A right-wing news site recently targeted staff members at several universities in Texas. The undercover “reporter,” posing as someone who supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, secretly video-recorded the staff members’ answers to questions about what was possible under Senate Bill 17, the new law in Texas that bans DEI programming, offices, and employees. The resulting video segment led to the suspensions of several staff members while their institutions investigated.
The segment isn’t exactly the stuff of highly trained investigative journalists seeking out the truth. The people interviewed seemed to have been confronted in the hallway or standing outside their offices. Many of the responses made clear that institutions were in the process of interpreting and complying with the law, and several of the people interviewed were administrative assistants or academic advisers whose jobs likely didn’t include any responsibilities directly connected to DEI. One was a campus-tour guide. The video refers to these and other staff members as “highly paid administrators.”
But the flimsiness of the segment’s claims doesn’t reduce the toll it takes on the people it targeted. Even if few of the people interviewed are formally reprimanded, they will certainly remember when institutional leaders failed to protect them or vocally support their work in the face of politically motivated harassment, ridicule, and misrepresentations. They will likely ask whether these often low-paying jobs, which were difficult before new laws were passed and are now even more exhausting, are worth enduring punishment and public humiliation.
What’s even more demoralizing is how many leaders have simply capitulated when confronted with an attack on employees who have dedicated their professional lives to educating students and advancing understanding of marginalized communities. In some cases, they have preferred the safety of quiet compliance at just the faintest whiff of enforcement before any real pressure is applied. And it’s the staff, not actually well-paid administrators, who are paying the price.
Perhaps the most significant failure of senior administrators has been the tacit acceptance of the political right’s framing of the debate.
The University of Texas at Austin axed an estimated 60 positions, many of them held by people of color, and UT-Dallas followed suit by shuttering the entire office that used to be responsible for DEI work, firing 20 employees in the process. Iowa’s public universities have also announced recently they will eliminate staff positions and close their DEI offices, seemingly in response to a sweeping DEI ban that was a last-minute addition to the state’s budget legislation. All of these staff members — and the students and staff they supported — became pawns in a political game, and the universities’ treatment of them is a shameful abrogation of the very values they purport to uphold.
Perhaps the most significant failure of senior administrators has been the tacit acceptance of the political right’s framing of the debate. In that framing, “DEI” has become the watchword for any program, initiative, or office that confronts inequities in higher education, with opponents claiming that the premise itself is “racist,” or “unfair,” or “undermining the meritocracy” — and those doing the framing are not shy about proclaiming the systematic, zero-sum nature of their campaign.
But as anyone conversant with this work can attest, those charges are gross distortions of what DEI efforts actually look like on campuses across the country. DEI offices and programming are vital, mission-critical institutional initiatives. While they address racial equity and justice, DEI offices also work with LGBTQIA+, disabled, first-generation, and veteran students and employees. Leaders’ failure to vociferously correct the record — by explaining and advocating for these mission-critical student-success efforts — is a grievous miscalculation.
In response to the growth of social media, political extremism, and disinformation campaigns, some universities have examined the extent to which they protect employees from various forms of harassment, especially faculty who have frequently been encouraged to translate their work for the general public (something Tressie McMillan Cottom powerfully noted the need for back in 2015). For example, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst developed an Academic Freedom Crisis Toolkit, with steps faculty can follow and campus resources they can access if they are subject to intimidation. Similarly, the University of California at Irvine provides staff and faculty members with a checklist to follow if they are facing online harassment, including keeping evidence and communicating with relevant campus offices, which may be able to monitor accounts and assess immediate risks. These efforts have the benefit of creating a clear place employees can turn to for help when their jobs make them a magnet for political vitriol or worse.
A harassment-free workplace is a basic obligation that any employer should meet.
More colleges should follow the lead of these institutions by providing robust and consistent protections for their employees and students from political targeting, whether it’s in the form of doxxing, harassment, or secret recordings. To put it bluntly, a harassment-free workplace is a basic obligation that any employer should meet. At the same time, some of the checklists and toolkits are still heavily oriented toward helping individuals navigate instances of political targeting. They typically aren’t designed to deal with the type of systemic and widespread bad-faith attacks, distortions, and outright racist falsehoods that constitute the campaign against DEI principles and practices across higher education.
The best defense is a good offense, and campus leaders must proactively affirm the necessity of DEI and protect the employees across institutions engaged in this work. Not just because their staff and faculty — the people who make colleges and universities run — deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. But also because it’s absolutely central to institutional sustainability, strategic planning, and mission-fulfillment. Leaders may be forced to comply with bad laws, but they should at least comply with a fight. Here are five ways leaders can act on behalf of employees who are politically targeted and anchor their commitment to DEI in unassailable institutional foundations.
Be the lightning rod. Senior administrators often describe their role as being a type of institutional lightning rod, attracting and absorbing internal and external grievances and critiques. Although this responsibility can be emotionally taxing, most see it as part and parcel of assuming leadership. Yet when it comes to recent moves against DEI, leaders have been more like Teflon — deflecting more than absorbing any shocks. It’s time for leaders to step up and take the heat for political attacks on DEI efforts and employees. Some of the most vulnerable workers at institutions are being hung out to dry, while leaders with considerable privilege and protection are left unscathed. And if standing up for employees is for whatever reason deemed too politically risky, leaders should at least own up to the institution’s failure to protect employees and acknowledge the harm that failure has caused.
Uphold academic freedom. Despite caricatures to the contrary, in which DEI is portrayed as simply feel-good fluff and empty affirmations of identity, the people who work in cultural centers and support DEI initiatives are often scholar-practitioners with disciplinary expertise in the communities they serve and the concepts they teach. These employees teach courses, host academic panels, and provide avenues for students to engage in the scholarly exchange of ideas. Anti-DEI legislation wants to paint these professionals as “bureaucrats” who compel others to participate in training or “indoctrination” because it undermines their scholarly and academic activities. Leaders should remind policymakers that they may disagree with these scholars’ work, but to ban it altogether on the basis of that disagreement is an affront to academic freedom.
Appeal to enrollment concerns. There are only a handful of institutions in the United States that don’t depend on enrollment and tuition revenues to at least some degree. For the rest of us, the size of incoming classes and our persistence, retention, and graduation rates are perhaps the most important metrics across all of our campus operations — especially the budget office. We know from a voluminous, well-established body of research that fostering and sustaining a meaningful sense of belonging among our students is the most important effort we can undertake to increase student retention and persistence to graduation.
Diversity is not an ideology or matter of interpretation; it is an empirical fact.
We also know that the postsecondary student body is more diverse than ever before — not just racially, but in all of the multiple and complex ways in which identity is fashioned. Diversity is not an ideology or matter of interpretation; it is an empirical fact. In light of these realities, it is ludicrous to suppose that eliminating student-support employees and offices could have any other effect than undermining the sense of belonging for large swaths of our student community. Students themselves have been increasingly vocal about the impact anti-DEI campaigns are having on their college experiences, and although their opportunities to do so are more constrained, employees are weighing in on that impact as well.
As John Comerford, president of Otterbein University, wrote in a LinkedIn post: “DEI offices are not about just espousing our values, they also are a critical driver of our enrollment, financial, and educational goals. Otterbein’s last incoming first-year class was 36 percent students of color. The ‘business’ of our university would be in deep trouble if we did not take this work seriously.” Senior administrators should reiterate this point as they reject calls for the elimination of DEI offices and employees.
Fulfill the promise of institutional mission. Those calling for an end to DEI mistakenly see it as a recent phenomenon. The truth is that many institutions, including minority-serving institutions, liberal-arts colleges, and religious institutions, have DEI baked into their missions — it’s part of their reason for being. A college’s mission statement is more than just advertising or corporate-speak; it is a set of promises. This promise applies to all of our students, not just those who come from wealth, or are white, male, or from families with multiple generations’ worth of collegiate education.
Yet demurring on protecting DEI efforts on campus undermines — indeed violates — those promises by positioning our principles and mission as conditional rather than absolute, and implying that success for some groups of students is not as important or worth protecting as it is for others. To effectively foster the conditions necessary for student success, leaders must resist the urge to punt when it comes to affirming and protecting this vital part of our missions; they will reap benefits for both themselves and their institutions if they hold firm instead.
At one of our universities, the president used the occasion of an opening-of-the-year welcome address to vocally affirm the institution’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of its overall student-success mission, and to assure faculty and staff that work would continue, even in the face of strong political headwinds. The audience broke out in applause, testament to how much even a simple public reaffirmation of principles can do for employee morale and commitment.
Joan Gallos and Lee Bolman, in their foundational text on higher-ed leadership, would see this occasion as an effective symbolic framing, where leaders do the crucial work of clarifying and affirming the institution’s purpose and values, but — most importantly — leading by example as they do so. For those of us whose job it is to promote student success (and, we would argue, that includes every employee on campus), having that role not just verbally affirmed, but positioned as mission-critical work, is an essential ingredient of both performance and morale.
If leaders won’t take steps to protect employees, what reason do employees have to trust and give their best to institutions?
Focus on shared strategic priorities. Cutting programs, offices, and positions is harder when DEI is a shared responsibility integrated into the institution’s long-term strategic goals — that is, how the mission will be operationalized on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis. Strategic priorities are an institution-wide articulation of where it wants to go and why that direction is important, along with specific metrics for measuring progress. Many institutions have incorporated DEI into their strategic-planning processes, meaning specific goals have already been set that implicate a range of offices and positions.
When leaders stand up for DEI, they can point out that it is not possible to single out people or initiatives because the pursuit of DEI is connected to a deliberate, community-informed strategy for the institution’s success. In the same vein, they can argue that firing experts in student success runs afoul of the institution’s strategy. They aren’t simply changing people’s titles or office names to skirt the law — they are retaining the talent and infrastructure necessary for student and, by extension, institutional success.
Not every institution or job is implicated in anti-DEI legislation sweeping the country, but every leader should see we all have a stake in standing up to state-sponsored censorship and political targeting of employees. Simply saying, “Well, we’re not Florida or Texas” is not leadership. Surrendering and over-complying in advance is not leadership. For all the talk about high salaries for senior administrators as necessary for attracting bold, innovative leaders who will advance the institution’s mission, we see precious little boldness in this arena. For each instance of a person being fired, suspended, or reassigned, other colleagues are watching and taking note. If leaders won’t take steps to protect employees and affirm our most basic principles and commitments, what reason do employees have to trust and give their best to institutions?
Sometimes the solutions to complex problems can be simple ones — but “simple” does not always mean “easy.” We understand the delicate balance leaders feel they must maintain among often-contradictory demands from their various constituencies, and that many leaders may feel as if this is a space in which they simply cannot win. That said, there is much to lose when institutions fail to protect their mission, or when leaders abandon their core values. In the face of an orchestrated effort to undermine higher education’s purpose, institutions, and the people who make institutions function, doing the right thing should be simple — even though it’s not easy.
Campus communities across the country are waiting for leaders to protect and affirm those doing the work of student success, and to do so both vocally and meaningfully. We’ve outlined several ways in which that protection and affirmation can be enacted right now and sustained even in the face of strong countercurrents.
Leaders: there is an opportunity here to be bold, and to position your institution’s commitment to its students and employees as more than empty performance and banal platitudes. Can you seize it?
