The meetings were scheduled in 15-minute intervals. Dozens of University of Texas at Austin employees were summoned by batch the morning of Tuesday, April 2, into mandatory Zoom sessions with a representative of the university’s human-resources office.
That’s never a good sign.
Most worked in the Division of Campus and Community Engagement and were aware of being in the cross hairs of Senate Bill 17, which on January 1 banned all diversity trainings and programs that promoted differential treatment on the basis of race, gender, or sexuality at public colleges across Texas.
Their work days, leading up to that day, had already been a blur of sudden and disorienting changes. A program for Black women, and another for LGBT students, were revised to serve all women. The name etched on the door of the Multicultural Engagement Center was scratched off with no official announcement that it was closing. A scholarship program for undocumented students was jettisoned and plans for affinity-group graduation ceremonies canceled. Titles and job responsibilities had been overhauled.
With all the recent changes, most of those nervously entering Zoom rooms that morning felt fairly confident their jobs were safe.
In session after session that morning, an HR representative, reading from a script, addressed employees whose mics were muted and chat functions turned off. They were told they were being laid off, their last day would be July 5, and to expect an email formalizing the news.
“What struck me was the audacity of the disrespect,” said one laid-off staff member who asked not to be identified because of a fear of being forced out early for complaining. “Some people had been there for 20 years, and in 10 minutes they were gone.”
Public records obtained by The Chronicle show that 49 people were laid off that day.
Highly redacted correspondences among campus leaders obtained through open-records requests revealed a frantic attempt to shift gears, dismantling or revamping recruiting and retention programs focused on students and employees the university had deemed most at risk.
Women make up more than half of the staff at the Austin campus but accounted for more than two-thirds of the DEI-related cuts on April 2. Black people are 7 percent of the staff but absorbed almost a third of the cuts.
The people who were laid off oversaw programs that helped low-income students study abroad, undocumented students find scholarships, and Black women thrive on a campus that once banned their admission.
Faces of the Fired
They worked in restorative justice, coached minority students into becoming entrepreneurs, and connected marginalized students with mentors. They planned events, managed websites, and filmed promotional material, with salaries ranging from $30,000 to $247,000. They were led by a vice president, LaToya Smith, who will remain in an administrative role combining student services and athletics. Most had deep ties to UT, having earned undergraduate and graduate degrees there, sometimes both.
The news set off alarm bells in DEI offices around the country that face the prospect of similar cuts. Fourteen laws so far have been passed nationwide that prohibit identity-based recruitment and retention efforts in 12 states. Four will go into effect in July. The Chronicle has tracked changes to DEI policies on 164 campuses in 23 states. Even in states without new laws on the books, campuses have made changes in diversity programs and offices.
Critics of DEI programs say they’re discriminatory, ineffective, and a waste of taxpayer money. They accuse colleges of using them to try to indoctrinate students with progressive ideas.
Employees who work in those programs say that, even when they receive minimal funding and support from their campuses, they’ve made progress in narrowing achievement gaps and making students feel more welcome and supported. Watching as programs they helped build were dissected, overhauled, and then eliminated has been stressful and emotionally exhausting, staff members told The Chronicle.
The laid-off staff member and UT alumnus who agreed to speak to The Chronicle anonymously said the university suggested applying to a few open positions, but the available jobs were a poor match for the accrued expertise, the employee said. “It was like trying to fit a cylinder into a square hole.”
Besides, no matter what job the Austin campus or any other public university in Texas might offer, “technically, Gov. [Greg] Abbott is going to be my boss,” the staff member said. “He has an agenda and wants to throw out more red meat” to his Republican base. Layoffs and program closures, the employee feared, will very likely continue.
The staff member vowed to find ways to continue doing diversity work: “Dr. King gave his life so we could do this work. I refuse to be one of the voices you continue to shut down.”
Being laid off after graduating from the university and helping hundreds of students begin successful careers “hurts,” the employee said. “It’s like a slap in the face.”
Diversity was one of four strategic priorities for Bill Powers when he became UT-Austin’s president in 2006 and created the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement the following year. Its goals, as spelled out in announcing a national diversity award, were ambitious. They included “the recruitment and retention of a diverse faculty, staff, and student body as well as increasing the academic success of diverse student populations, including first-generation college students, students of color, students with disabilities and students in the LGBT community.”
Over the years, the division had three leaders. Gregory J. Vincent led it from its planning stages in 2006 until 2017. He was followed by Leonard N. Moore, who served from 2017 to 2021, and then Smith. Vincent, who resigned this month as president of Talladega College, declined to be interviewed by The Chronicle. His two successors did not return requests for comment.
The division has faced plenty of challenges, including reducing stubborn achievement gaps among students of color and hiring more minority faculty members to reflect the increasing diversity of the state’s population. The relatively small number of Black faculty and staff members have often said they felt called on to shoulder a disproportionate amount of the work on committees and boards that are working to overcome the racism and sexism of the university’s past.
Diversifying student and employee ranks requires changing institutional culture, longstanding policies, and pay scales, all under the watchful eye of accreditors and federal regulators.
Social-justice issues were front and center at the division’s 10-year anniversary, in 2017, when the statues of four Confederate leaders were moved to less prominent places on campus, and three years later, when police shootings of unarmed Black people sparked protests and support for the Black Lives Matter movement in Austin and nationwide. In a page from the university’s catalog in 2020, the division’s ambitions and accomplishments are spelled out in detail: The division, it said, was a national model of how to create a more inclusive environment where underserved students across the state could thrive. It had more than 50 units, programs, projects, and initiatives, working in campus culture, community engagement, the pre-K pipeline, and research.
In addition to the 49 people laid off from the division, eight associate or assistant deans whose portfolios had included some diversity work were returned full-time to their faculty positions. Ten more people who worked for the vice president for student affairs were also laid off “to conserve financial resources and improve efficiency,” according to termination letters obtained by The Chronicle.
State Sen. Brandon Creighton, the Republican lead author of Texas’ Senate Bill 17, said these efforts in his state have been racially divisive and discriminatory, rewarding people for factors other than merit. Creighton demanded that colleges show him by May 3 how they were complying with the law, and had them defend their responses in a state Senate higher-education subcommittee hearing last month.
The Chronicle contacted dozens of people who were laid off and heard back from several who were frustrated and angry. Several didn’t want to speak publicly before their last day, July 5, because they were afraid of losing health insurance before then.
Thaïs Bass-Moore is a co-founder and the director of the Fearless Leadership Institute, a program that began in 2013 and “aims to give Black women a sense of belonging, show them their worth, and holistically prepare them for what’s next, according to a 2022-23 impact report. The program, part of the now-closing division, is among those being cut.
“My love and my affection for Black women at UT came about because when I was at UCLA for undergraduate, at one point, I was suicidal, partially because of an abusive relationship I was in,” she said. “I was considering dropping out of school. If it wasn’t for the love and support of family who lived nearby, I might have done either of those.”
Black women, who make up about 3 percent of the undergraduate population at the Austin flagship, don’t always have aunts and sisters living nearby, Bass-Moore said. She wanted to create a program that nurtured and supported students who might be experiencing the kinds of challenges that nearly derailed her. Bass-Moore, who’d already been mentoring young Black women through church and community work, joined with a colleague, Tiffany T. Lewis, to create the institute. Lewis has also been laid off.
We tried to create kind of an HBCU within the university so the brothers and sisters could lean on each other.
“We tried to create kind of an HBCU within the university so the brothers and sisters could lean on each other,” Bass-Moore said.
The institute, which expanded in 2016 to include Hispanic women, has served around 500 students a year through weekly interest groups, mentorships, and a leadership retreat. Weekly meetings, Bass-Moore said, covered such topics as professional development, self-care, relationships, and hair care. As she learned from experience, personal problems, insecurity, and loneliness can quickly overwhelm students who are already on shaky ground academically.
Before the institute was founded, the four-year graduation rate for Black women was about 45 percent, the report said. By 2020, for students who participated in the institute, it had risen to 81 percent.
Last year, Bass-Moore led 30 students from the Fearless Leadership Institute and the Heman Sweatt Center for Black Males to New York City to network with executives from the NBA, IBM, Spotify, and other big employers. (The Sweatt Center survived the cuts after being renamed a center for “Collegiate Males.” An LGBTQ center renamed as a “Women’s Community Center” did not survive.)
Her program, she said, had already changed its mission statement and target audience to clarify that it was open to all women. “The program would change, but if we want to keep a job, we do what we have to do.”
Students, after “learning about the domino effect and all the impact it would have,” were frustrated and angry, and she sensed they wanted her to fight back. But after months of political threats, scrounging for funding, programs closing, names and missions changing, “all of these little beat-downs, I was done,” she said. “I was depleted. I didn’t have a lot of fight left.”
Bass-Moore was en route to one of those networking trips to New York when she received the summons to the Zoom meeting. “The tears — it doesn’t hit you until later. I had to just keep on moving.”
Many of the Black women who were laid off were, like her, UT alums. “They laid off their own,” Bass-Moore said. It doesn’t surprise her that Black women gravitate to many of the positions that are now being eliminated, not only at the University of Texas, but across the nation. “By nature, I feel like we’re caregivers. It’s in our history and our bloodline to come in and be mother and auntie and holder.”
Of the 261 chief diversity officers who answered a National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education 2023 survey, 63 percent were women, 52 percent were Black, and 11 percent were Hispanic.
Some, like Bass-Moore, have options to fall back on. She’s also an actor, and after July, she will return to that profession full-time. She worries, though, about the minority women at the University of Texas whose supports, she believes, have been pulled out from under them.
While colleagues were worrying early this year that their programs might be eliminated, Alicia A. Moreno felt fairly confident she’d survive the cuts. Moreno, who had received both masters and doctoral degrees from UT-Austin, was hired in 2021 to oversee the Monarch program, which provided supports and scholarships to students who are undocumented or from families with mixed immigration statuses.
The program survived on a shoestring from donations but in the fall 2023 semester, it was celebrating receipt of its first university grant, for $10,000. Moreno was excited that her team would be able to expand programming and hire more interns. By December, the university had shut down Monarch.
As an undergraduate at the University of North Texas, Moreno had worked with undocumented high-school students who were from “a population that didn’t trust or seek out support, and for good reason. Students would say: ‘I don’t want to go to college. College isn’t for me.’ It wasn’t that they didn’t want to go to college. They didn’t think they could, by law.”
In her job at UT, one of her biggest rewards was reassuring undocumented students that they belong in college and could go on to successful careers. So was educating the employees who work with them. “We were training staff and faculty to understand who the population was, what their needs were, and how they could help these students,” Moreno said.
It was a logical extension of the work she’d been doing at UT since her days as a masters and doctoral student, serving as an academic coach, helping first-year students adjust to college life.
She didn’t see the layoff coming. “All summer and fall, we were told that we were safe. All the other programs were under a microscope and making changes, but I told my students we’re exempt because we don’t do race-based programming,” Moreno said. “The only thing I thought we had to do was tweak one training in which I talked about intersectionality,” a term that refers to the idea that different forms of prejudice can overlap.
This past spring we all saw the possibility of the division being dissolved, but no one thought we’d lose our jobs.
Someone from the university’s legal team pointed out an event flier that Moreno had reposted on Monarch’s Instagram page about a Latinx leadership summit another group was putting on. “It wasn’t ours. I was just helping spread the word,” she said. “This law wasn’t supposed to be in effect until January 1 and they held against me the fact that I promoted a Latinx event in October.”
It also pointed out a scholarship program for undocumented students that the administration said was illegal, even though it was funded by private donations. In trying to save the program, she added, “My boss and I pointed out that undocumented people can come from any race or ethnicity.”
But even if Monarch didn’t survive, Moreno felt protected by another administrative role she’d been assigned to in August 2023 helping oversee efforts to expand low-cost study-abroad options. Earlier this year, she took 40 students — mostly low income, first generation — to Japan. Even with Monarch closing, the global-leadership position meant that “I had zero indication I’d lose my job,” she said.
“This past spring we all saw the possibility of the division being dissolved, but no one thought we’d lose our jobs,” Moreno said. “We thought we’d just be placed in different divisions.”
After the announcement, “those of us on campus were just sitting alone in our offices processing what happened. I opened my door and a colleague was standing in front of me just crying. We were in utter shock.”
Moreno, who owns a home with her wife, is searching for jobs and would like to stay in Texas, where both of their relatives are. “As someone who benefited from support programs and who is Latino, first gen, and comes from a low-income background, I’m passionate about serving underserved students,” Moreno said.
Given the state’s rapidly changing demographics and stubborn inequities in educational outcomes, there’s plenty of work to be done, she said. But in the current climate, “there are so few of the positions I’m passionate about here anymore.”
Some programs and people are being moved to other divisions, many others discontinued. Despite the changes the university had already made to comply with Senate Bill 17, Jay Hartzell, UT-Austin’s president, said in his public announcement of the changes, the additional cuts were still needed to reduce overlap, streamline student services and redirect resources into teaching and research. He later acknowledged to faculty members that the university was still taking political heat to demonstrate its compliance with the anti-DEI law.
Staff members said they were told not to talk to the media but to refer calls to the university’s central marketing and communications team. But controlling the narrative got more complicated this month when the university laid off 20 members of that staff, effective August 31. An administrator said the goal was to improve the university’s reputation and response to crises, according to a report from KUT News.
Although the division has made some progress, the challenges it faced back in 2006 persist today. The programs set up to explicitly tackle them, critics of the cuts say, have either been eliminated or severely watered down.
In his announcement, Hartzell said it was “important that this continues to be a welcoming, supportive community for all.” It remains to be seen how the university will accomplish that.
