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Harvard College has allocated more financial resources to its new Office of Culture and Community than the three diversity centers it replaced, College Dean David J. Deming said in an interview on Friday.
Despite the diversity program rollbacks, Deming told The Crimson that affinity groups will continue to receive funding.
The College dissolved its Women’s Center, Office for BGLTQ Student Life, and Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations in July, consolidating former staff from the offices under a new “Harvard Foundation” within the OCC. The move was met with immediate backlash from students, who argued Harvard was taking a step back from its commitment to supporting students from marginalized groups.
But during his first sit-down interview as dean, Deming pushed back against critics, arguing that the new OCC has allocated more money towards its events than the former centers had, combined, by the same time last year.
“We are still devoting the same amount of staff time and actually devoting increased resources to the activities around the Office of Culture and Community,” he said. “We’ve had, I think, 14 events since the beginning of the year, so that’s roughly one every two days.”
The revamped Foundation hosted ice cream socials in the Radcliffe Quadrangle and Harvard Yard as well as a fall food festival at Memorial Church, which were explicitly marketed as open to all Harvard students on posters. Programming at the former offices was also open to all students, but it was geared toward students of specific identities.
In August, Deming told Peer Advising Fellows that the closure of the offices was motivated by external pressures and constraints, without providing more specific information. When asked to clarify on Friday, Deming declined to elaborate, saying that it wasn’t his place to contextualize the decisions that led to the offices’ closure.
“I don’t think it’s productive to engage in a tick-tock of how we got to this point,” said Deming, who took over as dean in July. “It’s like a change in the weather; you have to adapt to it. My focus as dean of the College is meeting the needs of our students and not trying to get into the larger dialogue around these issues.”
Deming declined to comment when asked explicitly if the changes were due to pressure from President Donald Trump — who has repeatedly called on Harvard to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programming — but he said he had made the final call to close the centers.
“I accept that people are unhappy with some things. I get that,” Deming said. “What I’d ask is just, ‘Tell us what you’d like to see.’ Don’t just say, ‘We don’t want this.’ Say what do you want.”
During the interview, Deming said the Foundation would still provide grants for events that are open to all students, in addition to funding recognized affinity groups. By law, Harvard is not able to fund events restricted by identity, but Deming said the College is now taking greater care to ensure that events are accessible to the entire student body.
“We could never fund them, and now we’re expending a little extra effort to make sure that we’re complying with those rules,” Deming said.
“There probably were events that happened in the past that violated those rules,” he added. “So what we are also doing is asking that student groups proactively ensure that they’re complying with the rules in ways that maybe we hadn’t asked before, as part of making sure that we’re complying with the law.”
Deming also confirmed that some traditional programming around identities would return — including Cultural Rhythms, a celebration in the spring featuring artists from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
The event has been hosted by the former Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations for the last 39 years. In its absence, Deming said the OCC will take up the reins.
“We are very excited about Cultural Rhythms,” he said. “We want it to be as good as it ever was — hopefully better.”
—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at samuel.church@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.
—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.
