MIT closes its DEI office

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced the closure of its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) office. Although some of its initiatives will be distributed among other departments, the office will close.

"As I’ve said many times, MIT is in the talent business," the university's president, Sally Kornbluth, wrote in a public missive. Kornbluth said the closure of the Institute Community and Equity Office (ICEO) comes after more than a year of research and reflection on the institution's successes and failures.

After consulting with a purposely created task force, she expressed appreciation for ICEO's programs but noted that there was "a broad desire to rethink how this work is done in practice." A common criticism was that "community is best built locally rather than top down."

MIT is one of the universities that came under fire from the Department of Education in March, when its Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into 45 institutions for "allegedly engaging in race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs include."

The institution became the focus of conservative criticism last year after Kornbluth refused to step down or be ousted following a criticized congressional appearance. While her colleagues Liz Magill, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Claudine Gay, of Harvard, stepped aside,

Then it made headlines again for the protests on their campus, as they sprouted up at other universities across the country. This year, already with Trump in the White House, the institution joined some of the lawsuits against the withdrawal of federal grants. In February, it claimed that cuts from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would mean a loss of between $30 million and $35 million annually.