The University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School is closing the doors on its Office of Equal Opportunity and Engagement, and with them, a chapter in its recent history of public commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
According to Philly Voice, the office, which offered resources, trainings, and a roadmap for reporting discrimination, won’t officially shutter until the end of summer, but its website has already vanished. This closure is accompanied by another significant rollback: a pause on applications for the prestigious Sadie T.M. Alexander Scholarship, a full-tuition award for students pursuing racial justice in their studies and legal careers.
Named for a towering figure in American history, the scholarship honors Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, a Philadelphia native who, in 1927, became the first Black woman to graduate from Penn’s law school and the first national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. In July, the city unveiled the final design for a statue in her honor, to be placed near the former site of a controversial statue of ex-mayor Frank Rizzo.
Launched in 2021 with support from the Black Law Students Association, the scholarship was itself a response to an earlier controversy—public backlash following inflammatory remarks from law professor Amy Wax, who questioned the academic abilities of Black students.
Now, both the office and the scholarship appear to be casualties of political headwinds. In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order demanding that federally funded universities dismantle DEI initiatives that he claimed violated civil rights laws. In rapid succession, some universities like Penn began scrubbing diversity language from their websites and policies. Penn Medicine followed suit in May, removing its DEI web content after the Department of Justice’s “Civil Rights Fraud Initiative.” The law school’s recent closures reflect a growing national trend of DEI rollbacks in the face of conservative legal and political challenges.
