Resegregating the Academy: How Anti-DEI Politics Dismantle Faculty Racial Equity Infrastructure

Since 2021, state legislatures and then the federal government have moved to dismantle programs and offices built over seventy-five years to reduce barriers for racially marginalized people in American higher education—losses largely examined in scholarship and media piecemeal, one policy or state at a time. We argue that the supports under assault constitute a system of faculty racial equity infrastructure spanning K-12 supports, college access, cultural programming, curricular content, research opportunities, and faculty hiring and retention. Drawing on 103 interviews with faculty across 38 states, stratified by legislative context, institution type, and field, we document the coordinated dismantling of this infrastructure and theorize it as a form of resegregation, the systematic re-exclusion, restriction of placement and advancement, and sorting of racially marginalized scholars into less resourced parts of a sector they had only partially entered. We characterize resegregation in the contemporary period as both removing mechanisms of desegregation and purging people of color. This resegregation is legitimated by recasting acknowledgement of inequality as discrimination and the criminalization of racial redress. Universities advance this racial project through anticipatory compliance, often before any law requires it. Structural interdependence means losses cascade across career stages, producing racialized social closure and loss of talent and knowledge.