In an email to the University of Michigan (U-M) Faculty Senate, Faculty Senate Chair and Professor at Stamps School of Art Rebekah Modrak alleges that academic deans at U-M schools were recently requested “to create lists of employees who work in DEI-related positions and to estimate what percentage of their work fell into one of four categories.” Deans were apparently given 48 hours to complete the lists, which were due Feb. 14.
The due date indicates that the request for lists of employees in roles related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) was issued prior to President Donald Trump’s own Feb. 14 memo, which warned U.S. schools they could lose federal funding for failing to eliminate diversity initiatives.
The request for lists of employees appears to have originated with the U-M Board of Regents, which did not respond to requests for comment on this article.
In a call with the Metro Times, Modrak said it was unclear whether the lists affected U-M faculty, staff, or both. She said it was also unclear whether individuals whose names had been included on the lists had been informed of that fact. It’s likewise unclear how the information will be used and with whom it will be shared, though Modrak said she had repeatedly requested clarity regarding these issues from U-M President Santa Ono and Provost Laurie McCauley.
According to an anonymous source in the administration, the names of employees doing DEI work will not be shared with U-M regents, but this information has not been confirmed either by Provost McCauley or other university officials.
Publicly, several regents, including Jordan Acker and Sarah Hubbard, have called for DEI programs at U-M to be dismantled; Acker has also made statements to the press conflating DEI with antisemitism.
In a prepared statement, university spokesperson Kay Jarvis of the U-M Office of Public Affairs said, “The University of Michigan is carefully reviewing executive orders and other federal guidance to understand their implications.” Jarvis added only, “Earlier this month, the university’s executive vice presidents asked deans, dean-level directors and executive officers to provide information related to staffing.”
Representatives from the Office of Public Affairs declined to provide further comment.
Modrak was originally approached by four executive officers who first informed her of the regents’ request for lists of employees in DEI roles; those executive officers asked to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisal.
Modrak told the Metro Times that she felt compelled to send the email to the Faculty Senate after sharing what she’d learned with a colleague at the U-M Law School, who told her, “The Faculty Senate cannot sit on this. That information needs to be shared with the faculty.”
“My goal is to share information with the [U-M] faculty so that they know things that are happening, and so that they can then speak up, if they choose to, and ask questions,” Modrak said.
In her email to the Faculty Senate, Modrak, who is the author of Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education — and the Teachers Who Are Fighting Back, writes that “Under McCarthyism, such lists were requested under the guise of ‘protecting the nation from subversives or communists.’”
Over the phone, Modrak mentioned the three U-M faculty members forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954. All three refused to answer questions. All three were suspended from the university; while Clement Markert was eventually reinstated, Chandler Davis and Mark Nickerson were dismissed from their positions. An annual lecture is now held in their names.
“They had a huge impact on the culture of the university,” Modrak said. “For decades afterwards, [U-M] became a place where people did not trust their colleagues, where people were hesitant to publish research or to put forward statements that took risks… But,” she adds, “the impact to those two individuals, of course, was the really devastating thing.”
Faculty at U-M have directly witnessed “the making of lists, and faculty being put on lists,” and those lists “leading to their firing,” Modrak said.
“It’s scary and it’s career-ending for some people. That’s a history that we’re aware of here.”
This sentiment was echoed by Berit Ingersoll-Dayton Collegiate Professor of Social Work Rogério Pinto, who says he first learned of the request for lists of employees in DEI roles when he received Modrak’s Faculty Senate email. He still isn’t sure if his own name has been included on a list and, when he asked administrators at the School of Social Work, he was told only that the names of individuals involved in DEI work are already freely available as a matter of public record.
DEI-related activities aren’t formally included among Pinto’s job responsibilities. But he believes that the principles underlying DEI are “inextricably connected to social work research, practice, and teaching,” whether or not the acronym itself is present.
“We work in a school that professes itself as a place where we promote diversity, equity and inclusion,” Pinto says. In that sense, “All of our names should be [on the list].”
Modrak wants to know how the university is “defining who’s doing DEI work.”
“Technically, we're all doing DEI work,” she told the Metro Times. “When I teach a class and I make sure that the artists that I’m showing are representing many different perspectives and cultures and races and genders and so on — I’m doing DEI work.”
Modrak’s email was distributed to the entire Faculty Senate, which includes approximately 7,600 tenure-track lecturers, clinical researchers, librarians, archivists, and curators; she also forwarded it to the president of the Central Student Government and shared it with staff. Near the end of her email, she invited other faculty to join her in requesting that President Ono and Provost McCauley de-identify the lists. Faculty were invited to cc the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs (SACUA, the executive branch of the Faculty Senate) on these messages. Modrak says SACUA has since received several dozen messages expressing “concern about the lack of clarity about how these lists will be used.”
U-M is currently one of more than 50 universities under investigation for alleged racial discrimination that, according to Trump’s officials, excludes white and Asian American students.
Moving forward, Modrak said she’d like to see President Ono, Provost McCauley, and other university officials “be more candid with faculty governance about what is happening.”
The lack of transparency, Modrak said, has only added to what she described as a “culture of retaliation from the federal government.”
“I'm hoping that [U-M officials are] a little bit more thoughtful going forward about protecting employees at the University,” Modrak said.
