Nobody in the stands at a college football game this fall is going to see a line item called “DEI office” disappear from a budget. That’s exactly the point. The most consequential changes happening in college athletics right now aren’t happening on the field — they’re happening in HR departments and compliance offices at some of the most profitable athletic programs in the country, and almost nobody outside the industry is covering it the way it deserves.
The University of Michigan abruptly closed its DEI offices this year and ended plans to promote diversity across the university, including in athletics. The University of Texas fired staff and canceled programs built around the same mission. These aren’t small regional schools quietly adjusting policy. These are two of the highest-revenue athletic departments in the country, built substantially on the labor of Black athletes in football and basketball, walking away from the institutional infrastructure that was supposed to support those same athletes off the field.
I want to be precise about what I’m arguing here, because this is exactly the kind of story that gets flattened into a partisan cage match, and I’m not interested in that. I’m not arguing every DEI office was well-run or above criticism — plenty weren’t, and plenty became compliance theater that did little for the athletes they claimed to serve. What I am arguing is that revenue-generating athletic programs built on Black athletic labor have a specific obligation that goes beyond scholarships and NIL checks, and dismantling the infrastructure meant to support those athletes’ academic, mental health, and post-athletic transition needs — while keeping the revenue model exactly the same — is not neutral. It’s a choice about whose needs matter once the money’s already flowing in.
This is playing out against a strange backdrop. The 2026 World Cup, hosted partly in the U.S. during the country’s 250th anniversary year, has shown something genuinely unifying — crowded stadiums, a diverse country actually enjoying something together, in sharp contrast to the more sparsely attended official anniversary events that got swallowed by political controversy. Sports, at its best, is one of the few places left where Americans across every line still show up in the same room and want the same outcome. But that unifying power is not automatic. It’s built on infrastructure — coaching development, athlete support systems, mental health resources, academic support — the exact kind of infrastructure that’s getting quietly defunded at the college level right now.
Here’s the piece that doesn’t get said enough: sports has become a genuine culture-war battleground, from kneeling debates to athletes using their platforms to needle politicians, and it’s tempting to read every athletics-adjacent decision through that lens. But I’d push back on treating the DEI-office closures purely as a culture war skirmish. Ask a Black offensive lineman at a Big Ten school what happens to his academic support and mental health resources when that office disappears, and you’ll get a much more concrete answer than anything you’ll hear in a cable news segment.
There’s also a business argument here that I think gets missed by people who want to frame this purely as values-signaling. Athletic departments that treat athlete development — academic, psychological, post-career — as a real cost center rather than a PR line item tend to have better outcomes: fewer transfer-portal disasters, stronger alumni engagement from athletes who actually graduate and thrive, fewer NCAA compliance headaches. Gutting that infrastructure to make a political point, or to avoid one, is a short-term move with a long-term bill.
What should actually happen here, if a program wants to walk away from a DEI office structure that wasn’t working, is replace it — not eliminate it. Build athlete-support infrastructure that’s explicitly tied to outcomes: graduation rates, mental health utilization, post-career employment. Make it accountable to athletes and their families, not to a university’s political optics in either direction. That’s a solution both sides of this fight should be able to live with, because it’s not about the label on the office door. It’s about whether the kid generating millions of dollars in ticket and media revenue for a university has somewhere real to go when the season ends and the pressure doesn’t.
I’ll be watching what these programs replace these offices with — if anything — as the season kicks off this fall.
Marcus Hart is the founder of Urban News Journal and host of the Transform U! Live Show, based in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.