Stephen A. Smith used a White House meeting with President Donald Trump to warn that the aggressive rollback of DEI programs is quietly drying up corporate donations to historically Black colleges and universities.
Smith, an ESPN commentator and HBCU graduate, met Trump in mid-October and zeroed in on a consequence largely absent from the partisan fight over diversity mandates: companies now hesitate to fund Black schools because a gift once treated as ordinary philanthropy can be read as a DEI initiative, exposing the donor to government scrutiny or accusations of racial preferences.
Trump acknowledged he had not fully considered that chilling effect and said he would look into it.
The retreat is already visible. Federal agencies have terminated or paused research awards and outreach efforts involving HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions deemed to conflict with administration priorities or anti-DEI directives, and private foundations and corporate givers have followed a similar path.
The practical effect is a de facto hands-off policy toward Black institutions, produced not by hostility to them but by caution about anything that looks race-conscious.