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The Oversight Project, a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation — the right-wing think tank that authored Project 2025, the blueprint for Donald Trump’s second presidency — has asked the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC Chapel Hill) to submit the syllabi and class materials for all 70 of its courses. The project seeks to identify any materials (including LGBTQ+-related ones) that contradict President Trump’s executive orders seeking to defund and persecute institutions that pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
The request occurs as the Trump Administration continues to target DEI and pro-Palestinian protests on college and university campuses. Last week, Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon admitted that the administration’s persecution of schools over these issues represents “a monumental victory for conservatives” against “elite campuses” and their “far left-leaning professors” (rather than a victory in the Trump Administration’s ostensible crusade to end discrimination in higher education).
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Oversight Project President Mike Howell submitted his request to the university on July 2, specifically requesting any data on class materials using the following terms: “gender identity”, “queer”, “sexuality”, “microaggressions”, “implicit bias”, and numerous other terms related to social justice and DEI efforts, Inside Highed Ed reported.
Howell’s request said that the university should pay for the administrative costs to pull the data because “Disclosure of these records will contribute significantly to the public’s understanding of university operations and student-facing programming, particularly considering ongoing public concern regarding institutional compliance with” the president’s anti-DEI executive orders.
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“[The records] will shed light on potential inconsistencies between internal practices and public representations made by officials in a matter of substantial national importance,” he wrote.
It’s likely that if The Oversight Project detects any DEI-related keywords in the university’s course materials, it would report the school for investigation to the Department of Education’s (DOE) Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The office has persecuted schools, threatening to revoke millions in federal funding unless they agree to remove all support for DEI initiatives and any policies allowing transgender athletes to compete in campus sports.
The OCR claims that DEI and trans-inclusive policies violate federal anti-discrimination laws, but critics say the OCR has merely re-interpreted civil rights law to aid Trump’s campaign against institutes of higher education.
UNC-Chapel Hill hasn’t yet responded to the Oversight Project’s request, but said that course materials remain the intellectual property of the professors who created them. As such, professors aren’t required to submit their course materials in response to information requests.
One UNC-Chapel Hill professor, Chris Petsko, has said he won’t hand over the course materials for his business management course — which partially discusses the outcomes of stereotyping and prejudice in various workplace practices — because he considers the project’s ideology illegitimate and wholly beholden to the Trump administration.
“These very broad and vague requests for faculty academic records such as syllabi and faculty communications about their academic pursuits chill free speech by putting a large burden on the faculty members and revealing private academic information they use to teach their classes,” said Zach Greenberg, a First Amendment attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
The DOE’s OCR has persecuted several colleges and universities in pursuit of Trump’s and the Heritage Foundation’s anti-DEI crusade. The DOE extorted $200 million out of Columbia University to restore the majority of funding that the Trump administration cut over allegations that the university violated anti-discrimination laws.
When commenting on Columbia’s settlement, DOE Secretary Linda McMahon admitted, “This is a monumental victory for conservatives who wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left-leaning professors.” Her comment undermined the Trump administration’s claims about its primary goal being to protect students from antisemitic and discriminatory harassment on campus.
Today, the DOE’s OCR announced that it would investigate Duke University in North Carolina for allegedly considering ethnic and racial factors in hiring, admissions, and scholarship decisions.
Last year, the Oversight Project issued thousands of data requests to search all federal government workers’ communications that mentioned sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression. The requests were likely to help identify any career civil servants who oppose the foundation’s and the president’s anti-DEI views, the investigative news site ProPublica reported.
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Source: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/07/pro ... materials/