The Evolution of DEI

Paulette Granberry Russell sounded anxious in mid-June as she read the news and awaited the United States Supreme Court decision on the use of affirmative action in college admissions. The head of the nation’s largest and more prominent organization working toward diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education had spent much of the spring playing defense, as DEI offices have been under attack by conservatives forces. In 21 states, legislation to either pull funding from the offices, ban the use of diversity statements in hiring, or ban identity-based hiring and admissions practices had been introduced and debated. And in four states, passed and signed into law.

“We have always had pushback to our work,” she said over the phone. “I didn’t anticipate the resistance we are seeing today.”

Granberry Russell, who has led the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education since the spring of 2020, worries that the wave of legislative proposals and laws sweeping the country threatens the work of diversifying the student body and faculty on college campuses in the U.S. She fears that it also undermines efforts to make the campus climate more welcoming for nonwhite and LGBTQ students, and kneecaps the power of universities to be transformative forces in their communities.

There was also the practical matter of what the laws in Texas and Florida meant for the DEI movement. Two of the three largest states in the country were banning diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, which could mean DEI staff members in those states would lose their jobs, reversing the growth of diversity efforts. Nadohe, which had its first convention in 2007 and drew fewer than 100 participants, welcomed more than 1,100 DEI officers to its most recent conference in Baltimore in April.

Meanwhile, Granberry Russell, like many others, expects affirmative action to be struck down by the court in a decision expected before the end of June.

The current political storms hovering over DEI hark back to the inception of diversity, equity, and inclusion work on college campuses. DEI was formed and reshaped by political crises. What we know as DEI today emerged from the smoke, fire, and ash of hundreds of urban uprisings following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. The killing of the country’s most visible civil-rights leader forced higher education to reckon with both the demands of minorities, in that case Black Americans, and its own legacy of racism.

From Riots to Diversity Efforts

Like so many cities across the country, Chicago burned shortly after the news of Reverend King’s assassination. And while King’s murder was the spark for the uprising there, decades of neglect and disinvestment were like kindling, building frustrations in the mostly Black communities on the West and South sides of the city. The riot in Chicago claimed at least nine lives and caused more than $10 million in damages on the West Side of the city alone. As the smoke cleared, the City Colleges of Chicago behaved like so many higher-education institutions did in the aftermath of King’s death and the uprisings his murder ignited — they tried to become more inclusive. The community-college system wanted to attract more Black students to its campuses, to spread across the city. It turned to a college Spanish professor, Myrna Adams, to lead the effort.

“I had no idea how to create an admissions policy in the first place, let alone make a more inclusive one,” Adams said.

In the fall of 1968, Adams drove north from Chicago to Evanston, and the campus of Northwestern University. The National Association for College Admission Counseling was holding a conference at the college, and she figured she could learn a bit more about how to do her job. She also wanted to meet with other Black admissions officers and trade information, and perhaps start building a strategy for making predominantly white institutions more diverse. When she walked into the conference, she saw an obvious problem.

“There were about five Black people who were doing college admissions,” Adams told The Chronicle.

Adams pulled together the handful of Black people and began holding informal meetings at the NACAC conferences. They would duck into an unused conference room and share their experiences working in their colleges’ admissions offices — the challenges they faced, what worked, and what didn’t. These types of informal meetings would mark much of the work to diversify predominantly white institutions following King’s murder.

Adams was working in an environment of rapid change. Activists had successfully sued the federal government for failing to enforce the integration plans required of colleges under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Universities in 10 states entered into a consent decree, requiring them to increase the number of Black students on campus or risk losing federal funding. The numbers of minority students at predominantly white institutions went up slightly in the 1970s. “There was a cautious movement to accept students of color and faculty of color,” William B. Harvey, one of the founders of Nadohe and the organization’s first president, told The Chronicle. “There was no deluge, there was no tidal wave.”

The Black faculty benefited slightly from the slow acceptance of Black studies in the academy, but they were also brought on campus for a more practical purpose.

“They opened their doors at least partially to hire people to minister to Black students, because the schools had no experience in dealing with Black students in numbers,” Adams said.

Still, progress was slow. Colleges hired staff members to oversee compliance with the Civil Rights Act, and later to oversee Title IX compliance. They collected demographic data, they collected information on racial and gender discrimination complaints. But their roles were seldom cabinet level, which limited their ability to make wholesale change in higher education.

Adams would eventually move into diversity work as the vice president for equity at Duke University, a cabinet-level post she took in 1995 that gave her responsibility for pushing for greater diversity of students and the faculty at the institution. After cutting her teeth helping labor unions secure better benefits for their workers, Granberry Russell would eventually move into higher education in 1998, as the first chief diversity officer at Michigan State University, her alma mater. She joined the handful of DEI officers sprinkled across the country. But those who were doing this work in the beginning recognized meeting the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion required more than just a loose patchwork of professionals. They needed an organization where people trying to make campuses more diverse could meet and share ideas.

“We had no sense of what the possibilities could be,” Harvey said. “What we found out was that the individual feelings we had on our campuses were shared by people doing the same work on other campuses.”

A Legacy of Greensboro

William B. Harvey was born in rural eastern North Carolina during Jim Crow. His family left in 1960, the same year students in and around Greensboro organized a lunch-counter sit-in to integrate the small restaurant inside Woolworth’s department store. The memory of the sit-ins stayed with Harvey. Race and higher education became his career, and by 2003, he was vice president and director of the Center for Advancement of Racial and Ethnic Equity with the American Council on Education. In 2003, ACE began to provide the handful of diversity officers who attended its annual conference with space to convene. Those early meetings mirrored the caucuses Adams held at conferences 30 years earlier. But it was in these meetings that Nadohe would be born.

“By definition, the higher education environment is conservative,” Harvey said.

In 2005, Harvey stepped down from his position at ACE to become the first chief diversity officer at the University of Virginia. The university created the position in response to racist graffiti and notes sprinkled around the campus, and at least one instance of a white motorist yelling racial epithets at Black students. As Harvey surveyed the landscape, more and more of his peers were being put in positions to help shape the student and faculty make-up of colleges. Benjamin Reese, who organized sit-ins in New York City as a student, followed Adams to Duke, and in 2003, replaced her as the head of diversity at the institution. Archie Ervin had become the first chief diversity officer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003.

Harvey, Reese, and Ervin wanted to professionalize their work. To do so they needed a national organization, one where diversity administrators could share ideas on how to make their campuses more diverse and more inclusive. What they sought to form was an organization that would continue in the tradition of the civil-rights struggle but focused on how those conflicts play out on college campuses. Diversity officers needed to share strategies on how to navigate colleges resistant to change.

“The academy can be isolating,” Harvey said. “We wondered what could be, if we could bring together the entire community of people doing this work, rather than doing this individually.”

What began as brainstorming sessions in 2003 evolved into a listserv and a gathering in the spring of 2006 of 30 diversity officers at the ACE annual conference in California. Over the course of two meetings, the first in California and a second meeting in Washington, D.C., the diversity officers in attendance drafted bylaws and picked leadership. Harvey was the organization’s first president, Reese and Ervin served on the board, and Granberry Russell offered the full support of Michigan State as one of Nadohe’s founding institutions. By the fall of 2006, the email list of diversity officers had grown from 30 to 120; by 2007, Nadohe was ready to hold its first conference, in Washington. The organization, which raised a little more than $300,000 in its first two years, lost money on the first conference. Still, the conference and the organization would expand each year, as colleges courted the idea of presenting themselves as more diverse. After the country elected its first Black president, the broader cultural winds seemed to be at the back of those in favor of a more diverse setting in higher education. But resistance to the idea was lurking in the shadows.

“There was some pushback as early as 2009, 2010,” Granberry Russell said.

Nadohe’s board members and executive began to hear whispers that diversity efforts were corrupting college campuses with what has been described as an extreme form of political correctness. The old trope of the liberal college as a place to corrupt impressionable young minds also re-emerged.

“DEI isn’t about indoctrination, it is about creating a more open and inclusive campus environment for those who live, learn, and work on those campuses,” Granberry Russell said.

Harvey was mostly unbothered by the early resistance to DEI. “Making change can be a dangerous process,” he told The Chronicle. “If you want to challenge the authorities, you have to be ready for what the authorities could do to you.”

Harvey, Reese, and Ervin served as the organization’s first three presidents. As veterans of the civil-rights movement, their focus was often on access to colleges for students, faculty, and administrators. They also spent a lot of time making the argument that the institution should leverage its buying power to help the surrounding communities. “When chief diversity officers began assuming cabinet-level roles, it allowed them to have conversations with college finance officers about whether the school was spending money with minority businesses in the surrounding community,” Harvey said.

Only weeks after Granberry Russell became Nadohe’s president, in early 2020, the nation was hit with twin crises that rippled through the higher-education world. Covid-19 would kill more than one million Americans; sideline much of the global work force, and with it, the global economy; and shutter almost all of higher education.

The glaring racial disparities in health outcomes that emerged early in the pandemic became a talking point for many concerned about the country’s failure to adequately address race. Then, in May 2020, a video surfaced of the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for more than eight minutes after a traffic stop, killing the 46-year-old Black man as at least one onlooker recorded the murder on a cellphone camera. Floyd’s killing ignited the largest mass protest since King’s assassination, and caused institutions from the NFL to Wall Street to make public proclamations of their commitments to racial justice. Higher education found itself back in much of the same place it had been in 1968, promising broad change to make colleges more diverse.

“After the murder of George Floyd every organization wanted to be able to say they hired one of these DEI officers,” Reese said.

Higher education was no different. Colleges that didn’t have diversity officers quickly made those hires, and then articulated a commitment to more diversity in their student body and faculty. Some dropped the use of standardized-test scores as an admissions requirement. And many colleges issued apologies for their roles in systemic racism. Granberry Russell was cautiously optimistic. Racial progress is typically followed by a backlash.

“You push as hard as we can in any way you can, and you celebrate any progress you can make,” Reese said, “and then you work on how to maintain that progress because the pushback is coming.”

At the same time, students on campus were asking more of administrators, including those in DEI offices. Black students might want different things than Hispanic or Asian students. LGBTQ students may have overlapping demands with those of cisgender, heterosexual minority students, plus specific requests for administration. What all of them wanted was to have their frustrations and grievances on campus to be heard, while not relenting on the material goals many had for increasing diversity in the student body and the faculty. They wanted to both belong and increase their power on campus. And the DEI officer’s job was to attempt to deliver on those requests.

“DEI offices are the ones that lead the campus community. And how do we lead the campus community with empathy, knowing that empathy was not enough? People wanted change,” Granberry Russell said.

She knew a backlash was coming, but not when, and she didn’t anticipate how organized and loud the resistance would be. At the same time, Granberry Russell was coming up with a strategy to expand the organization. In 2021, Nadohe’s board of directors began developing a five-year plan to increase the organization’s membership and expand its reach. The association wanted to bring in more Hispanic Serving Institutions, tribal colleges, and community colleges. But when Nadohe publicly announced its plans in 2022, the organization became an easy target for critics. “The conservative forces are so organized and so forceful that it means we are facing challenges we have never faced before,” Harvey said.

A barrage of anti-DEI legislation quickly followed, as did the Supreme Court decision to hear two lawsuits on affirmative action. When time came to hold Nadohe’s annual conference in April, the mood at times was funereal. Granberry Russell held a closed-door session inside a hotel ballroom at the conference to give her members time to speak freely about their frustrations. As the association expanded, and DEI work became more complex, the attacks appeared to its founders as more organized and much fiercer. And while only four states adopted anti-DEI laws, there is a sense that the battle has only begun.

The Supreme Court decision on affirmative action will come soon, and reshape admissions at some colleges. The conservative majority on the court is expected to strike a severe, if not fatal, blow to the practice of race-informed admissions at selective universities.

“I am fearful. And not just of the affirmative-action decision, but understanding the twin components of that and the anti-DEI push across the nation,” Harvey said. “These are twin factors that undermine the progress made in higher education and the moral import of higher education in determining where the country is going to move in the 21st century.”