“Greñuda y acomplejada” (“Frizzy-haired and insecure”). This racist and misogynistic insult concludes each of the six stanzas of anonymous verses directed at Professor Ísar Godreau of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) campus in Cayey. This happened after the researcher publicly denounced an anonymous and racist letter against an Afro-descendant supervisor at the campus.

Following her demand for a public condemnation from the Academic Senate, Godreau became the target of a new attack through a text distributed on campus, which included prejudiced language mocking her hair and anti-racist stance.

That’s the fourth stanza of the attack, signed by someone who went by the name El Silencioso (The Silent One).

This incident happened 15 years ago. At that time, the Academic Senate spoke out, but the campus administration did not promote any action, public apology, or investigation due to the anonymous nature of the publications, Godreau recalled.

Unlike universities in the United States, where debates on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have led to institutional structures and protections for decades, efforts at UPR were just beginning to gain traction when they started being dismantled by the federal policies of the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, according to more than 25 university community members interviewed by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI). They warned of increased ideological polarization, misinformation, and the reduction of institutional policies protecting historically marginalized populations at the University.

Governor Jennifer Gonzalez’s administration has adopted these federal policies, aimed at dismantling diversity programs in both government agencies and the public university.

At the UPR, Trump’s policies led to the elimination of the Diversity Committee of the Board of Governors, at a time when there are no protocols to address racism or ensure accessibility for vulnerable sectors. These measures also threaten to reverse already recognized rights, such as access to gender-neutral bathrooms, and exacerbate the exclusion of visibly Black individuals, those with a disability, as well as women, the LGBTQ+ population, and students from impoverished sectors or outside the metropolitan area. 

At the Río Piedras Campus, located in San Juan, Eduardo Ramos Carrasquillo still remembers the anger he felt when, in October 2023, contemporary literature professor Joel Morales Rolón compared him to the ape in Franz Kafka’s story “A Report to an Academy.” In that story, Kafka narrates the tale of an ape who, after being captured by humans, learns to imitate their behavior and speak like them to integrate into society. Eduardo, being Afrodescendant, immediately felt that the comparison carried a racist and violent undertone.

“Encountering this situation makes you realize there is a predisposition to violence. The professor sees me in my frenzy and thinks I’m going to attack him just for showing my teeth,” he said.

Ramos Carrasquillo said the incident happened during a debate in which the professor, apparently upset because the group hadn’t done a reading, reacted angrily when the student tried to justify the situation by mentioning the challenges of studying and working simultaneously. During that discussion, the professor allegedly responded that instead of baring his teeth as a form of intimidation, he should do like the ape in Kafka’s story and shape his thoughts with language.

He did not report the professor to the Student Ombudsman’s Office, although he acknowledged the harm caused by some silences. “What am I supposed to say to a white professor who compares me to a monkey and then interprets any gesture of mine as aggression? It’s part of how reality is constructed; it’s normal, and you can’t rebel because then you’re labeled as frantic, paranoid, or violent,” lamented the Philosophy student.

Professor Morales Rolón did not agree to an interview with the CPI. 

Diversity Without Access

At the University of Puerto Rico’s Mayagüez campus (known as RUM, in Spanish), located on the island’s western coast, Fernando Oyola Ramírez faces daily obstacles that most others barely notice. He is 27 years old, has been studying English since 2015, and uses a wheelchair due to a condition called spinal muscular atrophy.

The campus is not accessible to him, despite the University being governed by the Bill of Rights for Persons with Disabilities (Act 238), which requires accessibility to federally funded buildings and the elimination of barriers to receiving services and protocols adapted for students requiring reasonable accommodations. Since he began his bachelor’s degree, he has had to contend with uneven sidewalks, poorly designed ramps, and elevators and electric platforms that are out of service more often than they’re functional.

Next to the stairs are some lift platforms. Fernando has a key to access them, but the gate is too high, and he cannot open it alone, so he has to ask for help every time he needs to move to other floors of the building.

“I depended on my parents to use those platforms and go up to take classes,” he said. Since not all courses are offered on the first floor, his mother adapted her job to part-time to accompany him, wait for him during classes, and then help him down.

In September 2024, the platforms broke down and took four months to be repaired. The young man missed two weeks of classes while professors tried to adapt the courses to a virtual format. Fernando graduates this semester and will begin his master’s degree at the same campus in August.

“Studying is stressful enough but adding physical barriers to the life of a student in a wheelchair, and not being able to quickly fix those broken elevators and porch lifts, adds more stress. It demotivates and mentally affects anyone with a disability,” he said.

Resistance Against Gender Diversity

On the afternoon of Friday, April 25, Camila Bermúdez González was preparing to present the findings of a study she worked on for two years with colleagues from the Transdisciplinary Institute for Social Action Research. They analyzed the challenges women face in sports in Puerto Rico.

Before starting, the atmosphere already felt tense, she described. In the days leading up to the presentation, she and her colleagues received comments from some professors at the Humacao campus of the University of Puerto Rico, located in the eastern part of the island. These professors questioned the value of the study for promoting a gender perspective at a time when there is a threat of eliminating federal funds to institutions that address diversity-related topics in both their administration and academic research.

Once the study was presented, a professor openly questioned its relevance during the Q&A.

“He told us: ‘Women no longer want to be feminists. What is the importance [of the study] if women no longer want to identify as feminists?’” said the Social Sciences student, who preferred to withhold the professor’s name.

But it wasn’t just what was said, but how. “It’s the attitudes the professor used that made the resistance of the academy toward these projects studying gender issues evident,” the student emphasized. 

For her, this experience is not an isolated case but a sign of the growing influence of conservative and religious ideologies within the university system. “Humacao is a very conservative and religious town. It’s no surprise that this mentality reaches the University because the campus is in an area where these topics are taboo. It’s not the same to talk about these topics at the Río Piedras Campus, as in Humacao, where many are religious, and some even have very radical thoughts against these topics,” she noted, referring to the rejection of concepts like “gender perspective” and “feminicides” or the lack of openness to gender-neutral bathrooms or the use of inclusive language. In the town of Humacao, there are more than a hundred churches, Juan Vargas, director of the Faith-Based Office of the Municipality, confirmed to the CPI.

This influence, Bermúdez González warned, limits academic freedom and creates a climate of tension where projects with a gender perspective are seen as ideological provocations rather than contributions to university research.

At the Río Piedras Campus, the most recent debate related to diversity is about the elimination or preservation of inclusive bathrooms, that is, gender-neutral bathrooms that can be used by anyone regardless of their biological sex. Those calling for the elimination of these bathrooms argue that they lend themselves to sexual harassment. For the University Feminist Association (AFU, in Spanish), which defends keeping them, reducing the conversation to that single aspect makes invisible the harassment, academic exclusion, violence, and precariousness that trans and non-binary people experience daily at the University.

However, these issues remain unresolved because, in March, the UPR Board of Governors dismantled the Special Committee on Accessibility, Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, an entity created in 2021 to establish public policy and seek solutions to address these issues across the 11 campuses of the public university system.

The decision to eliminate the Committee responded to the Trump Administration’s mandate to cut federal funds to institutions promoting such initiatives. The motion to eliminate the Committee was presented at a meeting on March 27 by student representative Daniel Fernández González, whom his peers at the Mayagüez and Río Piedras campuses requested in April to resign from his position on the Board of Governors following the action. As of press time, Fernández González remains in his position and declined to be interviewed by the CPI.

During the meeting, the student representative said that the motion to eliminate the Committee responded to a regressive agenda imposed by the federal government and not to the values of the UPR. He noted that the measure was a consequence of policies he disagreed with, but he still pushed for the elimination of the entity, of which he was a member.

For Professor and Anthropologist Juan Caraballo Resto, the positions being taken by the UPR administration, including the elimination of the diversity committee, represent a fracture in the very mission of the public university.

“The University is not a building, but the community that constitutes it. Only the diversity of ideas that this diverse community proposes allows for important clashes of ideas and the construction of a country with its pillars of knowledge that help us move the national project forward,” he stated.

The law governing the UPR requires it to “fully develop the intellectual and spiritual wealth” of the people of Puerto Rico, ”especially those less favored in economic resources.” Additionally, through Certification Number 58 of 2004-2005, the public university system implemented the Policy Against Discrimination at the University of Puerto Rico, which prohibits all discrimination in education, employment, and service provision based on race, color, sex, birth, age, social origin or condition, ancestry, marital status, religious or political ideas or beliefs, gender, sexual preference, nationality, ethnic origin, veteran status of the Armed Forces, or physical disability.

After the elimination of the Committee, the UPR Board of Governors — composed of 11 men and two women — tried to minimize the criticism by indicating that, in substitution, the responsibility was transferred to the Permanent Committee on Student Affairs, which “will assume a student-centered approach and ensure their civil rights.” They detailed that this committee will be responsible for promoting and supervising admission and retention policies, ensuring accessibility, addressing the spectrum of student needs, and ensuring fair representation of all student sectors. It does not include direct instructions on how inclusion will be promoted, nor does it assign specific tasks to promote diversity among other sectors of the university community, such as professors, administrative staff, facilities and operations staff, and security personnel.

The chairman of the Board, Ricardo Dalmau Santana, did not respond to a request for an interview with the CPI. 

A University Without Diversity?

On Friday, February 14, the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education issued a letter titled “Dear Colleague,” presenting diversity programs and cultural spaces as “a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history,” comparing them to racial segregation. The federal agency, now led by Linda McMahon, justifies its opposition to diversity programs with a literal interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which establish that no person can be excluded, segregated, or treated unequally due to their race, color, or nationality.

According to the federal agency, diversity programs in universities encompass admissions, graduation ceremonies, dormitory assignments, student employment, and extracurricular activities.

Under Trump’s directives, implemented by McMahon and expanding on a 2023 court ruling, the use of race as an affirmative factor in university admissions, hiring, or promotion is prohibited, as is the allocation of economic aid, such as scholarships and housing, based on race. Additionally, programs that ensure the inclusion of diverse people, the representation of certain racial groups, or that teach about their historical experiences are dismantled, under the premise that these activities foster divisions. 

Professors Godreau, from Cayey, Mayra Santos Febres, from Río Piedras, and Jocelyn Géliga Vargas, from RUM, agreed that eliminating race from affirmative inclusion criteria in universities, as proposed by the U.S. government, is more problematic for UPR because the institution doesn’t even have clear data on its Afro-descendant population. For the academics, the aim is to further erase a group that has been historically ignored in Puerto Rico.

The elimination of the Diversity Committee of the UPR Board of Governors, for example, halted a collaborative project conducted by Godreau and Professor Mariluz Franco Ortiz, from UPR in Cayey, to collect data on the racial identity of students across the 11 campuses.

“We had been collaborating with that Committee to create mechanisms to collect data on the racial identity of students at the UPR, to see if the enrollment of students at the public university reflected the racial diversity of our population in Puerto Rico. All that went to waste. There was a lot of institutional support from that Committee; we were on the verge of success,” Godreau recounted.

The project, the professor detailed, already had proposed protocols, methodological design, literature analysis, and had begun the process of requesting permits to implement it. But with the elimination of the Committee, everything was left in limbo, as, although there was no formal communication to stop the work, the professors considered their efforts terminated following the Board of Governors’ certification that ordered the termination of the Committee’s mandate “in compliance with the public policy of the United States government.” 

“The people identified to work on this are no longer there,” she said. The direct contact with the UPR Central Administration was through Professor Juan C. Jorge Rivera, executive officer of Diversity, with whom the academics have not had communication since the Committee was eliminated in March.

The lack of information on the racial composition of the student body, Godreau warned, is not a minor issue, as without data, “you cannot oversee whether the University is fulfilling its public mission.”

“If you don’t have data on how things are, you won’t be able to measure if we are improving or not,” lamented the researcher who is part of the Interdisciplinary Research Institute at UPR in Cayey.

“That [university] census on Afro-descendants is fundamental,” concluded Professor Santos Febres in a separate interview, and who is principal investigator at the Center for Research and Digital Archive on Afrodescendancy at the Río Piedras Campus (PRAFRO Center).

“We need to know how many we are. If that [Afro census] is delayed, we fall far behind in having a more precise idea of what our population is. Now they leave us without an informative basis to create the necessary policies,” said Santos Febres, who for four years has coordinated the Afro Summit at the Río Piedras Campus, where dialogue tables, panels, and healing spaces for Black people in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean are held.

Santos Febres has a critical view of the Committee, as she says it was part of a slow, bureaucratic administrative structure incapable of implementing systemic changes with concrete results.

“I’m not saying that the Central Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee is not a good idea and that they weren’t working hard to create more impactful public policies. They were doing that. However, I think we need to keep fighting for a real implementation of agile policies that create equity practices,” she said.

Yarimar Rosa Rodríguez, director of the Center for Educational Research at the Faculty of Education at the Río Piedras Campus, pointed out that the problem is due to the perspectives of the UPR Central Administration being completely disconnected from reality and daily life on the campuses. “That’s why many faculties at the Río Piedras Campus decided to respond, from a faculty-led stance, against the Central Administration’s and presidency’s position to eliminate that Committee,” she emphasized.

The Puerto Rican Association of University Professors, the faculties of the School of Law, and the faculties of Education and Social Sciences, as well as student organizations, such as the General Student Council, the Federation of Social Work Students of Río Piedras, the Student Movement, and the Student Collective of RUM, among others, repudiated the elimination of the Committee. 

Inclusive bathrooms: a hard-won victory at risk

For Mabel Rodríguez Centeno, who teaches courses in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the Río Piedras Campus, Trump’s public policy, which the UPR administration adopted, reverses achievements made in the past decade.

“In recent years, a kind of movement of sensitization, awareness, and political agency by sexual diversities began to take place, for example, at the UPR,” explained Rodríguez Centeno.

She recalled that during Barack Obama’s administration, students at the campus actively pushed for the implementation of inclusive bathrooms in line with the directives of the then U.S. president, who initiated that public policy as recognition and protection for trans people.

“At that time, when Luis Ferrao was rector of the Río Piedras Campus, the order for inclusive bathrooms was approved. That doesn’t mean we had them overnight. These things have always faced a lot of resistance,” she said.

She lamented that once Ferrao assumed the presidency of the university system, he did not promote the policy of inclusive bathrooms in the rest of the campuses.

Miguel Muñoz became the interim president of UPR after Ferrao’s departure in February, and right off the bat, one of his first statements was against inclusive bathrooms. The Interim President was not available for an interview with the CPI.

Although the policy of inclusive bathrooms remained in place only at the Río Piedras campus, even there, its application is very limited, agreed students Jinelly Romero Cabrera and Ariana Santiago Díaz of the AFU and professors Rodríguez Centeno, from the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and Rosa Rodríguez, from Education.

Of the more than 60 buildings that make up the Río Piedras Campus, only 10 have inclusive bathrooms, and in each, only two were enabled, all on the first floors. In total, there are only 20 inclusive bathrooms available for the entire student community, which exceeds 13,000 students.

Nonetheless, some students oppose the permanence of these spaces, arguing that they lead to “sexual harassment,” as stated by Jan Carlos Tousset Rivera and Cristian Rodríguez García, members of the Río Piedras Campus Chapter of Students for Life — a student organization opposed to abortion rights — during a student assembly on April 23.

But the data shows that incidents of harassment and sexual assault at UPR-RP have decreased since inclusive bathrooms were established in 2019, according to information from the Campus’ Compliance and Audits Office. In 2022, seven cases of sexual harassment were recorded, three in 2023, and one in 2024. So far in 2025, no complaints of this type of violence have been received. The data collected from the complaints do not include the location where the incidents occurred.

For Romero Cabrera, from the AFU, a person who truly intends to commit a violent or lewd act does not stop to look at the bathroom sign, regardless of whether it reads “ladies,” “gentlemen,” or “inclusive bathroom.”

“What is violent is what that person has in their head. Removing inclusive bathrooms solves absolutely nothing,” said the Foreign Languages student.

Rodríguez Centeno, from the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, pointed out that detractors of inclusive bathrooms do not consider the dehumanization that their positions provoke on other people with different realities, such as trans people, for whom these places are safe spaces, important in their process of self-affirmation.

Many trans and non-binary people arrive at the University at an early stage of personal exploration, when they are still discovering and affirming their identity, explained Rodríguez Centeno. In many cases, their families do not know — or do not accept — that reality, forcing them to navigate the university space with extra caution.

“Before, they would arrive at the University dressed in the clothes imposed by their families, and in their backpacks, they carried the clothes they wanted to present themselves socially with,” she said.

That transition process, even within the campus, could expose them to situations of violence. “In that change of clothes, the possibility of someone being offended and violent toward them exists,” she added.

She recalled that in 2018, some trans people were assaulted by university guards at the Río Piedras Campus, who prevented them from using the bathrooms they identified with, based on arbitrary judgments about their appearance. “I mean, I’m talking about feeling intimidated by going to the bathroom,” she pointed out.

Unnamed Violence 

Although the deterioration of infrastructure, the increase in tuition costs, and the fiscal challenges facing the UPR affect the entire university community, for marginalized populations, these structural obstacles are much more difficult to overcome, noted Nairobi Hernández Francia, a member of the PRAFRO Center.

“Everything that happens at the University — that there is no proper infrastructure, no housing, that tuition goes up disproportionately —  affects Afro-descendant students because we know there is a very close relationship between class and racialization. Therefore, the rope breaks at the thinnest point… and the thinnest point is the most marginalized students,” Hernández Francia stated.

In the case of people with functional diversity, the challenges multiply, as they not only face discrimination from others but also physical barriers imposed by the institution itself and by a physical infrastructure that is not adapted to their needs.

At the Río Piedras Campus, for example, 219 students with functional diversity reported having difficulty finding readers for learning assistance, limitations with building access, and difficulties with library services. The finding was part of the first study measuring the main needs students faced at that campus in terms of food, housing, transportation, materials and equipment, economic security, and the service needs for students with disabilities, published in January by the Psychological Research Institute of the Faculty of Social Sciences.

“The UPR campuses have physical plant deficiencies ranging from electrical power, buildings in poor shape. Additionally, the size of elevators and the dimensions of some classroom doors make it difficult for all types of bodies to navigate the university space,” noted anthropologist Caraballo Resto.

The UPR campuses also face serious delays in the reconstruction of structures affected by recent atmospheric phenomena and by the constant electricity fluctuations in Puerto Rico, which frequently leave essential equipment like elevators out of service. An example of this is one of the main elevators at the Student Center at UPR in Bayamón, which has been out of order since last semester, confirmed Anthony Pérez Cardez, president of the General Student Council of that campus.

A similar situation occurs at the Río Piedras Campus, where the service room for people with disabilities in the José M. Lázaro Library has been closed since Hurricane María in 2017. Although the administration announced that all floors of the library will eventually be accessible, it is a project that could take another three years. 

Professor Jocelyn Géliga Vargas, co-coordinator of the University Access Center (CUA) located at the RUM, says that the UPR also lacks the capacity to address the growing number of neurodivergent students, who arrive in the classroom with diagnoses such as attention deficit, dyslexia, severe anxiety, and other conditions.

“Most professors are not prepared to handle this,” she said, questioning that, in many campuses, academic excellence standards are still imposed without adjustments that consider these realities. Although reasonable accommodation is a right established by law, in practice, it remains optional and often must be self-managed due to the lack of a clear institutional protocol, Géliga Vargas noted.

“Before, I would receive a single reasonable accommodation sheet every so often. Now I get up to three notifications per class each semester. In many cases, there is no understanding, and there isn’t even a protocol to handle neurodiverse students when they enter a crisis,” she lamented.

In her view, the increase in requests for reasonable accommodation reflects that more students dare to identify as neurodivergent and claim their rights, something that was less common before. But, she added, it also exposes the University’s lag in the face of that generational and social behavior change that is already happening.

“Many students eventually approach me to thank me for the reasonable accommodation. But I clarify that it’s a right, and they tell me no one else does it — that it’s just words on paper,” she recounted.

This story is made possible through a collaboration between the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo and Open Campus.

This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and thoroughly reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.