Public colleges in Florida and Texas may soon have to eliminate their diversity offices to comply with new state laws. Arkansas did not enact such a ban this year; a proposed bill failed. But the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville decided this week to dissolve its diversity, equity, and inclusion office anyway.
The university’s chancellor, Charles F. Robinson, announced in an email to the campus on Tuesday that the move was part of a “realignment” of the university’s resources. Effective August 1, the diversity office’s five staff members will be reassigned to other divisions that focus on student success, human resources, advancement, and equal opportunity.
The goal, Robinson said in the email, is for these departments to work together to “expand programs around access, opportunity, and developing a culture of belonging for all students and employees.”
Robinson, the university’s first Black chancellor, is closing out his first academic year in the role. Formerly, he was the vice chancellor for diversity, and in that position he established several programs designed to help increase college access for underrepresented students.
Arkansas lawmakers introduced and then voted down a bill to ban affirmative action in April. But two experts on higher ed and diversity told The Chronicle that a tense political climate toward diversity offices in general, coupled with an institutional desire to preserve support structures for students from diverse backgrounds, could be driving the university’s decision.
“There seems to be a political assault on anything labeled as a special office of diversity and inclusion right now,” Adrianna Kezar, a professor of leadership at the University of Southern California, told The Chronicle.
The chancellor’s office and DEI officers at the University of Arkansas could not be reached for comment.
Public colleges in South Dakota dismantled their diversity offices in the 2021-22 academic year and rebranded them as “opportunity centers.” The decision came after the state’s Republican governor sent a strongly worded letter to the South Dakota Board of Regents suggesting there had been “inappropriate ‘mission creep’” in diversity offices.
‘Embedded in Everybody’s Roles’
While Arkansas’s flagship and other colleges are facing pointed questions about their diversity spending, some have decided to go without a diversity office for apolitical reasons.
On paper, Robinson’s vision — to advance a culture of belonging through multiple divisions — resembles elements of an institutional model known as “shared equity leadership,” where diversity efforts aren’t the responsibility of a small team in one office, but are distributed across the campus.
Kezar cited Rutgers University at Newark as an example of a college that embraced shared equity leadership.
“[Rutgers] decided, like several others who have pursued this model, that it would be better if it’s just embedded in everybody’s roles,” said Kezar. “If they didn’t have that office, people wouldn’t point to that office as where the work was going on and say, ‘Oh, I don’t have to do the work then, because somebody else is doing it.’”
According to Kezar, this method can be more successful at creating an inclusive culture than a diversity office.
Other experts contend that a college with a decentralized diversity structure, as Arkansas has now embraced, may have trouble fulfilling their vision of a diverse campus culture.
Roger L. Worthington, a professor of counseling, special education, and higher education at the University of Maryland at College Park, studies diversity officers in higher ed, and was formerly a chief diversity officer at the Universities of Maryland and Missouri. He said a cabinet-level diversity officer in the president’s or provost’s office often helps establish and enforce “institutional priorities” for diversity, and can work together with a diversity office and others spread out on campus to support that work.
“In the absence of that, the highly decentralized organizational infrastructure then becomes potentially problematic by siloing specific activities without any collaborative partnerships or coordinated efforts to address the more-centralized priorities of the institution,” said Worthington. He added that a lack of coordination through a central office could result in fragmented processes and duplicate roles.
Still, Worthington said, the University of Arkansas may not have had a choice. Just being in a conservative state might have put the university’s diversity office at risk down the line, he said.
“Even if it’s not publicized,” he said, “there would probably be some trend or influence at the governmental level to move in this direction.”
