The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is scrapping a progressive graduate program emphasizing “social justice” and “health equity,” citing low enrollment and a lack of sustainability.
According to an email sent to students on April 4, the Gillings School of Public Health will end admissions to its Health Equity and Social Justice concentration within the Master of Public Health (MPH) program following the fall 2025 cohort.
“We are reaching out to share the heavy news that … Dean Nancy Messonnier has made the difficult decision to discontinue new admission into our Health Equity and Social Justice concentration next year,” the email stated.
Administrators explained in the message that the program failed to meet minimum enrollment requirements and emphasized that “our current political context was not a factor in this decision.”
Alleged Students in the Health Equity Class of 2026 began a petition that accuses the university of attempting to “erase health equity” and calls for the decision to be reversed. The petition also claims that the elimination “undermines Gillings’ commitment toward public health.”
[RELATED: NIH removes DEI requirements from grant applications]
According to the program’s website, the concentration heavily emphasized leftist terminology and frameworks like “structural inequities” and “social justice.”
”The Health Equity and Social Justice concentration will equip students with the skills to: Critically evaluate public health issues based on the historical context, policies, theory, and methodological approaches,” the web page says.
The program also enables students to “[w]ork in diverse teams to assure health equity and social justice principles and practices are adhered to.”
UNC’s decision is part of a growing trend to cut Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs in higher education since the start of the new Trump administration.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently slashed funding for a $1.6 million National Institutes of Health project that went toward “transgender mice.”
In March, Fox News reported that HHS ended over $330 million in grants to California nonprofits and schools, including one for a UCLA study on “Buddhism and HIV Stigma in Thailand.”
The University of Michigan School of Nursing also recently swapped its DEI page and renamed it the “Community Culture” page after one of President Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders signed in January.
Campus Reform has reached out to the UNC Gillings School and Dean Messonnier for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
