Want to Celebrate Your Culture? Better Clock Out First.

For many Black, Hispanic, Asian, and gay people at the University of Texas at Austin, employee affinity groups have been a source of community bonding and celebration on a campus whose faculty and staff are overwhelmingly white and straight.

To celebrate the end of Hispanic Heritage Month, for example, the Hispanic Faculty Staff Association has sponsored a fiesta with a mariachi performance, ethnic food, and dancing. The Pride and Equity Faculty-Staff Association has offered sessions with strategies for coming out at work and an opportunity to join a transgender reading group.

But in the wake of a new state law prohibiting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at public colleges, university lawyers have deemed such groups too much a risk.

In what seems to be an effort to scrub the campus of anything that might sound to watchful lawmakers like DEI, the university has issued a list of new restrictions the groups say are essentially pushing them off campus. Leaders of the groups say they can no longer meet during paid work hours, use any university resources, or have departments pay members’ dues.

If inclusion groups want to meet in person, they’ll have to squeeze it into their lunch hour or other times when members are off the clock. If they want to print out fliers for an upcoming event, university copy machines are off limits. Paying for guest speakers might be tough since the money they’ve raised from membership dues has been temporarily tied up in university bank accounts they’re no longer allowed to access. They need that money to cover the cost of honoraria, social events, and professional development.

Nationally, 12 percent of college students in 2021 were Black but only 8 percent of college faculty members were, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Hispanics made up 19 percent of students, but only 7 percent of the faculty.

Colleges’ failure over the years to diversify their faculty ranks has been blamed on both discriminatory hiring practices and, in some disciplines, a shortage of people with Ph.D.s. The effects, though, are clear. When colleges have few faculty of color, it’s harder to attract professors and students of color.

The differences are even more stark at the University of Texas’ flagship campus in Austin, which hired its first Black professor, Ervin Perry, in 1964. White students there make up only 35 percent of students, but nearly 70 percent of the faculty and 58 percent of the staff, according to the 2021 and 2022 data compiled by the Austin American-Statesman.

The latest restrictions “have had a demoralizing effect,” said Karma Chávez, a Mexican American and Latina/o studies professor. Among the new rules she shared with The Chronicle, the Hispanic Faculty Association and other affinity groups can no longer meet or host events during working hours. Their access to university Zoom accounts was cut off, so virtual meetings that used to span 60 to 90 minutes end abruptly when the 40 minutes of their personal accounts expire, Chávez said. Departments can no longer cover members’ dues.

“Everyone has the sense that the campus doesn’t care about us,” she said. “There’s been no outreach from the administration saying, ‘We’re sorry this is happening to you.’”

A university spokesman confirmed the restrictions placed on the affinity groups, which also include the Black Faculty and Staff Association. They’re banned from using university resources “the same way you wouldn’t be permitted to use university resources for personal reasons, such as making photocopies for your kids’ soccer booster-club meetings,” he said.

Affinity groups representing military and disabled employees weren’t affected because those groups aren’t targeted by the anti-DEI law, he said.

The leaders of the affinity groups that are now restricted say that the nationwide attack on DEI makes these support groups more necessary than ever. They believe the university is “overcomplying” with Senate Bill 17 by limiting their activities.

A section of SB 17 prohibits colleges from “conducting trainings, programs, or activities designed or implemented in reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation,” other than those required by court order or federal law.

In January, when the law took effect, the university shut down its Multicultural Engagement Center, which housed several student affinity groups. On April 2, the university also closed its Division of Campus and Community Engagement, laying off around 60 employees.

Track DEI legislation and its affect on college campuses

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The inclusion-group leaders interviewed by The Chronicle said their main concerns are with the students who are being cut off from institutional and faculty support for their activities, and for the employees being laid off. But the new rules governing when and how they can meet only compound their insecurities about whether their work and activities might be considered diversity-related and whether they might be fired. A staff member who is active in the Asian/Asian American Faculty and Staff Association called the recent layoffs and restrictions on diversity activities “paralyzing” and “anxiety producing.”

“The tiger is both outside my door and inside my room at the same time,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified because, like many people interviewed for this article, she fears retribution. “It feels like an intentional political decision to have us have to focus on survival” rather than issues such as racial discrimination, community building, and emotional health that groups like hers been working on for decades. She added: “Our positions are precarious as it is because people’s job status can change at a whim. We’re constantly having to think about covering our bases — the language we’re using, where we’re sending things from and at what times. There’s this hypervigilance about protecting people while having no safety net ourselves.”

Among the group’s plans, now on hold, was a forum for helping Asian Americans get over the stigma of seeking help for mental-health problems.

In order to regain access to the money they’ve raised through dues, members of affinity groups were required to set up accounts at an off-campus credit union where the money will eventually be transferred, several members said. That hadn’t happened yet for some of the groups whose leaders were interviewed last week.And in order to set up the off-campus accounts, they had to sign up using a member’s name, along with their home address and Social Security number, they said. That’s a scary prospect given the target that anyone involved in DEI work in Texas now has on their back, according to leaders of university resource groups.

If they want to continue getting tax-exempt status, each group will have to register as a nonprofit, “which requires a board, bylaws, and another layer of bureaucracy that fewer people are going to be willing to take on,” said one instructor of a now-restricted affinity group. He said the group’s activities have nearly ceased.

“We haven’t had any meetings or events this semester because there’s no clarity about what we can or can’t do,” he said. “There’s a sense of fear because so many of our colleagues were cut. People are worried that any work we do that can be interpreted as DEI is going to get us in trouble.”

While tenured faculty members might have a level of job protection and options to move on to jobs outside the state, staff members who belong to the support organizations feel especially vulnerable, Chávez said. “These are Texans. Their whole families are here, and it’s not like they’re going to pick up and leave the state the way some faculty might.”

The local branch of the American Association of University Professors reported last week that 62 professional staff members had reported receiving termination notices on April 2. Of those, 12 also said they held non-tenure-track faculty titles, with eight holding the title of lecturer and four, the title of assistant professor of practice.

Those numbers were slightly higher than the layoffs reported last week by the university’s president, Jay Hartzell. He told faculty members that 49 people had been laid off on April 2, and eight associate or assistant deans had been fully returned to faculty positions. In addition, there were eight terminations in the Division of Student Affairs unrelated to the closing of the Division of Campus and Community Engagement.

Hartzell alluded to the pressure that state lawmakers are putting on the university to show that they’re complying fully with the new anti-DEI law. The bill’s Republican sponsor, Sen. Brandon Creighton, said he plans to schedule hearings, probably next month, to hear from college leaders on how they’ve complied with the law. He gave them until May 3 to outline those steps and notify the Senate Education Committee, which he chairs. Creighton warned that colleges that violate the law could face funding cuts or legal ramifications.

“My role is to worry about the long-run future of university,” Hartzell said, “thinking about not only what had to happen by January 1, but, as this plays out over the coming months and years, how am I doing the best I can to mitigate what I and many people believe are real and imminent risks that, if left unchecked, could affect the very basic way we run the university?”

Among those being laid off in July was a member of the Pride and Equity Faculty Staff Association who asked not to be identified because she didn’t want to risk losing her benefits before then. She said she’d been planning a lavender graduation, one of several cultural graduation ceremonies the university no longer sponsors — over her lunch breaks — the only times she was permitted to work on such activities. Her group has also brought in speakers and community partners “to try to make the campus feel like a safe space for queer people, which it’s not,” she said.

The affinity-group instructor, who feared even identifying the group he belonged to, said he vacillates between wanting to fight the restrictions and being resigned to them. “We need to advocate for our students and our communities, and we sometimes take risks to do that,” he said, “but we also know that at any point the president could say, ‘This person is a liability.’”

“We’re going to continue to exist,” he added. “We just don’t have the funds right now or the clarity of where or when we can have our events. We’re not going to disband or disappear, even if the nature of what we do will change.”