In the spring of 2015, members of the University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chapter broke into song as they rode a bus accompanied by their dates. The lyrics, chanted to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” included racial epithets and references to lynching.
A brief video from the bus circulated online, and the outrage was swift. “I felt disappointed. It wasn’t that I didn’t know things like that could happen,” said Suzette Chang, founder and chief executive of Thick Descriptions, a progressive education-reform group based in Oklahoma, said recently, reflecting on the moment. “It was how blatant the incident was.”
Because Oklahomans “see ourselves as being polite,” Chang said, “we confuse that with being incapable of being truly racist.”
Within a day of the video’s emergence, the university announced the closure of the fraternity house, and within a month it hired a vice president for the university community. His duties closely resembled those of diversity, equity, and inclusion officers being hired across the country. The move satisfied many who had been clamoring for change on the campus, but Chang and other people of color were cautious in what little optimism they held around the appointment.
“It was a good move in a better direction,” she said of the establishment of the Office of University Community, which later became the campus’s DEI office.
But Chang worried the university wasn’t doing enough to confront the culture of racism that led to the racist fraternity chant.
“I think it was box checking,” she said. “As if this one human could resolve and rectify the history of the college, including the incident with the fraternity.”
Over the next few years, Chang and others proved to be at least partially correct.
A series of racist incidents in 2019 — two involving people wearing blackface — put James L. Gallogly, the university’s president at the time, under intense scrutiny by students and some faculty members. Then within a two-week span in 2020, two professors used a racial slur in their classrooms. Those incidents prompted the University of Oklahoma to introduce mandatory diversity training the following academic year.
After a summer of demonstrations in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, colleges across the country began to wrestle with race. The University of Oklahoma hosted a panel discussion in the fall of 2020 on how to be an anti-racist. In the five years after the Oklahoma fraternity members drew national attention for their bigoted racist chants, the university built an impressive résumé of progressive efforts on race. And now it’s at risk of being erased.
“It has been collective amnesia,” Chang said. “Oklahoma is good at that. I recently met a native Oklahoman who asked why she didn’t know about the Tulsa massacre” of 1921.
But even more-recent incidents fade quickly from people’s memory.
“In the circles I am in, people stopped talking about 2015 and the racist chant a long time ago,” Chang said.
An Executive Order and Two Bills
This year, Oklahoma’s politicians have waged a full frontal attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public colleges. In mid-December, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an executive order calling for a review of DEI departments, staffing, and programs across Oklahoma, and prohibiting the state’s public colleges from spending money and resources or using facilities to support DEI efforts. The order also prohibits the use of state resources for diversity training, and it bans mandatory diversity statements and race- or identity-based preferences.
Stitt’s Republican colleagues in the Oklahoma Legislature filed two bills in January. Senate Bill 1303 would block public colleges and universities from maintaining DEI offices or hiring or assigning employees or contractors to do the work of a DEI office. It would also ban required diversity statements and the use of racial preferences in hiring or admissions. Senate Bill 1678 would also ban racial preferences and diversity statements. It would forbid requiring anyone to “disclose their pronouns.” The bill also calls for reviews of DEI efforts by the state’s higher-education system and empowers those institutions to restructure or eliminate DEI programs deemed unnecessary.
“We really believe that ultimately what matters most in how you evaluate government is outcomes,” said Jonathan Small, president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank. “The primary objective of higher ed is to equip students with the career vocation and technical skills they need so they have options to pursue a career and profession that helps them achieve their God-given skills and potential.”
“There is a recognition that for some the job of a university is to help facilitate the college experience and expose students to ideas and things that they haven’t been exposed to before,” he added.
Oklahoma’s recent moves are part of a wave of anti-DEI legislation sweeping the country. The movement builds off the advances conservatives made against DEI in 2023, when 49 bills were introduced across 23 states, and seven became law. As the 2024 state-legislative season kicks into gear, 29 new bills have been introduced.
Oklahoma’s executive order and the two bills, to many civil-rights advocates, strike at the heart of efforts to make the state’s colleges more equitable and inclusive for the faculty, staff members, and students. Chang is concerned the legislation, if successful, would only widen ideological divisions and impede progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion. “This is going to pause us from advancing,” Chang said.
‘Nobody’s Losing Their Job’
The legislative attacks have caused confusion and stirred some resistance among DEI professionals and administrators at the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University.
In the immediate aftermath of Governor Stitt’s executive order, Belinda Higgs Hyppolite, vice president for diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer at the University of Oklahoma, said her office would close and her team would work to recreate DEI efforts in a way that would comply with the executive order.
“The big question right now is that, ‘Is DEI going away?’ Well, DEI, in [its] current iteration, is absolutely going away,” Hyppolite told the Staff Senate of the Norman campus in December. “We will be complying with this executive order, but we know that we have a responsibility to make sure that we continue to increase access and to create opportunities for our campus community.”
Whether DEI will disappear or fade is another question — one the university hasn’t answered. In January, Joseph Harroz Jr., president of the University of Oklahoma, told the student newspaper: “Nobody’s losing their job. No one’s losing their employment with the university because of these changes.”
The university has until May 31 to comply and is reviewing DEI activities across all of its campuses. The names of offices doing DEI work will change. How much their mission and actions will change has yet to be decided.
Meanwhile, Kayse Shrum, president of the Oklahoma State University system, said that institution’s DEI work didn’t need to cease because of the governor’s executive order, declaring that “an initial review indicates that no significant changes to our processes or practices are needed.”
The hedging by the state’s two flagship universities has only inflamed tensions, with Small — the think-tank president — referring in a statement to “poisonous” DEI programs and teachings as “racist, collectivist and antithetical to reason and biology.”
Central to the criticism of DEI by conservative opponents in Oklahoma, and specifically Jonathan Small’s, is the rising cost of public colleges in the state and “mission creep” that has driven up the cost of tuition at the University of Oklahoma by 166 percent in the last 20 years. And part of the mission creep that has driven the soaring price, the argument goes, is DEI and the broader emphasis on humanities education that offer the state little return on taxpayers’ investment.
“Over all, a classical liberal-arts education is a privilege,” Small said.
The University of Oklahoma spent $2.2 million on DEI in 2023. The university’s total budget is $1.4 billion.
That Small’s organization is criticizing the cost of DEI at Oklahoma, despite the relatively minuscule percentage of the budget it consumes, is not surprising to Chang. Conservatives have long argued about education costs in a state that ranks near the bottom nationally in per-pupil spending. The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs talks a lot about cost, and it insists that college should be more of a training ground for workers than a place of learning, Chang said. It was only a matter of time before those same conservatives set their sights on higher education and used a cost-benefit argument to snuff out things they don’t like, such as DEI.
“If there are no financial benefits to any program, it is not a priority, and in the end the state will try to cut the program,” Chang said. “That’s what happens in Oklahoma.”
The legislative session in Oklahoma officials began February 5. If the two bills pass and are signed by the governor, DEI as Oklahoma once knew it will be dead. Advocates, however, said they would continue to fight to make the state more equitable and inclusive.
