Under Fire From Lawmakers, a Flagship Tries to Explain Why Diversity Matters

Caitie McMekin, Knoxville News Sentinel via AP Images

When J.T. Taylor came to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville as a freshman, she immediately found a home at the Pride Center, which serves students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. Ms. Taylor, a senior who is African-American and identifies as queer, says she has also benefited immensely from a mentoring program and other efforts sponsored by the university’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion.

But now, as Tennessee lawmakers cast doubt on whether public colleges should direct any state money toward diversity, Ms. Taylor worries that students like her won’t find the same support in the future.

This month a committee of the Tennessee House of Representatives will begin an investigation into how the state’s public colleges spend funds earmarked for diversity. The move doesn’t just concern students like Ms. Taylor; it also raises hard questions about how institutions might justify such spending. It can be difficult to measure the concrete successes of diversity-and-inclusion programs.

There’s a lot at stake, though: Republican lawmakers have threatened to defund the Knoxville flagship’s diversity office if they don’t see evidence that its programs are effective. (One proposal would divert the money to a program that would place decals saying “In God We Trust” on every law-enforcement vehicle.) Some lawmakers also want the university to focus solely on multicultural issues and stay away from efforts related to sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion.

The House investigation has its roots in controversies last semester, when the Knoxville campus clashed with Republican legislators over two incidents that critics slammed as demonstrating excessive political correctness.

A post on the Pride Center’s website offering guidelines for the use of gender-neutral pronouns went viral in August after conservative news sites like Campus Reform, the College Fix, and Fox News portrayed its suggestions about using the pronouns as a hard-and-fast policy. Joseph A. DiPietro, the university system’s president, announced a few days later that the guide had been removed and that he’d asked Jimmy G. Cheek, chancellor of the Knoxville campus, to “instruct the vice chancellors not to publish any campuswide practice or policy without his approval after review with the cabinet.”

Tensions escalated in December when a post suggesting that people not use faith-based references at campus holiday parties also drew the indignation of right-leaning journalists. That led some Republican lawmakers to call for Mr. Cheek and Rickey Hall, the vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion, to resign. The post was then replaced with a message used in previous years, said Margie Nichols, a spokeswoman for the Knoxville campus. “It just got in the way of things,” she said. “We had to move forward.”

Mr. DiPietro said in his inaugural State of the University speech on Tuesday that the institution was committed to “fundamental tenets of advancing diversity and inclusion,” which he said included race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and socioeconomic status. He also promised Tennessee residents that “we will work even harder to ensure that your interests in our operations are considered with our own.” But he expressed concerns about legislative interference in university matters.

Mr. Cheek sees a silver lining in the lawmakers’ criticism: He called the committee’s investigation “an opportunity to really clarify what we are doing” in the diversity office. But some faculty members and students at Knoxville believe the legislative scrutiny is simply political pandering in an election year.

They contend that neither post was controversial until conservative news sites stirred up trouble — under headlines that misrepresented the posts’ content, they add. Some people on the campus have also faulted Mr. Cheek and Mr. DiPietro for not standing behind the two posts.

A Sign of ‘Straying’?

Spending state money to promote diversity at Tennessee’s public colleges hasn’t been a major point of contention in the past, said State Rep. Martin Daniel, a Republican. But the “recent messaging” coming out of the Knoxville campus’s diversity office stoked lingering concerns that lawmakers had about the goals of such programs, he said.

Earlier this year Mr. Daniel introduced a bill that would curb spending on diversity across the University of Tennessee system and prohibit faculty and staff members whose primary responsibilities are not focused on diversity from participating in such activities during the workday. The bill, HB 2066, would also prevent staff members in diversity-related positions from doing any work that doesn’t have to do with nondiscrimination or recruitment of minority students, faculty, or staff members.

The system has around 60 employees whose roles focus on promoting diversity and inclusion, and it spends $5 million to $6 million annually on such efforts. That’s a small fraction of the system’s state appropriations, which are nearly $500 million, but Mr. Daniel believes it’s probably too much. “It’s just gotten out of control and taken on a bureaucratic life of its own,” he said.

His chief concern is that the flagship “is straying into areas that they just don’t need to be in,” like LGBT and religious issues. “I don’t think anyone has a problem with the general concept of diversity,” he said, but “these are things that tend to offend the people of Tennessee. They’re very sensitive.”

Some at Knoxville have decried lawmakers’ criticisms as politicized attacks. Mr. Cheek didn’t see it that way. “I think it’s more concerns about understanding what we’re doing in the diversity office,” he said, adding that “every decision I make, there’s a few people who aren’t happy with it.”

But the decision by Mr. Cheek and Mr. DiPietro to remove one of the hotly debated posts and water down the other has drawn the ire of some students and faculty members. “I think it’s censorship,” said Mary McAlpin, a professor of French and president of the campus’s American Association of University Professors chapter. The post on pronouns was written by a professor, Ms. McAlpin said, so they should not have taken it down without consulting the faculty.

Donna Braquet, an associate professor and biology librarian who also serves as director of the Pride Center, wrote the post. She declined to comment. Mr. Hall, the vice chancellor for diversity, did not respond to an interview request.

‘It Was This Invisibility’

As lawmakers’ scrutiny mounted late last year, so too did pressure from students. Nearly three dozen student organizations and community groups have since formed a coalition, UT Diversity Matters, to defend diversity-and-inclusion programs. The coalition helped sponsor a pro-diversity rally on the Knoxville campus this month that drew more than 300 attendees. (The event also included protests of a plan to privatize the management of most state facilities.)

The students drafted a list of 19 demands, including calls for the university to republish the guide on pronouns and for Mr. DiPietro and Mr. Cheek to publicly apologize for “the damage that the post’s removal did to the campus climate and the safety of LGBTQ+ students.”

“I know a lot of nonbinary and trans students really felt erased when that post was taken down,” said Kristen Godfrey, a social-work graduate student who is an organizer with UT Diversity Matters. “It was this invisibility — this sense that these people don’t exist.”

Ms. Godfrey and a handful of other students talked with Mr. Cheek and some members of his cabinet this month at a pair of meetings. She said she was frustrated by the administrators’ lack of preparation. A YouTube video of one of the meetings shows several students repeatedly asking Mr. Cheek about his views on gender-neutral pronouns while the chancellor mostly remains silent.

Mr. Cheek, however, said he had worked adamantly during his seven years at the helm to improve the campus’s diversity and the climate for students from underrepresented backgrounds. In the past decade, he said, the university has increased African-American faculty members by one-third and more than doubled the number of Hispanic members of the faculty. The campus also has a large number of students eligible for Pell Grants and “is veteran-friendly,” he added.

A University Makes Its Case

How can the university make its case to lawmakers who seem deeply skeptical? Mr. Cheek plans to bring up the diversity statistics once the investigation begins. Also, he said, “I think we need to let our students talk about why it’s important to them to have diversity.”

But he and other campus officials will face an uphill battle with some lawmakers. Mr. Daniel, for one, has a lot of questions. “What does a diversity employee do when they come into the office in the morning?” he asked. “It’s a mystery to us.”

“I expect they go to meetings and conferences and seminars,” he said, “and then they have more meetings and conferences and seminars about the previous ones.”

One advocacy strategy for the university will probably include a focus on business and jobs, said Bruce J. MacLennan, an associate professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and president of the Faculty Senate. Diversity education, he said, “is not some crazy liberal idea. This is work-force preparation.”

UT-Knoxville is trying to break into the top 25 public research universities nationally, Mr. MacLennan said, and many institutions in that group spend more on diversity and have more diverse student and faculty populations. “We feel like we should be doing more,” he said.

In recent weeks Ms. Godfrey has spent a lot of time trying to convince fellow students that diversity matters. But she has also won some over by concentrating on lawmakers’ actions. “If people can’t understand diversity, they at least understand that the state legislature is up in a lot of our business and that it’s not OK,” she said.

Ms. Taylor said members of UT Diversity Matters would travel to the legislature to advocate for their cause in early March. She wants lawmakers to come to the campus and see how diversity programs help students like her succeed on a daily basis.

The investigation’s findings are due at the end of March. Could officials, lobbyists, and students persuade Mr. Daniel to rethink his suspicions about the university’s spending on diversity? “I don’t think so,” the lawmaker said. “We know what’s going on.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.