After Texas’ DEI Bans, Administrators Got ‘Creative.’ Then They Got in Trouble.

As director of student belonging at the University of Texas at Tyler, Tarecka Payne was still adjusting to how her job had changed under a new law banning diversity, equity, and inclusion activities when she was ambushed in her office and secretly recorded by an undercover reporter from a right-wing news group.

Payne was asked whether the DEI work she’d been assigned to when she was hired in July 2022 was off the table now that Senate Bill 17, which took effect January 1, had passed. “There’s really no ways of, like, doing the DEI work?” the reporter asked.

“No, you can still do it. You just have to be … creative,” Payne answered, pausing before carefully enunciating the final word.

Within days, the university suspended her while it investigates the video.

She’s not alone. Administrators from several other universities said they’re investigating comments their staff members made to someone hired by Accuracy in Media, a conservative news website. A seven-minute video the news group circulated last month claims to show these Texas employees “bragging” that they were still doing DEI work, just calling it something else.

Caught in their campaign were student-affairs staff members whose jobs have shifted, sometimes multiple times, as colleges figure out how to comply with a law that bans much, but not all, of the diversity and inclusion work they’d been assigned.

In what appears to be an earlier title, director of student diversity and inclusion, on her LinkedIn profile, Payne’s duties are listed as assisting “the campus community by developing multicultural programs and strategic initiatives related to diversity, equity, and inclusion to support the recruitment, retention, and success of diverse and underrepresented student populations.”

Now, as director of student belonging, she’s one of 20 employees listed in the university’s department of student engagement, which supports programs that “meet the needs of a growing student population.”

Pretending to be a DEI supporter, the woman hired by Accuracy in Media told Payne she was glad the administrator was “smart enough” to know how to find any loopholes in the law. By keeping her questions deliberately vague — she does not define what she means by DEI — she got the answers she was looking for.

“They’re gonna keep coming for whatever you rename it to, unfortunately, so how are you going to carry on?” the reporter asked.

“We carry on,” Payne answered. “We do the work. I plot. I plan.” Asked how many times the university has changed the name of the DEI office, she held up three fingers, adding “officially twice.” Sounding weary and resigned in some of her answers, frustrated and determined in others, Payne had no idea that clips from the conversation would soon go viral.

Using hidden cameras and undercover reporters posing as recent college graduates, Accuracy in Media struck up conversations with employees at two dozen public campuses across Texas. As narrator, the group’s president, Adam Guillette, set the tone by warning that “radical, anti-American diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are out of control” on college campuses. In an interview with The Chronicle, Guillette said, “We found, shockingly, that some universities, begrudgingly, were adhering to the law.”

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On the other hand, he said in the video that “highly paid administrators at a half-dozen Texas universities bragged to us about how they ignore the law, break the law, circumvent the law.”

The video has created turmoil across Texas by presenting the impression that the state’s public colleges are trying to skirt the law banning DEI activities. And it’s worried advocates in other states who’ve seen how groups that oppose diversity and inclusion efforts can mobilize to advance a narrative that DEI is a radical, un-American concept that needs to be quashed.

The stakes are high for both the institutions and employees. Texas and Florida were the first states that banned DEI activities with laws that are both ambiguous in their descriptions of what DEI is and harsh in their penalties for noncompliance. The ambiguities about those laws and how they might be interpreted have led lawmakers in other states to spell out dozens of specific jobs that should be eliminated.

The University of Florida last week announced that, to comply with the state’s anti-DEI law, it was eliminating all of its DEI positions. Unlike in Texas and other states where affected staff are moved into other offices without being fired, the Florida university is terminating 13 full-time positions, providing 12 weeks of severance pay, and encouraging those fired to apply for other jobs at the university, promising them “expedited consideration.”

The university’s chief diversity officer, Marsha C. McGriff, whose position was eliminated, was not immediately available for comment. It was unclear whether she would retain her position as a senior adviser to the president or stay on in any capacity.

In Texas, SB 17 was signed into law in June by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican. It requires that all DEI offices at public colleges be eliminated by January 1 and bans any programs or activities designated for specific races, ethnicities, gender identities, and sexual orientations. Diversity training and statements are also prohibited.

Critics of DEI contend that the programs give unfair advantages to minority students, try to make white students feel guilty about their race, and violate free speech. Proponents say they’re needed to make up for decades of exclusionary practices that have put certain students at an academic disadvantage.

Over the past several months, in Texas and Florida, the words diversity, equity, and inclusion have been scrubbed from job titles, plucked off office doors, and erased from program descriptions. Most of the people who did the work, like Payne, are still around but shuffled into new or rebranded offices with names like student belonging, community engagement, and campus access.

Within those offices, the duties they’re permitted to continue aren’t always clear, leaving some student-support staff anxious about their future and uncertain how they should even talk about their work. They worry that, at a time of intense political and social-media scrutiny, their efforts to support students from a variety of backgrounds might be interpreted as flouting the law.

“There is a lot of angst and resentment about the law among people who have devoted their whole lives to this work and see the value it has to students and other community members,” said Karma R. Chávez, a member of the University of Texas at Austin chapter of the American Association of University Professors’ executive committee. Chávez, who is also a professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies, said that what staff members are doing, far from breaking the law, is finding ways to comply with it without jeopardizing progress they’ve made.

The video gave new ammunition to Republican state senator and author of SB 17, Brandon Creighton. The day the video posted, he issued a warning on social media to colleges that skirt the rules. He called SB 17 “the strongest ban on DEI in the nation,” mainly because of its strict enforcement provisions.

Colleges that fail to certify and persuade an auditor that they’ve complied with it could find their state funds frozen. They’re also required to discipline employees who violate the law with sanctions up to and including termination.

“The Texas Senate will be exercising full oversight of the implementation of this bill during hearings in the coming months — and make no mistake, we expect full compliance,” Creighton wrote in a post that linked to the video. “If we find that taxpayer-funded colleges and universities are attempting to circumvent state law, I suggest they take this seriously.”

Neither Payne nor any of the other videotaped employees agreed to an interview with The Chronicle. No one would confirm whether any other employees were disciplined, but several universities said they’re investigating any potential noncompliance.

For employees who feel they’re being blamed and shamed for work they believe in, there’s a distinct feeling of having a target on their back. The frustration is evident in interviews.

“These videos create a culture of surveillance and fear among people who are literally just trying to make sure that students who are Black, who are queer, or otherwise underrepresented feel welcome on campus,” said Antonio L. Ingram II, a civil-rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Many of these staff members, he said, are people of color and women who are earning far less than they might in the private sector.

Despite Guillette’s description of “highly paid administrators,” some of the staff members interviewed in the video worked in student advising and other support roles and actually earned less than $40,000 a year, according to publicly available salary listings.

Complaints of Overcompliance

Senate Bill 17 bans all DEI offices, programs, and training at public colleges, as well as preferential hiring and diversity statements. It includes exceptions for student groups, research, teaching, and admissions, but many say it’s had a chilling effect across those areas as well.

Some of the programs and practices that have been discontinued in order to comply with the law could have withstood legal scrutiny, Ingram believes. “A lot of institutions are relying on their general counsels to make these calls, and many are making them in a very conservative way,” he said. “Any ambiguities in SB 17 are being construed against populations that in some way are disfavored by those in power — immigrants, queer people, trans people — it’s almost like a carte blanche to attack them.”

In January, for example, citing SB 17 and a federal immigration law, the University of Texas at Austin ended the Monarch Program, which offered help with scholarships, financial aid, and internships to undocumented students and those from mixed-immigration-status families. They were particularly important, students said, at a time when the fate of DACA — the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — is up in the air. DACA provides protection from deportation and permission to work for hundreds of thousands of undocumented young people. Undocumented students aren’t all Hispanic, the program’s supporters point out. Some are white, and they come from all backgrounds.

Accuracy in Media Stages a Sting

Accuracy in Media, which formed in 1969, trains and dispatches teams of undercover reporters, using “investigative journalism and aggressive activism to expose corruption and public-policy failings.” It’s taken heat for its tactics before. The group has sent trucks to colleges, including Harvard and Columbia Universities, mounted with billboards showing the photos and names of pro-Palestinian students and calling them “leading antisemites.” The doxxing trucks, as they’ve been dubbed, have drawn heated protests, and Accuracy in Media has said it plans to expand them to other campuses.

Guillette told The Chronicle that his group decided to investigate SB 17 compliance in Texas after conducting similar hidden-camera interviews in Florida public schools on the teaching of critical race theory, which, since 2022, has been banned in that state. “We found, consistently in K-12, that administrators were more than happy to break the law and deceive parents, and we wondered if the same would be true for higher education,” he said.

The Accuracy in Media video, which circulated on social media, was also picked up by conservative news outlets and written about in local papers including The Dallas Morning News. It cuts from campus to campus, with sound bites coaxed from staff members interspersed with commentary from the narrator, Guillette. Eyes wide, his tone urgent, he appears alarmed by what he’s hearing. After setting up the good guys, who appear reluctant but resigned to the new law, the video pivots to Rachel Ball, assistant director of academic advising at Texas A&M University at Galveston, who said employees are “not allowed to say DEI anymore.” As for DEI efforts, Ball added, “They’re just rebranded, so we’re still doing the same work. We just can’t call it that.”

Some of the universities targeted complained that the media group had used deceptive tactics by misrepresenting who they are and recording employees without their consent. The video was recorded several months before SB 17 took effect.

Reactions to the Video

Asked for their reactions to the video, and the noncompliance it purports to show, university leaders gave a range of answers that reveal how nervous many are about how the law will be applied when DEI means different things to different people. Students of color make up a growing percentage of Texas’ college-going population, and ensuring their success is crucial not only for the colleges’ bottom lines, but for the state’s work force.

Texas Tech University released a statement saying the video misrepresented the ways in which the university has complied with SB 17. Some units and activities that used to be part of the diversity, equity, and inclusion division have been “maintained but realigned according to their purpose and the audiences they serve,” it said. These include programs that serve all students, along with federal TRIO programs, and military and veterans programs.

“Any insinuation that these realignments have skirted state law is inaccurate,” the university said. “Texas Tech has grown and thrived because of our ability to recruit and support a diverse student body. We will continue to provide opportunity and access as we prioritize the success of all students.”

Other universities issued tough statements emphasizing their commitment to the law and their determination to suss out anyone who violates it. Texas A&M University at Galveston said that the method the interviewer used in the interview “raises significant ethical issues.” Nevertheless, the university “is committed to following state law, and reports of noncompliance will be reviewed and, if necessary, deficiencies corrected in accordance with Senate Bill 17.”

A statement from the chairman of the University of Texas system Board of Regents, Kevin P. Eltife, said “The consequences for violations are clear, and under no circumstances will we allow UT institutions to jeopardize state funding that collectively educates more than 250,000 students at our institutions.”

Reactions to the Law

In November, Eltife, a Republican who was appointed by Governor Abbott, said, “We’re not going to look for loopholes. We’re not going to look for workarounds. We’re going to implement the law as passed.” Each of the system’s 14 institutions had to sign off on guidance from the system to certify full compliance.

In January, the flagship campus, in Austin, closed its Multicultural Engagement Center. The six UT-sponsored student groups that the center had housed are now on their own to plan and fund their programs.

The university system released guidance on what it determined is and isn’t allowed under the law. An employee whose position is eliminated can be reassigned to a different position, but with few exceptions; they can’t do any work that treats people differently because of their race, color, or ethnicity, it states.

At Texas A&M University’s flagship campus, in College Station, the Office of Diversity was eliminated, as were all DEI-specific duties. No one was laid off, and employees either moved to another job at the university or found positions elsewhere.

Texas A&M’s guidance also points out dos and don’ts under the law: Colleges can continue to collect data on race, which certain state and federal laws require them to do. But regardless of what the data shows, they can’t offer scholarships or other advantages to people based on race or ethnicity.

And even though offices solely dedicated to LGBT students will need to be restructured, programs supporting the LGBT community may be incorporated into a broader student-success and multicultural framework.

That’s where differing interpretations of what DEI means tend to clash.

One of the “gotcha” moments the video purported to show is when Marcus Brown, an academic coordinator at Tarleton State University, said the university has been able to continue much of its diversity work by shifting the focus to first-generation students who, he pointed out, are among the most diverse groups of students on campus. As Guillette sees it, first-generation students are the “trojan horse” hiding DEI efforts.

At the University of North Texas at Dallas, the video said, administrators are trying to “circumvent the law” by calling DEI work “belonging.” The university, which is a component of the University of North Texas system, denied that the change is just a way to get around the law. It said in a statement that its Office of Student Belonging serves all students, including those who are underrepresented, and that it does so in ways that comply with the state law. It also pointed out that the university’s diversity is one of its strengths as a federally designated minority-serving and Hispanic-serving institution.

Actually serving those students just got more complicated. In a campus message in August, Neal J. Smatresk, president of the University of North Texas’ main campus, in Denton, announced that the vice president for inclusion, diversity, equity, and access would retire that October. To comply with SB 17, the division she oversaw was dissolved and some units distributed to other parts of the university.

Also in August, university leaders from North Texas met with Sen. Royce West, a Democrat from Dallas, to discuss how to repackage DEI efforts to comply with the new law. “I’m hoping some of the DEI activities will be quote-unquote repackaged and relabeled and continue to do the work,” West told a local news station. West did not respond to requests for comment.

At the University of Texas at Tyler, a spokeswoman said she couldn’t comment on the employment status of Payne, the director of student belonging who was put on leave, because it involved a personnel matter. Her office, though, will face plenty of challenges. As one of the state’s fastest-growing campuses, meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse student body will require new approaches. Six-year graduation rates were 31 percent, 43 percent, and 51 percent for Black, Hispanic, and white students, according to federal government statistics, but any efforts to close achievement gaps will have to be color blind.