to identify which programs or classes might violate the executive orders.

Separate from the orders, on Feb. 14, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights released a Dear Colleague letter that also targeted DEI and gave colleges and universities until Friday to comply. The letter helped clarify some of what the administration was targeting: all differential treatment based on race in higher education, from decisions on financial aid and hiring to “segregation by race at graduation ceremonies and in dormitories.” (It didn’t mention LGBTQ+ issues—another bugbear for conservatives—at all.)

“Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or [sic] segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” the letter said, adding that “race-based decision-making, no matter the form, remains impermissible.”

But the letter raised issues similar to the executive orders. The American Federation of Teachers and the American Sociological Association filed a lawsuit Tuesday taking issue with, among other things, the letter’s directive to “cease all efforts to circumvent prohibitions on the use of race by relying on proxies or other indirect means.” The new litigation says the Dear Colleague letter doesn’t define DEI and calls the letter’s directives so vague they could chill speech.

The suit says it’s unclear whether the Office for Civil Rights would consider it a violation to lead “a class discussion on the history of slavery in America,” for example, or to maintain “departments of African American Studies, Arab American Studies, Asian American Studies or Jewish Studies.” It also questions whether colleges would be allowed to host celebrations “for Black History Month, Holi, Eid or Lunar New Year” or sponsor tutoring “designed to help low-income students excel, if a disproportionate number of such students are people of color,” or even counsel students who are upset at being called racial slurs.

Part of the problem may be that “DEI” has long been a broad, and nebulous, term.

Even before Trump retook the White House, Republicans and Democrats were fighting in statehouses over DEI, as the term has become increasingly politicized, with conservatives seeking to restrict it. But the purpose of DEI has long depended on whom you ask.

Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars and former provost of the King’s College, published a book in 2003 called Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, which he followed up in 2019 with Diversity Rules. Wood said all three words that make up DEI “are simply ways of packaging the idea that group identification should trump merit.”

He said DEI is largely about racial preferences, and “the notion is that if you want to distribute social goods according to race, then you have to reinforce racial identifications at every possible turn—which is why some colleges and universities now allow racially segregated dorms.”

Wood called racial preferences “unfair to the people who receive them, as well as to those who find themselves blockaded from advancement in college admissions or in their professional careers because of them, but they are also destructive of the ideals of America as a place where people advance on the basis of merit, talent, proven ability.” He said, “We should expect diversity to be something that happens naturally, rather than something that is enforced by a regime of ‘diverse-ocrats’ whose job it is to override fair standards of admission and promotion and hiring in favor of standards that are based on group preferences.”

Granberry Russell of NADOHE said the idea that DEI is all about race, gender or LGBTQ+ status is a “false narrative that has been, unfortunately, somewhat successful in demonizing diversity, equity and inclusion.”

“We have as an organization embedded in our standards of professional practice an expectation that individuals coming into this work understand, when we’re talking about ‘inclusive’ and ‘inclusive excellence,’ it applies to the broad range of ways in which people’s lived experiences impact their success in higher education,” Granberry Russell said. “And that can include income. It can include whether you grew up in a rural or an urban environment and everything in between.”

Asked if he could define DEI, Smith, the North Carolina AAUP president and a tenured UNC Chapel Hill history professor, chuckled and said, “Not really.” Nowadays, he said, “the term is thrown around in all sorts of ways.”

“When that label gets applied to a course, one has to assume that what it means for the person using it is that they object to the centering of experiences and perspectives that are nonwhite,” Smith said.

“I would be interested to hear people in the Trump administration or Republican legislatures across the country offer another definition of DEI that doesn’t sound racist,” Smith said. “I would love to hear them try it. I mean, I think it would be awfully hard.”