Last spring, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine was embroiled in controversy.

Sherita Golden, the school‘s chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer, faced a firestorm of online attacks that caught the attention of Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk. Critics took issue with her definition of privilege, which named white people, heterosexuals and middle-aged people among those who benefit from it.

Golden stepped down and the university pledged to conduct a “thorough national search” to find a suitable replacement.

But 14 months later, the role remains unfilled and the search has been “paused,” according to Kim Hoppe, a spokesperson for the medical school, who did not say why the position was paused. Some students worry that the long-unfilled position is a symptom of a larger shift.

Hopkins is at a complicated crossroads as President Donald Trump’s administration threatens to pull federal funding from institutions with programs that support marginalized groups. The stakes are high: Hopkins has already lost hundreds of millions of dollars and seen cuts to 90 medical and health research grants.

Some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, like Harvard and Columbia, have been singled out by the Trump administration over alleged antisemitism. Both of those universities, along with others, including the University of Michigan, have halted, edited or erased their diversity statements, programs and offices. Hopkins, for its part, has taken a less aggressive approach.

Graduating senior Akosa Obianwu said he’s seen Hopkins vocally defend its priorities — and to him, it hasn’t highlighted diversity, equity and inclusion enough.

“Research is their priority,” he said.

Hopkins joined 12 other research institutions in a lawsuit against the Trump administration and sent officials to Capitol Hill when funding was slashed. The university is seeking to support a second lawsuit filed by Harvard University to protect its federal funding, as well.

Its response to Trump attacks on DEI was quieter.

In a message to community members in March, university President Ron Daniels wrote: “We aspire to be a place that fiercely opposes discrimination, supports equality of opportunity, and welcomes diverse people, perspectives, and thought as essential to the effective discharge of our truth-seeking function.”

Daniels also spearheaded a collaboration to increase the number of conservatives in academia with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank that has published pieces critical of DEI policies.

Hopkins isn’t the only Maryland college grappling with what to do about DEI under the new administration. The U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis has hewn closely to Trump’s directives, removing nearly 400 books on race and gender from its library and prohibiting faculty from teaching about systemic racism and sexism. The books were later returned to shelves after a public outcry.

Loyola University Maryland, on the other hand, forged ahead with a late-January panel on the 1619 Project and reparative work acknowledging its role in the slave trade.

Maryland’s public universities, meanwhile, have taken an approach more similar to that of Hopkins. They’ve stayed mostly mum on threats to DEI, with the University of Maryland, College Park, and Towson University noting in statements that they are “monitoring” or “reviewing” guidance from federal agencies.

The Trump administration “has made people so fearful to do anything that will support people of different backgrounds,” said Jen Fry, a Baltimore-based conflict and culture consultant who works with colleges.

At Hopkins, Gnagna Sy, 22, sums up the state of DEI with the word “discouragement.”

“It’s been a bit daunting trying to navigate all the social and political turmoil,” said the president of the Black Student Union. “There is not good transparency between staff and students.”

Other student groups in recent months have accused the administration of interfering with their efforts to highlight and support diverse voices.

The Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance had its annual “Flagging the Quad” and other events canceled “pending review by legal counsel,” according to an Instagram post by The Hopkins Justice Collective. The alliance did not respond to a request for comment.

Initially, the university did not respond to a request for comment from The Baltimore Banner about whether the Flagging the Quad event took place. After the publication of this article on Wednesday morning, however, J.B. Bird, the university’s senior associate vice president of media relations, emailed the Banner to say that the event indeed had been held.

Earlier this month, the Instagram account jhumulticulturalstudents noted that Hopkins had stopped promoting its annual Lavender Celebration as an event for LGBTQIA+ graduates, instead advertising it as celebrating “all graduating students.”

“Purposely erasing LGBTQ+ history of this celebration serves no one,” the post reads.

Hopkins refutes claims it has censored students from marginalized groups. It touts the Lavender Celebration as having its largest attendance ever.

“The university unequivocally supports and values all students at Hopkins — including students in our LGBTQ+ community — and we remain deeply committed to fostering a vibrant pluralistic community grounded in openness, nondiscrimination, scholarly excellence, and equality of opportunity,“ said Bird.

As for the Flagging the Quad event, the Office of General Counsel reviews programs on an ongoing basis to ensure they are fully and clearly compliant with current law and reflect the school’s “long-standing commitment to a broadly encompassing view of diversity that includes the wide range of people, perspectives, thought, and backgrounds,” Bird added.

The sexuality and gender alliance changed its status from a registered student organization to an initiative within a university center, triggering the additional review, according to Bird.

A graduate student member of the Hopkins Justice Collective, which includes undergraduate and graduate student groups not officially recognized by the university, said the institution’s “commitment to an all-lives matter narrative” is “pandering” to right-wing groups and only further supports their lack of commitment to marginalized groups.

“Hopkins administrators so much as struggle to say the word ‘Palestine’ or ‘anti-fascism’ while they encourage well-disguised alt-right talking points under the guise of the ‘free exchange of ideas,’” said the student, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

Sy, the Black Student Union president, said she has always felt valued at Hopkins, but recalls feeling disappointed by the way the university dealt with criticism of Golden last year.

“I think she kind of got thrown under the bus,” Sy said. “There should have been more regard to the nuances that occurred.”

In Golden’s January 2024 newsletter, she defined privilege as “a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group ... at the expense of members of other groups.”

She later issued an apology, as did officials with Johns Hopkins Medicine, who said her definition ”was overly simplistic and poorly worded," and that it was “exclusionary and hurtful to our patients, their loved ones and members of our community.”

Golden, now the Hugh P. McCormick Family Professor of Endocrinology and Metabolism at Hopkins, declined to comment.

Fry, the conflict and culture expert, said she was disheartened last year by the way Hopkins dealt with Golden.

“If you can’t even say the word privilege, what else are you not going to be able to do or say?” she asked.

Over its history, the world-renowned university has also had a fraught relationship at times with the majority-Black city around it.

In 2020, the university acknowledged that its founder and benefactor, Johns Hopkins, owned slaves until the mid-1800s. Its hospital made headlines in 2023 when the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who died of cervical cancer, settled a lawsuit with a biotechnology firm that profited off her cells — harvested by Hopkins doctors without her knowledge 70 years ago. After public outcry, the university dedicated a building in Lacks’ honor, along with a lecture.

In 2014, actors Danny Glover and Wendell Pierce joined several thousand union members and others who gathered at the Inner Harbor to call for better wages for Hopkins service workers, the majority of whom were Black. The group said many of the workers were making so little money at the time that they had to rely on public assistance to survive; Hopkins officials at the time said that their starting wages were above the state’s minimum wage. Hopkins eventually raised wages in 2021, five years after the protests.

And the university has drawn the ire of displaced Black residents as it expanded its physical footprint throughout the city.

Obianwu said that students there — particularly Black students — are also worried about a decrease in the enrollment of racially diverse students.

This year‘s group of first-year students at Hopkins was significantly less diverse than prior classes, according to data released by the university. That’s in large part due to the Supreme Court’s ruling to end affirmative action in college admissions, Bird said.

Latino and Black students had the sharpest decreases, by 10 and eight percentage points. University President Ron Daniels and Provost Ray Jayawardhana said in a joint statement released last fall that the “racial and ethnic diversity in this admissions cycle is profoundly disappointing.”

Obianwu said he doesn’t regret his decision to attend Hopkins, but knowing everything about the university he knows now he said he might not have applied.

“Being here has made me a stronger person,” he said.

“But feeling obligated to create community because of these challenges has defined my time in Hopkins. Hopkins students of color have to create spaces because spaces are not created for us here. Hopkins does a good job showing us how hard it can be.”

About the Education Hub

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