Dozens of colleges have quietly pulled back from Pride Month this year under pressure from the Trump administration to enforce institutional neutrality policies more closely.
The trade publication Insider Higher Ed reported that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UNC Greensboro and Lamar University in Texas recently deleted LGBTQ social media posts.
Other top schools pulled down Pride flags from public spaces, including at the University of Chicago and Boston University.
Meanwhile, the University of North Texas dropped its sponsorship of a local Denton Pride festival.
Some LGBTQ advocates involved in Pride Month events told The Washington Times that colleges pulled back from them this year to avoid the Trump administration cutting off their federal funding and grants based on allegations of political bias.
“Schools are not abandoning Pride Month because they’ve had a change of heart,” said Gareth Gallagher, a Los Angeles-based LGBTQ event planner. “I feel they’re going quiet because they’re scared.”
Norman Extract, the South Florida-based founder of OutLGBTQ.com, a nonprofit that publicizes Pride events, blamed President Trump for stoking a “troubling pattern” of anti-gay sentiment.
“This shift is having clear ramifications across the country, where we are seeing rainbow crosswalks painted over and pride-themed displays erased,” Mr. Extract said. “When those symbols disappear, it tells LGBTQ+ residents that their presence is conditional and something to be hidden rather than celebrated.”
The Education Department redesignated June as Title IX Month for the second year in a row — pushing colleges to publicly repudiate the Biden administration’s support for male-born transgender athletes competing in women’s sports.
The month honors a 1972 federal law that required equal opportunities for male and female athletes. Under Mr. Trump, the Education Department has investigated dozens of school districts and colleges that reinterpreted the law as protecting self-identified gender identity rather than biological sex.
“While prior administrations distorted the law in a relentless pursuit of a radical agenda, forcing young women and girls to endure unsafe and uncomfortable situations in their places of learning, the Trump administration has kept our promise to enforce the law,” Education Department spokeswoman Amelia Joy said in an emailed statement.
Some public colleges, such as Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, have hosted compliance workshops to enforce the Trump administration’s insistence that Title IX is based on biological sex.
However, none have embraced any public displays or parades to honor the new designation.
Some campuses instead continue to sponsor Pride Month activities — including the City University of New York and Howard University in the District of Columbia.
“I’m not aware of a single school district or university that has adopted Title IX Month,” said Caroline Welles, a former Biden administration official who recruits women to run as Democrats for state legislatures. “The larger story is that the overwhelming majority of schools, colleges and corporate sponsors celebrated Pride Month this June just as they always have.”
Robert A. Heineman, political science professor emeritus and a former department chair at Alfred University in New York, said even conservative schools are likely afraid of LGBTQ groups protesting any Title IX Month events.
“It is a sad commentary on American pluralism that schools that have worked diligently to implement Title IX now face pressures from marginal LBGTQ groups,” Mr. Heineman said in an email. “Honoring the achievements of Title IX is a useful way the government can give additional support to the nation’s educational institutions.”
Pride Month, an annual commemoration of the June 1969 Stonewall riots that the gay community organized in New York City’s Greenwich Village, originally focused on promoting same-sex marriage. Corporate sponsors and liberal organizers gradually emphasized the right of children to transition from their birth sex into other gender identities after the Supreme Court legalized gay nuptials over a decade ago.
According to academic insiders, it’s unlikely elite universities will ever publicly honor Title IX Month, even if the White House persuades them to keep male-born athletes out of female sports.
Jonathan Zimmerman, an education history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, cited a simmering anger about the Trump team using the designation “to impose its values on everyone else.”
“For years, Republicans have been telling us that education should be a state and local concern rather than a federal one,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “But all of that goes out the window when we get to issues around gender, especially trans athletes and sports.”
