Washington University in St. Louis Quietly Capitulates to MAGA
Washington University in St. Louis has ensured that its capitulation to the MAGA capture of universities has been a lot quieter than those of fellow elite universities like Columbia and Penn, with much less local heat than its April 2024 mass arrest of students, staff, faculty, and community members protesting on campus for the human rights of Palestinians. Thankfully, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Monica Obradovic has watched the university’s actions closely, and broke the news recently that the erstwhile “In and For St. Louis” research institution has begun removing language pledging diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across websites – and that one longtime staff member at Olin Library may have departed.
Washington University in St. Louis has removed all DEI content from websites associated with the McKelvey College of Engineering, the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, the School of Law, and the Mathematics Department. The webpage for Olin Library Head of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access (IDEA) Rudolph Clay now returns a “404 page not found” message. Clay’s scrubbed profile has not been explained by the university.
While the university’s pages for its Center for Diversity and Inclusion and Equity, Diversity and Inclusion programs remain, as do event pages for fall semester programs such as the Rainbow Welcome, it is clear that Washington University is bringing at least its public face in line with the agenda of President Donald Trump’s far-right regime.
As I wrote earlier this year in an essay for Common Dreams, the right-wing project to attack, intimidate, defund, and cripple institutions of higher education is not about eliminating colleges and universities and the elitism of private R1s like Washington University. The Trump administration and its vocal media supporters overconcentrate Ivy League credentials. Instead, the MAGA agenda is to capture colleges and universities by right-wing elites by placing them under ideological control of the federal government, weaponizing federal research funding and civil rights laws to bring about compliance. With the “Big Beautiful Bill” dismantling affordable student loans, and the administration continuing to try to deport and reject international students, the plot to make higher education the narrow domain of affluent, politically-subservient Americans is quite clear.
The Trump administration’s freshly-announced settlement with Columbia University shows the blueprint for higher education that should frighten everyone (although admittedly it is hard to pity elite schools sometimes). Columbia will pay a $200 million ransom to the Department of Education and $21 million to Jewish staff and students claiming harm from protests, will vet social media accounts of international applicants for political incorrectness, will place many humanities departments in receivership and has already suspended or expelled 80 students who think that Palestinian people should not starve to death. Columbia University essentially will become the first of a new wave of Trump Universities, but – to the adulation of its science and medical faculties – will keep its multimillion dollar federal research grants.
Out of Washington University in St. Louis’ $4.6 billion FY2023 budget, $3.5 million of that budget was for its School of Medicine. 61% of all expenditures consisted of staff compensation. Revenue sources included $497 million in tuition, $570 million in endowment payments, $853 million in research grants (mostly federal), and $2.2 billion in clinical care revenue. Washington University’s current model of survival is untenable without its medical school, and it receives more federal funding than it draws from its own $16 billion endowment. The impoundment of its National Institutes for Health and other federal research grants could topple the university, or at least force it to drastically reform – and that also would mean potentially lowering compensation for its administrators.
It’s not hard to see why Columbia University folded, and why Washington University in St. Louis is trying to wag the dog by pre-emptively conforming with the MAGA vision. Follow the money. Washington University Chancellor Andrew Martin’s actions in the last two years show a drive to protect his medical school at all costs.
The Trump administration’s first salvo in the right-wing capture of universities was the Executive Order entitled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”, signed on January 21, 2025. This order reiterated the typical reactionary bromides against DEI programs, proudly ignoring the discriminatory histories of colleges and universities – Washington University was the last higher education institution to desegregate, and that was less than 70 years ago – as well as the wide set of reasons DEI programs exist.
Race and gender captivate the right-wing imaginations, but classes of discrimination are legally defined in the US against persons based on physical abilities, age, and class. Washington University accepted the lowest number of persons using federal financial aid of any private university in the US in 2014, and under previous Chancellor Mark Wrighton worked seriously toward increasing those admissions. Very few working-class people climbed the hill to Wash U’s castle, and what is called DEI by some is simply justice to others who have been excluded.
Of course, as the deep cuts to the social safety net under Trump show, the anti-DEI agenda is about far more than racism, sexism, and transphobia – Trump and the MAGA world fervently want to restore harm on people by reconstructing systemic discrimination. They are sick of anyone who is not rich and powerful getting a fair shake. They disregard the real injuries of race, class, gender, and ability that still percolate in America, and for which DEI is the bare minimum – and often ridiculously ineffective – tool of redress.
Washington University in St. Louis found itself under the official hammer by March, when the Department of Education announced that it was investigating 45 colleges and universities for supposedly violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by providing funding to The Ph.D. Project, which helps get more Black people into doctoral business programs. The Ph.D. Project actually falls into the capitalist emphases that dominate American society, but its modest push toward justice in admissions is too much for Trump’s team.
Thus, Martin announced a task force to review DEI in May, stating that its aim would be to examine programs in order to keep them “consistent with our values and the law.” Here began Martin’s attempt toward an accommodation of MAGA’s agenda that would somehow spare the university the ignominy that has befallen other universities. With the threat to higher education, including limits on speech and admissions, a litany of college leaders signed a mass letter of protest this spring. Wesleyan President Michael Roth announced that he would accommodate none of Trump’s agenda, consequenced be damned. Not Martin. Martin did not sign the letter, and instead doubled down on a “third way” he first articulated in a February op-ed co-authored with Vanderbilt University’s President Daniel Diermeier. Entitled “Universities Must Reject Creeping Politicization,” the essay ignores who is perpetrating the politicization and to what end – as well as the fact that Trump’s administration is basically extorting colleges and universities to purge faculty members and students, cull humanities programs, and commit to an agenda of restoring historic social barriers to education. Martin and Diermeier present a safe space of “excellence” and “free speech” with “rules” that ignore historic processes unfolding around them.
Of course, Martin’s goal at Washington University is simply to keep the medical school budget intact, which is why his DEI purge probably will not be vocally protested across his campuses. Those who benefit from large salaries and posh laboratories will applaud his moves, and Martin and his trustees will be glad if they don’t have to stare down lawsuits from the Department of Education. After the repressive suspensions of students, staff and faculty (including those with tenure) last April, the capacity for open dissent at Washington University seems to be low. The downward transfer of compliance is one of the ways in which fascism produces acceptance, according to political theorist Antonio Gramsci. Higher education could prove Gramsci’s theory wrong, but sadly, so far, few institutions seem willing.
A successful capitulation to MAGA – rationalized as “survival” by Wash U’s liberals and progressives — seems to mean that the university which proclaims to be “In St. Louis, For St. Louis” in a city whose racial scars remain some of the most extreme in the nation and whose wealth gap has deepened seemingly past any relief, will be at best “In Clayton, For Clayton.” Martin does not have to adopt the ideological language of MAGA to hand over his institution to the new order of social stratification in which a Wash U education will revert to being far out of reach of most of the people who call St. Louis home.
Disclaimer: The author was a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis from 2014-2024 and was arrested at the April 27, 2024 encampment. No criminal or civil charges of any kind were ever made by the university against the author.
