In the wake of anti-DEI directives from the White House, local LGBTQ+ advocates say Arizona State University has been quietly making digital resources less available.
To ensure they remain accessible to the community, they say they’re still catching up with verifying and reuploading the volume of digital materials aimed at promoting resources like information about gender-inclusive housing, inclusion guides for faculty and student spaces, and more.
ASU alum Gabe Hagen owns Brick Road Coffee roughly 5 miles from campus. He’s been helping verify and reupload a slew of broken links and webpages that used to make up the bulk of resources aimed at LGBTQ+ students and faculty alike.
“Whether it be from the LGBTQ plus community or really any community that is in need of some sort of support,” said Hagen. “When these types of changes happen, oftentimes — especially when they’re done quiet — they can be very, very harmful. Because when they're done quietly and we let them happen in the dark, that's when we see some major steps back.”
Hagen said he understands that ASU faces risks damaging access to federal funding. But he added that removing those digital resources sends a message, and part of that is for the community to step in and bridge the gaps.
When he asked the university about it, he said the response was disappointing.
“They say they haven't removed resources,” said Hagen, “but unless they can provide me the URL for the faculty guide — the transgender faculty guide, I'd say that resource has been removed. Or the gender-inclusive housing — unless they have a URL that I can't find through searching their website, that resource has been removed.”
An ASU spokesperson told KJZZ that resources haven’t changed, and are still available via the Rainbow Coalition’s website. But advocates argue that the student organization, which receives funding and functions differently than traditional resources, can’t provide the same support.
Hagen said tools like the Wayback Machine, which automatically scans and captures screenshots of webpages to archive them, have come in handy.
“It’s showing the major step back we are witnessing,” he said. “We are seeing that we used to have resources, we used to have safe spaces. That was not perfect, but it was at least going in the right direction, and we are actively moving in the other direction. And that, to me, is something that I think from a historic standpoint, we have to document.”
Hagen said this serves as a reminder of how permanent the internet is, and how resilient the LGBTQ+ community is in the face of what he called a push for erasure.
