Over the past year, Duke has shifted its public messaging away from the language of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” and toward the new, more Trump-friendly branding of “Inclusive Excellence.” Though similar re-branding measures have been taken by other universities, with some dismantling their DEI programming altogether, there has been little discussion at Duke about what materially is changing within the university’s equity programs. Is this just a cosmetic adjustment or is Duke fundamentally re-writing its diversity policies?
Given the breadth of the university’s commitment to equity, this piece will be limited to an investigation of changes at the university’s primary organizers of DEI programming: the Office for Institutional Equity (OIE) and the university’s Racial Equity strategic initiative. What, if anything, has changed under this new “Inclusive Excellence” framework? Are the university’s harassment policies different? Have staff been laid off? Is there new programming? This piece will provide an overview of the restructuring of OIE and the Racial Equity Initiative, with particular attention to the usage of language, given the Trump administration’s demonstrated opposition to “potentially unlawful proxies.” The piece will neither assess the legality of these shifts nor weigh in on their normative value but simply document how Duke is responding to the Trump administration’s crackdown on DEI.
DEI Then
Duke’s institutional equity efforts extend back decades. The university established an Equal Opportunity Office in the 1970s renamed the Opportunity Development Center in 1982. That center was abolished in 1985 by then-President Keith Brodie, though staff continued performing its functions informally. In 1995, President Nannerl Keohane formalized Duke’s equity efforts by establishing the Vice President’s Office for Institutional Equity, which became the Office for Institutional Equity (OIE) during the 2004–05 academic year. For much of the next two decades, OIE focused on affirmative action planning, education, and training and ensuring that Duke complied with nondiscrimination law.
The scope and direction of Duke’s equity initiatives shifted dramatically in 2020 amid nationwide unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s death. That summer, President Vincent Price issued a “Statement to the Community Regarding Anti-Racism,” released on Juneteenth. In the statement, Price pledged to “significantly and measurably expand the diversity of our faculty, staff, and students, with particular focus on Black, Indigenous and people of color.” In addition, President Price commitment to increasing “faculty support for Black, Indigenous and people of color, through chairs and other means,” and to “incorporate anti-racism into our curricula and programs across the university, requiring that every Duke student…learns of the nature of structural racism and inequity.” Following the Juneteenth message, the university doubled-down on its commitment to anti-racism with a $16 million grant from the Duke Endowment allocating “$10.5 million toward recruiting and retaining diverse faculty and $5.5 million to support programming to increase the university community’s understanding of historical and current racism, to combat racism and to create a more inclusive environment.”
By 2022, Duke’s Racial Equity initiative, one of the university’s official strategic priorities, was already claiming measurable results. The university bragged about a 30 percent increase in Black faculty over four years and noted that since 2019, 15 percent of regular-rank hires had been Black and 10 percent Hispanic. President Price reiterated and expanded those claims in 2024, stating that Duke had increased the number of Black faculty by 47 percent and increased the total enrollment of Black undergraduate students.
During this period, the bulk of Duke’s DEI programming, compliance activity, and educational initiatives flowed through two central institutional structures: the Office for Institutional Equity and the university’s Racial Equity strategic initiative. OIE served as the primary administrator of training, workshops, policy guidance, and harassment and discrimination prevention, while the Racial Equity initiative, through its advisory council and subcommittees, functioned as the university’s ideological arm, coordinating anti-racism commitments, campus climate assessments, and long-term equity goals. Together, these two entities formed the backbone of Duke’s DEI infrastructure, making their evolution under “Inclusive Excellence” central to any assessment of what has, and has not, changed.
The Pivot to “Inclusive Excellence”
Adjustments to Duke’s DEI programming first began in response to the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision in summer 2023. In June of that year, President Price issued a statement titled “Our Commitment to Inclusive Excellence,” where he reaffirmed the university’s commitment to “our values of respect, trust, inclusion, discovery, and excellence” while acknowledging a degree of uncertainty about how the Court’s decision would affect the university. Notably, this message still included references to the “impactful work of Duke’s Racial Equity Advisory Council (REAC),” language that has since been abandoned.
Indeed, following the election of Donald Trump in November 2024, the university began to more dramatically reframe its DEI programming. Since then, the university has fully adopted the banner of Inclusive Excellence alongside a set of “Overarching Principles” to guide the institution through this period of heightened scrutiny. Kimberly Hewitt, Duke’s Vice President for Institutional Equity, stated in December 2025 that the Inclusive Excellence framework was adopted to “affirm and clarify existing policies and guidelines, establish new guidelines where necessary, and reflect both our legal obligations and the values of respect, trust, inclusion, discovery, and excellence that guide our institution.”
But how new is Inclusive Excellence, and what, if any changes are occurring within OIE and Duke’s Racial Equity Initiative?
Changes at OIE
Despite the shift in rhetoric, the Office for Institutional Equity remains fully operational. Unlike peer institutions that have shuttered or downsized DEI offices, Duke’s OIE continues to maintain a robust staff and host regular events, workshops, and trainings. What has changed is the content of these programs and, most notably, the language used to describe them.
For example, the section on the OIE website formerly labeled “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” has since been renamed “Education and Resources.” Archived and current versions of the site frequently direct users to identical landing pages, despite the change in labeling. Within this education section, Duke continues to offer members of the university community the ability to “Request an Education” from OIE staff. The current OIE website offers these “educations” to “raise understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion issues while also deepening engagement with and between individuals throughout the Duke community.” As for the content of this programming, the website says that “race, ethnicity, gender equity, gender identity, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, immigrant experience, age, federal regulations, Duke policies & procedures, and other dimensions of diversity have all been considered when building the curriculum.”
This programming has been changed in substance as well as branding. In February 2024, OIE “educations” included sessions on subjects like implicit bias, microaggressions, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, trans identity, anti-racist leadership, and “interrupting” racial inequity, Today’s offerings are fewer and framed in broader terms, focusing on bias awareness, inclusive supervision, communication during times of challenge, and workforce improvement. While there is likely subject matter overlap, the language has been generalized and the most explicit references to race and identity have been removed.
The same goes for OIE’s workshop series, which the current website describes as being “designed to provide education and support on key issues related to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.” In early 2024, OIE listed workshops such as “DEI Building Blocks,” “Equitable Hiring Practices,” “Recognizing & Interrupting Ableism,” “LGBTQIA+ Foundations,” and “Trauma Informed Approaches for Leadership and Supervision: A DEI Lens.” The current site lists workshops including “Foundational Concepts,” “Quality Hiring and Selection,” “Disability and Inclusive Excellence,” “Social Identity,” and “Trauma Informed Leadership.” Some offerings, most notably LGBTQIA+-specific workshops and DEI Building Blocks, were removed entirely. Others were renamed. “Equitable Hiring Practices,” which explicitly referenced increasing workforce diversity, was rebranded as “Quality Hiring and Selection.” References to “recruiting a diverse candidate pool” became simply “recruiting a candidate pool.” The 2024 site also included a dedicated “Anti-Racism Resources” page featuring articles, videos, podcasts, and “Anti-Racist Literature and Reading Guides.” That page has since been removed.
There does not appear to have been extensive personnel turnover within OIE, with most of the changes being primarily cosmetic in nature. For example, Kimberly Hewitt’s title changed from “Vice President for Institutional Equity and Chief Diversity Officer” to “Vice President for Institutional Equity.” Elizabeth Jones, Director of Education and Outreach, retained her role, though her biography was edited to remove references to “critical feminist, queer, and disability theories” and other social justice-oriented language. The staff directory category formerly labeled “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” was again removed and replaced with “Education and Outreach.” Overall, senior leadership and personnel in oIE remain largely unchanged.
Changes to the Racial Equity Initiative
Parallel changes occurred within Duke’s Racial Equity initiative. During the course of this investigation, over Duke’s recent winter break, RacialEquity.Duke.edu was rebranded as CampusCulture.Duke.edu. As recently as December 17, 2025, the site’s landing page stated that Duke had an obligation, given its Southern location and history, “to actively dismantle any remaining effects” of systemic exclusion. That language has since been replaced with a description of the Campus Culture Survey, a former program of Duke’s Racial Equity initiative which invites community members to share feedback on their experiences as members of the Duke community. The former Racial Equity Advisory Council, designed “for the purpose of supporting and informing…centralized efforts to advance racial equity across Duke,” now appears as the “Campus Experience and Culture Advisory Council,” retaining the same four subcommittees but with nearly all detailed documentation removed. The original membership lists, references to Juneteenth commitments, and language about anti-racism and racial liberation have been scrubbed, replaced by brief mission statements and generalized priorities.
The Campus Experience Survey, alternatively described in 2023 as the “Duke Climate Survey on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” now occupies a central role in Duke’s Inclusive Excellence framework. According to Duke’s former Racial Equity website, the survey was “announced in President Price’s Juneteenth message” and first conducted in 2021 as part of Duke’s anti-racism initiative. The survey includes questions assessing satisfaction with racial diversity among faculty and leadership, perceptions of institutional commitment to women and underrepresented minorities, and experiences with microaggressions. In a December 2025 Q&A on Duke’s shift towards Inclusive Excellence, Hewitt stated that she is proud of these surveys and that they will be “an increasingly important tool for us to understand and respond to student, faculty and staff feedback about how we are living up to our commitments to Inclusive Excellence.”
This all brings us back to the present matter and Duke’s Inclusive Excellence principles.
Duke’s Inclusive Excellence principles were drafted by an 11-member working group, six of whom previously served on the Racial Equity Advisory Council or its subcommittees. Hewitt herself, who chaired the group, described DEI work as requiring changes in hiring, admissions, and institutional structures in a 2021 interview titled “Q&A: The Meaning of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”. That interview directed readers to OIE workshops on anti-racism, implicit bias, and microaggressions and linked to anti-racism.duke.edu, a URL that is now defunct.
While the university has emphasized that Inclusive Excellence reflects an effort to clarify policies and ensure legal compliance rather than abandon prior commitments, the overlap in personnel suggests a high degree of continuity between Duke’s earlier Racial Equity framework and its current Inclusive Excellence approach. Rather than a wholesale restructuring of leadership or governance, the shift appears to have been managed largely by the same administrators who oversaw Duke’s DEI and anti-racism initiatives in the years following 2020.
Conclusion
Taken together, these developments clarify what Duke’s transition to Inclusive Excellence represents in practice. The university has not dismantled its DEI infrastructure, eliminated its equity offices, or abandoned the tools it uses to assess institutional climate and inclusion. Instead, it has systematically altered the language used to describe those efforts—renaming programs, revising titles, removing or consolidating webpages, and softening race-explicit framing—while largely preserving the underlying structures, personnel, and ideological mechanisms.
Duke has been clear that this shift is driven by legal considerations, particularly in response to the Students for Fair Admissions decision and heightened federal scrutiny of race-based decision-making. Yet the university has not provided a clear public account of how Inclusive Excellence differs operationally from its prior DEI framework, nor how continuity in programming, staffing, and metrics aligns with its stated compliance goals.
Though Inclusive Excellence may ultimately prove to be a durable framework for navigating the current legal environment, its most concrete function appears to be linguistic rather than structural. Whether Duke intends this rebranding as a temporary adjustment or a substantive redefinition of its equity work remains unclear. What is clear is that, as the university enters a new period of political and regulatory scrutiny, transparency about what has changed—and what has not—will matter as much as the language used to describe it.
by Sherman Criner
