Michigan college president: ‘New white nationalism’ drives Trump’s anti-DEI push

FRANKENLUST TOWNSHIP, MI — In an essay published this week, Delta College President Mike Gavin was critical of higher education leaders for “capitulating to the assault” on academia by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Gavin is no stranger to pushing back against Trump policy pursuits, particularly the Republican administration’s efforts to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Gavin is one of the driving forces behind Education for All, a 1,100-member nationwide organization that formed in 2023 to combat lawmakers advocating for anti-DEI legislation.

On Monday, March 31, he published a 2,200-word essay in Truthout, a nonprofit media group that reports on social justice issues. The title of the essay: “Silence Isn’t a Strategy: Academic Leaders Must Resist Assault on Higher Ed.”

The essay was published less than one week after University of Michigan closed two equity-focused offices and ended a campuswide DEI initiative, which Gavin referenced as part of higher education’s “collective stasis” that invites more assaults against academic programs.

The Ann Arbor-based university’s move came amid threats from Trump’s administration to cut federal funding over DEI programs at colleges and universities.

Trump contends such programs amount to illegal discrimination.

Gavin, on the other hand, calls the push to end such programs a “new white nationalism” that assaults higher education.

“The new white nationalism uses legal, social and cultural apparatuses to perform the same work of the traditional skin-headed or white-hooded white nationalism,” Gavin wrote in Truthout. “It acts covertly so that what is presented to the mainstream may often seem benign when it is anything but.”

Gavin wrote “much of academia” falls victim to Trump actions that “intentionally pervert reality of what is happening on college campuses for the mainstream to make it seem that civil rights are being upheld when in fact they are being decimated.”

Instead, the Trump administration’s “true purpose” was to provide a road map for state lawmakers to impose “anti-academic freedom, anti-institutional autonomy, anti-civil rights, and anti-educational restrictions on their own state’s public institutions,” Gavin wrote.

“In a snowballing fashion, extremism is being normalized,” he wrote.

Gavin warned that snowball effect could build into an avalanche if academic institutions fail to challenge such political attacks.

“There is no doubt that situating our moment and the landscape in this fashion is rife with danger,” he wrote. “But it is also dangerous not to. Indeed, we must challenge the notion that academia must be overly careful and not provoke retaliation — for that is the way we arrived at the moment we are in today.”

His essay called for training college officials on the background of the “new white nationalist movement,” which he argued would provide higher education officials with tools to collaborate with other institutions in the fight against the movement.

“There will be detractors from what I suggest here,” Gavin wrote. “Some will claim that I am calling out too many of us, or that my argument is not timely. I would remind us what Martin Luther King Jr. taught us about remaining complacent when civil rights are on the line, and how timeliness is an argument made by those who benefit from time passing by.”

School officials hired Gavin in 2021 as president of Delta College, an 8,200-student community college in a rural corner of Bay County.

That same year, he published a book, “The New White Nationalism in Politics and Higher Education,” which explores some of the same themes highlighted in his Truthout essay.

The Trump administration’s anti-DEI initiatives have thrust a number of colleges into the spotlight in recent weeks. In this state, the University of Michigan was not the lone newsmaker.

Last month, a U.S. Department of Education letter stated both University of Michigan and Grand Valley State University were under investigation for alleged “race-exclusionary practices” in their education programs.

Across the country, over 50 universities were under similar investigation, and could lose out on millions of dollars in federal funding, according to federal directives.

GVSU faced scrutiny for scholarships the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights office said could be “impermissible” and “race-based.”

In response to the notice, GVSU President Philomena Mantella last month said the university’s legal team was reviewing the federal communication.

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