The University of Alaska Fairbanks has shuttered the office and taken down the website for an on-campus center that supported cultural programs and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) trainings.
But university officials say plans to integrate the center’s work with other offices were in motion before President Donald Trump’s administration targeted DEI programming at educational institutions nationwide.
Hudson Bolduc is the former coordinator for the Nanook Diversity and Action Center (NDAC), and said he quit in October 2024 after his mentor advised him to look for a new job due to the political climate.
“When you work in DEI, you’re very aware of anti-DEI pushes, whether it’s internal, external, the community, et cetera,” he said.
Bolduc specifically pointed to the emergence of Project 2025, a conservative presidential transition playbook that claims that DEI policies violate civil rights laws. Trump disavowed the document during his campaign, but an executive order soon after he took office sought to eliminate the widespread inclusion initiatives.
A letter from the U.S. Department of Education sent to schools and universities across the country in February also threatened their federal funding and repeated the sentiment expressed in Project 2025, saying DEI policies discriminate against white and Asian students.
After Bolduc left NDAC toward the end of last year, another employee took his place in the interim, but he said they moved on from the center in January, meaning no staff remained.
Then, earlier this month, Bolduc got a call from the Rasmuson Library at UAF “to let me know that they were going to archive the website so that they could historically document what had taken place,” he said. “And so that’s right around when I found out everything was getting pulled and that the [NDAC] website would just link to the Wood Center.”
For years, NDAC has helped facilitate professional development trainings, first-generation college student initiatives, LBGTQ student initiatives and heritage month celebrations. Staff also organized drag shows and other campus events.
An email sent Monday to the university community from University of Alaska President Pat Pitney names NDAC as one of the casualties of a Board of Regents’ motion that passed in February.
That motion directed the university president and chancellors to scrub websites, print materials, position titles and office titles of all diversity, equity and inclusion terminology. The motion says that’s to comply with federal guidance and executive orders.
On March 10, UAF Chancellor Dan White notified faculty, staff and students that he was carrying out that directive, despite resistance, saying the risk of losing federal funding posed an “existential” threat to the university.
UAF Communications Director Marmian Grimes told KUAC Tuesday the university intends to roll some of the NDAC’s functions into the larger Center for Student Engagement.
And while the university removed NDAC’s website after the Board of Regents’ motion, she said the plan to close the center’s physical office actually surfaced earlier. That decision came after the last staff member quit in January, predating Trump’s inauguration, according to Grimes.
“The bottom line is that there were two positions eliminated over the course of this reorganization, but there were no employees that were laid off or anything,” she said. “When we had the last employee leave, we took the opportunity to put that savings toward other stuff.”
For Bolduc, watching his old workplace go dark in-person and online was both expected and sad. But he said, one way or another, he expects the mission to persist in some fashion.
“Though the center can be removed, you can’t really remove the fact that student, staff, faculty – we want to be able to promote safe spaces for students, we want to promote cultural diversity, we want to celebrate who comes to UAF, and I don’t think that will stop,” he said.