By Dipa Desai
Introduction: As the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging specialist at the DITI, I am interested in identifying ways to expand the DITI’s learning and resources on digital equity and accessibility. This year, a significant amount of my work has focused on navigating around barriers to digital inclusion, for multiple reasons.
For one, the federal government has been taken over by what is ostensibly a techno-authoritarian, white nationalist regime backed by wealthy, tech and fossil fuel company executives (González & Buxton, 2025, Giroux, 2026, Klein, 2025, Lewis, 2025). A pillar of the regime’s strategy to weaken democracy has been to attack DEI programs and resources at the federal and state levels, and reframe the concept of DEI to now mean something that is anti-American (ACLU, 2025, Movement Advancement Project, 2024, Ng et al., 2025, US Dept. of Education, 2025).
The political turnover has cascading impacts on universities and students, undermining research funding, student activism, athletic programs, curricula standards, even the perceived freedom of speech in classrooms. These impacts are a continuation of the past, targeted attacks on universities led by far-right politicians. The Republican-majority Supreme Court removed affirmative action from college admissions in 2023, leading to a drop in enrollment for Black students across universities in Massachusetts, including at Northeastern (Curwin, 2024). Educational institutions have also been the focus of harmful legislation attacking trans and LGBTQIA+ communities, with a noticeable increase in these proposed policies in 2023. These policies have sought to remove protections for queer students and teachers, censoring curricula and limiting safe spaces, among other DEI rollbacks (Translegislation, 2026, ACLU, 2026). These attacks have also extended to international students at major universities, with the federal regime revoking visas and terminating immigration statuses for international faculty and students alike (American Muslims for Palestine, 2026)
Some scholars have noted these actions are an expansion of earlier, anti-DEI actions formed under the first Trump administration and continued through the Biden administration. Major universities have acted to silence pro-Palestinian, student activism on campus before the Trump regime (Farooq and Essa, 2023; Betancourt, 2024). Now, these universities can use the regime’s anti-DEI positioning to continue hampering and blocking student protests of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, forcing student activists to creatively get around protest constraints (Moses, 2026).
Furthermore, coordination among right-wing actors and politicians have intentionally sought to oust scholars and leadership working in Critical Race Theory in order to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion from universities and whitewash educational institutions (Conway, 2022, Matthews, 2024). This has created an environment where right-wing actors can target established faculty, like the former Harvard University President, as well as any student or academic for promoting nuanced perspectives on diversity, equity, and inclusion (Matthews, 2024). Indeed, the early 2024 abduction and detainment of a Tufts University graduate student is one such repercussion of the environment of surveillance and extralegal punishment (Pérez, 2025) Moreover, the regime has offered several universities in the New England area a compact “deal” to receive federal funding in exchange for censoring language and restricting resources related to DEI (Washington Examiner, 2026).
The federal regime has close financial and political ties to powerful actors in large tech and fossil fuel companies, and violent rulers in Israel and Hungary. The coordination among the regime, tech, and fossil fuel companies has sought to embed AI use in universities and further entrench fossil fuel energy use, while companies themselves take back their DEI commitments and actions (Center for Biological Diversity, 2025, Davis, 2025, Rapier, 2026). In addition, the regime has taken notes from its authoritarian counterparts abroad to expand ICE, which is essentially a nation-wide, state-sanctioned gang (Echols, 2026, Martinez, 2025). ICE agents have targeted college campuses to abduct and terrorize students, with a growing presence in the Boston area (WBUR and Ríos, 2025, AP, 2025). Finally, conservative actors are also using college campuses as grounds to create student chapters of right-wing groups.
The current political context indicates universities and colleges are sites of ideological battlegrounds, and as DEI weakens, become venues for organizations to market dangerous products and ideas. Thus, I wanted to understand how local college educators in the digital humanities and social sciences are responding to the federal regime’s DEI rollbacks. I aimed to find strategies for the DITI to advance their DEI resources and teaching under this political climate. In doing so, this research connects to interdisciplinary scholarship around knowledge production and maintenance in digital spaces, such as digital gardens, as a potential avenue for DEI-advocates to counter techno-fascism and spread digital resources.
Background: In early 2025, a large research university in the Boston area (“University A”) removed its public, DEI resources and shut down its former Institute Community and Equity Office (Lau et al., 2025, Kornbluth, 2025). It is hard to say whether this move was related to the university’s 2024 actions to remove diversity statements from their hiring requirements for faculty (Salier, 2024). Despite showing early acquiescence to the regime’s calls to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion resources, University A rejected their compact offer (Kornbluth, 2025b, Quilantan, 2025).
Another private research university in the Boston Area (“University B”) seemingly pre-empted the early 2025 rollbacks of public, diversity and inclusion resources. In 2023, the university renamed its DEIJ office to the Office of Inclusive Excellence (University, 2026). This indicates a move away from targeted rhetoric around diversity and equity. Conversations with faculty and staff revealed the university has taken a strong stance away from neutrality to one of institutional pluralism, where individual perspectives are welcome as long as stated views do not directly affect the core mission of the university (University, 2026b). Following the 2024 student encampment protests against the genocide in Gaza, the university employed curated language and policies around students’ rights to protest Islamophobia and anti-Semitism on campus. Their policies refer to the active genocide as the “Israel-Hamas War” and allow students to protest at specific times and locations with university notice (Eng, 2024, University, 2026c). The university’s strategic positioning seems to allow students, faculty, and staff to retain their freedom for speech and research, while also distancing the university from any unwelcome, free speech.
A third research university in the Boston area (“University C”) is one of the few institutions in the area that still retain a public-facing website and resources for diversity and inclusion. This office of Community & Inclusion is housed within the university’s Provost’s Office. They offer programs on wellness, ethical research, and community conversations (Office of Diversity & Inclusion, 2026). I was unsuccessful in reaching staff at this office, or digital humanities and social sciences network colleagues at University C. This is partially because the timing of my requests fell in the middle of the term, when staff and faculty are busy. This research also comes at a time when University C seems to be internally grappling with its inclusion and academic freedom policies: the university recently faced backlash in spring 2026 for removing LGBTQIA+ pride flags on campus to enforce a “content-neutral” signage policy (Alonso, 2026, Genzer, 2026). In 2025, the university removed a faculty member’s signs in support of students detained by the regime’s masked ICE agents, citing the same policy (Albano, 2025). There seem to be pockets of student and faculty activism against both the genocide in Gaza and the role of students, faculty, and staff to allow and invite pro-genocide activity on campus (Clement, 2026).
A fourth institution in the Boston area (“University D”) has demonstrated its pre-capitulation to the regime by removing its public-facing DEI resources and rebranding its office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to the Office of Belonging in early 2025 (GBH News, 2025). This action was not prompted through express orders to the university, but rather through the looming, potential consequences created by the regime’s executive order to investigate “illegal” DEI programs or principles, including at higher education institutions (Curwin, 2025, White House, 2025a). The impacts have been felt by faculty, staff, and students alike, with the shift away from DEI continuing the university’s actions to silence student activism against the the US and Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people (Wendling, 2024). Moreover, purging DEI resources and content from the university directly conflicts with the university’s marketed brand of being a “global” campus.
At University D, there has been a noticeable campaign to market and integrate AI use for students, faculty, and researchers, as well as add AI features to already-popular digital platforms and tools used by universities. This has been balanced by more thoughtful, university-level policies on AI (University, 2026). Internally, some students, faculty, and staff are advocating for a critical approach to AI use (DITI, 2026, CATLR, 2026).
Overall, universities in the Boston area exhibit a variety of responses to the current political climate, with major points of conflict coalescing around public-facing DEI resources and student activism on campus, and a growing tension around AI use. I developed a basic typology of the university responses observed through interviews; however, some of the interviews only captured information on universities’ responses to student protests, or DEI efforts, while other observations and interviews highlighted universities’ responses to AI use. As a result, each university appears in the typology based on what information interviews, observations, and current news provided, and may not fully capture universities’ responses to all three factors.
Figure 1: Typology of university responses to student activism, DEI rollbacks, and growing AI use.
| University Responses: | Resistance | Pluralism | Pre-capitulation and/or obedience |
|---|---|---|---|
| Activism | Enable students rights’ to protest | Conditionally allow student protests with administrative approval | Challenge students’ rights to protest via content-neutral policies |
| DEI resources | Maintain curated, public DEI resources and actions | Remove public DEI resources and maintain internal DEI actions | Remove public DEI resources and prevent internal DEI actions |
| AI use | Avoid and ridicule use of tech companies’ AI products | Advocate for a critical use of tech companies’ AI products | Promote use of tech companies’ AI products unquestioningly |
Methods: This research first started by examining the current political landscape and the responses of local universities. Next, I spoke with humanities and social sciences faculty and library staff members across the Boston area to understand how university-wide responses are impacting how they teach and support students. For each conversation, I recorded de-identified notes using NULab’s Google Drive. I cleaned the interview notes and iteratively read through the conversations to address the following questions:
- What are the responses of universities to the federal regime’s rollbacks on DEI?
- How does their university’s response to the federal regime shape their work around DEI, if at all?
- How are changes impacting the students, if at all?
- What strategies are recommended for advancing DEI resources and teaching under the current climate?
Given the sensitive nature of this research, I experienced some difficulties in finding interviewees, and relied primarily on snowball sampling local, university staff and faculty. I suspect another reason limiting the participation of interviewees is the spreading cognitive exhaustion of hearing near-daily news reports which detail further erosion of public policies and democratic laws.
I supplemented this research by looking at current literature on the regime’s attacks on democracy, and reviewing past strategies for expanding democratic and anti-oppressive education under the threat of rising authoritarianism.
Results: Interviewees noted that University A operates as primarily an undergraduate institution in the science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines. The humanities, arts, and social sciences faculty, graduate students, and staff are housed within one department. As a result, interviewees identified that students’ engagement with concepts in diversity, equity, and inclusion may be limited to their exposure to the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, choices of their STEM professors to incorporate DEI concepts into teaching, and/or students’ own exploration of these concepts. Classroom support programs offered by University A’s Libraries further engage students with DEI topics, particularly where research involves archival explorations. However, interviewees noted that fewer, incoming humanities and social sciences faculty can strain advocates, particularly for the already-concentrated department.
After the institution cut its community and equity office, structures for supporting internal DEI work at University A have been removed. Yet, faculty and staff have not received explicit orders to stop further engagement with diversity, equity, and inclusion topics. Interviewees reported that internal leadership continue to refer to their department’s core values and mission to engage students’ learning with openness and care, while contributing towards broader, social justice goals. Another driver of continued DEI work is academic freedom at the university, according to one interviewee. Individual faculty and staff at this university have decided to continue and/or advance their own work in this area. One interviewee clarified that this is an organic process embedded in the existing partnerships among faculty and staff which support students’ learning in the humanities, social sciences, and arts. In addition, advocates moved to take advantage of focusing moments to continue offering equity and inclusion resources to students. For example, student activism on campus around the genocide in Gaza prompted faculty in the School to host a lecture series focused on this issue, as well as target recruitment of scholars working on this topic. In another example, the regime’s targeted attacks on international students prompted some faculty at University A to work with pro-bono lawyers to identify supports for these students. The interviews themselves seemed to further prompt action, as one interviewee relayed they plan to check in with colleagues across the School to offer support during the shifting political climate.
Interviewees at University B identified that the institution offers a variety of arts, humanities, and social sciences courses, and recommended I speak with faculty across several departments to understand the inclusive education offered to students in different courses. The university has recently opened the Center for Expanding Viewpoints, which intentionally engages with differing ideological views to grow engagement across religious and cultural divides. According to one interviewee, this Center acts as a forum for students to openly talk across apparent differences and learn from others’ views. This helps students both navigate difficult conversations in the classroom as well as thoughtfully handle sensitive research topics. From this same conversation, I learned that the ideas for the Center originated from a faculty member’s course, and were incubated in the President’s Office before becoming its own entity.
In addition, faculty and staff advocates across multiple departments take on actions to incorporate principles of inclusion, equity, and diversity into their pedagogy. One interviewee expressed a main driver of this continued work is academic freedom. Another conversation emphasized that internal directives to not pre-empt the regime’s orders helped maintain current DEI actions at University B, supported by the university’s move toward institutional pluralism rather than institutional neutrality. Interviewees described how the university spent intentional time crafting the pluralism statement with faculty and staff feedback; these thoughtful efforts trickled down to help individuals feel that they can speak up for their own personal views on equity and inclusion. One conversation revealed how structural changes to educational offerings can increase students’ exposure to inclusive resources and teaching: by shifting the libraries’ ad-hoc, in-class workshops to a formal, 1-credit research course open to all students, the staff can provide more students with accessible and equitable digital education. Moreover, this model helps establish more meaningful connections and build trust with students, which interviewees identified as necessary to navigate students through politically-charged classroom discussions around equity and inclusion.
Interactions among faculty, staff, and students at University D reveal that AI use is a growing issue that creates cascading impacts on digital accessibility and equity. One interviewee described how the AI model, Claude, is useful to generate transcripts quickly and can provide voice narration for audio and videos where needed, when companies respond to requests to improve accessibility of the models, or already have accessibility features built-in. However, internal research at the DITI on AI models and transcript generation has revealed that transcripts generated from AI models often contain errors and require scrutiny to ensure accuracy. In addition, depending on the model’s size and data center requirements, even casual use of AI tools can strain energy and water resources, as well as create dangerous health impacts for communities near data centers (Siddick et al., 2021, Han et al., 2025). A limited version of the AI model, Claude, has been used by the US government to harm students in Iran (Manson, 2026). This raises moral questions for students, faculty, and staff using this tool, particularly because the university has contracts with Anthropic to offer the product to students.
Figure 2: Observed responses to student activism, DEI rollbacks, and growing AI use in universities.
| University Responses: | Resistance | Pluralism | Pre-capitulation and/or obedience |
|---|---|---|---|
| Activism | Enable students rights’ to protest | Conditionally allow student protests with administrative approval Ex. University B | Challenge students’ rights to protest via content-neutral policies Ex. University A, C |
| DEI resources | Maintain curated, public DEI resources and actions Ex. University B, C | Remove public DEI resources and maintain internal DEI actions Ex. University A, D | Remove public DEI resources and prevent internal DEI actions |
| AI use | Avoid and ridicule use of tech companies’ AI products Ex. Climate Justice Universities Union | Advocate for a critical use of tech companies’ AI products Ex. University D | Promote use of tech companies’ AI products unquestioningly |
Who takes on this work: As I conducted interviews, I noticed characteristics of those who took on the work of engaging students with different perspectives. These good trouble-makers, as described by former Sen. John Lewis, include students, faculty, and staff who are in a secure enough position to pose critical questions, and spearhead democratic, and inclusive actions (Hayden, 2020). Among these are long-term staff, tenured faculty, those leaving the university soon, and those in specific roles aimed at improving diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are guiding voices and personalities who can crystallize their and others’ goals around a shared mission to educate students.
Conversations with faculty and library staff revealed how they continue to engage students with equity-centered scholarship and resources through strategic positioning around the concept of DEI. Indeed, throughout conversations, individuals mentioned a range of work they considered to fall within the realm of diversity, equity, and inclusion: digital accessibility, equity in hiring and enrollment, inclusive research showing multiple perspectives, freedom to protest, and academic freedom.
I noted these individuals found ways to strategically tie their actions to their university’s stated mission, even in oblique ways. One interviewee described interpreting their university’s goal for “inclusive excellence” as an opportunity to bring in and expand viewpoints: by engaging openly with conservative views and bringing these views into contact with different perspectives.
These individuals also take advantage of focusing events to gather community around anti-oppressive action. One interviewee described how the regime’s targeted attacks on university students felt like a moment to express support for the students. Another mentioned that during the rise in anti-abortion policies, their program leadership used the moment to offer a lecture series, which has now become a course, on the history of abortion. Similarly, one faculty member has coalesced the increasing political interest in DEI by engaging with conservative views: their work to teach a history of conservatism course has grown to leading organizational action to diversify perspectives.
Strategies: One interviewee went to university in an area with frequent student protests, and identified ways to protect students’ activism on campus around equity and inclusion issues. They noted that importantly, faculty are not comrades with students and staff. To safeguard students’ rights to gather, faculty should respect students’ space and time to protest and not aid or abet their activism. They recommended that if faculty and staff want to join campus activism, these faculty and staff need to organize separately from students. Furthermore, one interviewee mentioned proactively redacting and/or anonymizing public-facing information about students working on sensitive research topics around diversity, equity, and inclusion, to protect students’ identities and academic freedoms.
According to a few of the interviewees, it is important to avoid virtue signaling to students, and instead engage students in their own perspectives without trying to persuade. In this way, students can appreciate when their views are engaged and faculty let them decide their own positions, rather than trying to market one idea or another. Pedagogical research on anti-fascism similarly highlights ways to create an informed and engaged civic population, by engaging with the opposition to bring perceived truth to error in such a way that gives people time and grace to expand their thinking (Bray, 2017; Varus, 2022).
Interestingly, one faculty member viewed the anti-DEI movement as a backlash from what they called an “out of control culture” around diversity and inclusion. Similarly, the regime’s actions to co-opt the concept and related terms like “woke” intend to domesticate and reframe these ideas as dangerous and not aligned with American ideals. Personally, I feel that backlash against equity and inclusion revolves around sentiments of guilt: the repositioning of DEI as something discriminatory suggests to me that anti-DEI actors want to claim discrimination and victimhood, and thus negate any shame and spur feelings of righteousness. Furthermore, I see that the erosion of DEI values also undermines core civil rights and democratic principles, as a step to normalize injustice, in a way similar to the banal spread of evil described by philosopher Hannah Arendt (Giroux, 2026, Stonebridge, 2024).
The discursive battle offers a logical next step for those seeking to expand diverse perspectives and challenge authoritarian views: reframe anti-oppressive education as part of a wider, democratic education. Varus (2022) describes how, following World War II, teachers at the New York Teachers Union challenged racist content and actions by calling out fascist language as un-American, and how teachers incorporated anti-oppressive education as part of their civic education curricula.
In today’s world, providing students with an inclusive digital humanities and computational social science education can help them identify misinformation online and apply diverse perspectives to critically examining digital media. This fosters an engaged civic population that can spot when discourse and media are used by powerful actors to weaken democracy. AI and social media products of large tech companies are now commonly used to generate and spread digital misinformation, among other harms. The federal regime has been a particularly noticeable user and proponent of AI products for war-related violence and propaganda (Brooks et al., 2026, US Department of War, 2026).
A strategy to combat digital misinformation via AI is ridicule of tech companies and their AI products, to undercut AI’s manufactured importance (Climate Justice Universities Union, 2025). Ridicule can work as a tool to break mis-perceptions of AI, and expose the tragedy-comedy of its technofascist ties. In practice this can look like engaging with these tools to intentionally uncover its flaws, and openly discussing the inherent contradictions of these products being promoted to help society’s development while also being used for violence and pollution.
Moreover, it is important to know one’s opponents in order to avoid and/or remove their power. The regime’s AI strategy has made it clear that open-source technologies for AI are becoming a political tool to gain an economic edge over perceived competitors in China (Krasodomski, 2025; White House, 2025b). Similar to reclaiming discourse, advocates against fascism can reclaim open-source technologies and repurpose them for building independent digital equity resources that expose the regime’s AI-fueled misinformation.
The idea of reclaiming (digital) tools and spaces is not new. It stems from conceptual work on digital gardens, streams, and other forms of creating, maintaining, and experiencing digital information (Appleton, 2022). Digital gardening scholarship has been expanded to support Indigenous-centered research methods, such as those at the Collaborative Indigenous Research Digital Garden (Collaborative Indigenous Research, 2022). Relatedly, anti-fascist scholars have brought in concepts of guerilla gardening to reimagine the pedagogy and epistemology of democratic and social principles (Edwards-Schuth and Cerquiera, 2022). Learnings from democratic, anti-fascist scholarship suggests that a digital, civic education may need to carve out safe, digital spaces. This could look like digital spaces unassociated from the large, protected digital spaces owned by large tech companies, and/or existing digital spaces repurposed and reclaimed (i.e., digital guerrilla gardening). Groups like the NULab use these concepts to develop and share inclusive and equitable digital humanities and computational social science resources as a community garden. Perhaps with coordinated growth across counterparts at other universities, individual gardens could bloom into a broader, digital resource forest.
Overall, this project was a fascinating dive into how inclusive digital humanities and social science can serve as critical, civic education for students in a time of increasing digital misinformation and propaganda.
