Where DEI Efforts Are Ambitious, Well Funded, and Taking Fire From All Sides

Across the country, Republicans have attacked diversity, equity and inclusion offices on college campuses as being discriminatory, ineffective, and a waste of taxpayer money. They’ve introduced dozens of laws in 21 states to try to dismantle the work of these offices and, in some cases, shut them down.

Some universities have responded by suspending DEI policies and programs, others by removing the word “diversity” from the names of offices and the titles of officers. The opposite is happening at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, an institution that has played a pivotal role in the decades-long debate over race and college access. Instead of cutting back, it’s doubling down on its commitment to one of the nation’s most expansive DEI efforts.

The university has been detailing its work on a public website and in campuswide and community meetings. Employees whose jobs in some way touch on diversity were worried about the growing attacks, says Tabbye M. Chavous, who in August became vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer.

“Some institutions were preemptively tamping down their efforts so they wouldn’t be the target of inquiry or be noticed, and there was some concern we might go in that direction,” she says. “Michigan learned there’s nothing we can do to avoid scrutiny, so why not try to be creative and bold within the confines of the law to take every effort to still uphold the value of diversity in higher ed. We just have to be prepared to defend it.”

The first five years of Michigan’s initial 10-year DEI plan have shown that gains are possible, even when the consideration of race in admissions is banned, as it has been for some time in Michigan and nine other states. They’re harder to achieve, though. Michigan’s DEI structure, with $85 million in initial funding and more than 100 employees contributing at least part time to diversity efforts, is widely considered among the most ambitious and well-funded offices in the nation. In 2021, the Heritage Foundation reported that Michigan had 163 people in DEI roles, making the university’s the largest “DEI bureaucracy” in the country.

Yet despite the size and scope of its efforts, Black students say the university has failed to meet their needs, especially when it comes to enrolling them in what they consider a critical mass — enough that they’re not isolated and forced to feel like spokespersons for their race.

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Last year, after Black enrollment dipped to 3.9 percent — 14 percent of the state’s population is Black — the Black Student Union released a manifesto to highlight its most urgent needs. “DEI at the university, as it currently stands, is structurally flawed,” the student group wrote in November in a document it called “More Than Four: The 4 Point Platform.” The group wrote that “85 million dollars was spent on DEI efforts and yet, Black students’ experience on campus has hardly improved.”

After meeting with the student leaders, the university set up committees comprising faculty, staff, and students to tackle the four points discussed in the document and to make recommendations for the next round of DEI programs. That’s given student activists a front-row seat into some of the challenges a highly selective university faces in creating racially balanced classes.

Their input will be added to the mounds of data and pages of testimony collected and publicly posted during a yearlong review of “DEI 1.0" — the effort that spanned 2016 to 2021. In October a second five-year phase — “DEI 2.0" — will start, focused on a subset of strategies that have showed measurable progress.

Over the past several years, the university has hired more diverse faculty and staff, increased the number of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and incorporated diversity-related material across the curriculum, according to a university analysis. However, fewer students reported being satisfied with the campus climate in 2021, compared with those surveyed in 2016.

The situation underscores how challenging it can be for DEI offices to do all they’re expected to do, including monitoring the recruitment and retention of minority faculty members and students while combating real and perceived acts of racism. To critics, the mixed record is evidence that DEI practices and policies can struggle to achieve their own goals.

Across the country, most DEI offices are staffed with a few people with backgrounds in law, labor relations, or behavioral sciences who are expected to ensure compliance with federal laws, while making sure students, faculty, and staff from a variety of identities — underrepresented minorities, those who identify as LGBT, veterans, students with disabilities among them — are treated fairly. But even at the University of Michigan, with tenfold the number of staff assigned to diversity work, along with administrative, faculty, and political support, the DEI office is struggling to create conditions where minority students feel represented and included.

Chavous, who has worked in a variety of DEI-focused roles at the university since 1998 as both a faculty member and administrator, has spent much of her career researching how Black adolescents and young adults form their identities, and the roles institutions like universities play in that development.

“A lot of the criticism of DEI is based on very effective misinformation,” she says. “Our work cuts across almost every community that people care about.” Robust diversity offices are more important than ever, she says. By the end of the month, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to strike down, or at least severely restrict, the consideration of race in admissions. Chavous and others argue that DEI officers and the staff they oversee will be the people best positioned and trained to navigate a thorny political and legal landscape in the coming months to accomplish a vital task: recruiting and retaining students of color.

What Michigan has found, Chavous says, is that race-neutral approaches, like focusing instead on socioeconomic status, “are not an adequate substitute” for the race-conscious strategies that may soon be off the table at both public and private colleges nationwide.

The attacks on DEI and the potential for a nationwide affirmative action ban are twin pressures weighing on campus administrators at a time when the nation’s minority populations are growing, but their representation on many campuses is shrinking. Nationally, Black undergraduate enrollment dropped by about 17 percent between 2010 and 2020, and another 7 percent since then.

As of mid-June, 38 bills that would dismantle campus DEI efforts have been introduced in 21 states. Six have received final legislative approval, five have been signed into law, and 26 were considered but failed to pass before the end of the current legislative session. The bills mostly seek to eliminate the use of diversity statements, training, and funding for DEI offices. One of the most restrictive that is still under consideration is in Ohio, Michigan’s neighboring state. It would withhold money from public colleges unless they declare that they will not require students, faculty, or staff to take part in diversity training or programs.

Chavous says she feels a responsibility to speak out at a time when many college leaders have remained silent, fearing political backlash. In Michigan, a state with a Democratic governor, Senate, and House, “the legislative space is not as challenging as it is in other states,” she says, “but we’re only an election away from things changing. We’re not immune from those dynamics.”

Michigan has been a central character in higher education’s legal battle over race-conscious admissions. In the 1970s, Black student activists occupied the central administration building and boycotted classes, frustrated by the slow progress the university was making to diversify enrollment. During the 1980s and 1990s, the university pursued a plan it called the Michigan Mandate, which included aggressive recruiting efforts for minority faculty and specific enrollment targets for underrepresented students in all of the university’s colleges and schools. By the mid-1990s, Black enrollment had reached a peak of 9.3 percent.

The university’s practices attracted intense scrutiny and became the subject of two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases. In 2003, the court upheld the limited use of racial preferences in admission in a case, Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan Law School. The court agreed with the law school that diversity was central to its mission and that race could be considered as one of many factors in admissions. In a separate case involving Michigan’s undergraduate admissions, the court ruled that the university’s practices had gone too far in favoring minority candidates. A point system with explicit benefits to minority groups was unconstitutional, the court determined. Race must not be the “deciding factor” in admissions. The university took the split rulings as a limited win for affirmative action.

The reprieve was short-lived. In 2006, Michigan residents approved Proposal 2, which banned public institutions from using affirmative action based on race or ethnicity in admissions and hiring. By then, worried about the possibility of more legal challenges, the university had already started backing off from its more-explicit consideration of race in admissions, and minority enrollments were sliding. After the state ban was imposed, Black and Native American enrollment dropped by 44 percent and 90 percent, respectively, the university reported last year.

The loss was felt across the campus. In a statement to The Chronicle last week, Santa J. Ono, who became president last October, said that “diversity in the broadest sense … benefits the exchange and development of ideas by increasing students’ variety of perspectives; promotes cross-racial understanding and dispels racial stereotypes; and helps prepare students to be leaders in a global marketplace and increasingly multicultural society.”

Michigan’s initial five-year diversity plan began in 2016. The $85-million program was created following a rally by several hundred faculty and staff members and the discovery of racially offensive flyers in several spots on campus.

The goal was to ensure that DEI permeated the entire highly decentralized campus.

Each of the university’s 50 units has a DEI lead — typically a full-time employee whose job also includes other responsibilities. Combined, these units came up with 2,800 detailed action plans for achieving diversity goals. The central office also pursued 37 universitywide strategies.

Between 2016 and 2021, the university reported that its DEI programs made the university more accessible and affordable for students from underserved communities, shrank disparities in performance between majority and minority students, and created more diverse candidate pools for faculty and staff. Hispanic enrollment grew by 58 percent to 7.3 percent of undergraduates, while Asian American students rose by 40 percent to 17 percent of the total student body. Native American enrollment dropped by nearly 18 percent to 0.1 percent of undergraduates. Five percent of students in 2021 declared two or more races. Although the number of Black students increased slightly, from 1,255 in 2016 to 1,267 in 2021, it was less than the expansion of the university’s overall population, so the percentage of Black undergraduates dipped from 4.3 percent in 2016 to 3.9 percent in 2021.

During the first phase of DEI work, the university also opened a $10-million multicultural center, started an intensive tutoring and advising program with families and schools in four underserved areas, and offered free tuition to low-income students. Faculty were trained in inclusive teaching practices, students were supported by a larger network of peer mentors and professional coaches, and buildings were modified to accommodate people with disabilities. It was an unapologetically ambitious attempt to infuse DEI principles throughout the university’s processes and policies. Conservative critics took aim.

In its critique of “DEI bureaucracy,” the Heritage Foundation contends that Michigan’s DEI structure appears to “increase administrative bloat without contributing to the stated goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Chavous says the employees with diversity-related jobs are a tiny fraction of the Ann Arbor campus’s approximately 50,000 workers. Most have jobs that include other responsibilities and were already on staff before the DEI plan began in 2016, working in a variety of areas across the university: ensuring compliance with federal laws on sexual misconduct, age discrimination, and gender bias; helping faculty members teach more effectively; and advising struggling students. The $17 million a year the university spent during the first five years of its DEI plan represents less than 1 percent of the university’s annual operating budget of $2 billion.

“The breadth and depth of the work” across the university has made Michigan a model for others to follow if affirmative action is further restricted, says Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. “It’s to their credit, but it’s also made them a target.”

Chavous hadn’t planned to step into the chief diversity officer role, previously held by her husband, Robert Sellers, until after the university started a nationwide search for his replacement. But the job aligned well with the research she’d done on identity development among minority adolescents and young adults, as well as the impact institutional climates have on students’ academic, social, and psychological adjustment. Students who don’t feel a sense of identity with their discipline are more likely to interpret the normal setbacks of college, she says, as affirmation that they don’t belong. That makes it all the more important, she says, to have a critical mass of minority students across all disciplines.

Chavous received a doctorate in community psychology from the University of Virginia. She and Sellers, who she met at the University of Virginia, have collaborated on research into how racial identity relates to well-being.

Chavous, who earns $380,000 a year and reports directly to the provost, is the president’s principal adviser on DEI issues. She works in a renovated 1928 building, formerly the home of the Museum of Natural History, whose rotunda is capped by a domed plaster ceiling with carvings of flowers, monkeys, geckos, and swirling vines. Millions of museum specimens were moved out so that the president, provost, and other top executives could move their offices in last year. Regents now meet in a two-story room that once housed dinosaur skeletons. It’s a setting that could both awe and inspire first-time visitors to the campus.

When she started, the university was preparing for a second round of DEI programming. The challenges happening in other states didn’t dissuade her from taking on the role. “I’d spent a career experiencing different forms of resistance to this work,” Chavous says. “I felt like this is water I was already swimming in.”

For enrollment managers, it can feel, at times, like treading water. The population of high-school graduates in Michigan has plummeted 40 percent since the 1990s, as industries like auto and manufacturing shrank and families moved out. Meanwhile, inequalities in school funding and the disproportionate impact the pandemic had on learning in predominantly minority schools mean that there are fewer competitive applicants in those schools. Because of the state ban, race can’t be factored into admissions decisions. The combined impact means that the university has had to rely more on out-of-state students to recruit a strong, diverse class, Chavous says. Out-of-state students now make up 50 percent of Michigan’s undergraduates.

One of the signature programs of DEI 1.0 is Wolverine Pathways, which offers year-round academic and social support to students, families, and schools in four underserved areas — Detroit, Ypsilanti, Grand Rapids, and Southfield — starting in seventh grade. One example of the support: a math specialist who’s familiar with both K-12 and university-level math helps bridge what is often a huge chasm in preparation for college.

About one in five of Ann Arbor’s entering Black in-state students are program graduates, university leaders say. Those who complete the program are more than twice as likely to apply to, get in, and go to Michigan, and those who are admitted to the Ann Arbor or Dearborn campuses receive four years of free tuition. But relying on place-based recruiting leaves out many Black students from middle- and upper-income families, Chavous says. Not all Black families live in poor neighborhoods, and the kind of diversity the university is seeking includes students from all socioeconomic levels, she says.

The central DEI office also oversees the Go Blue Guarantee, which offers four years of free tuition at Michigan’s Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses for qualified Michigan students whose families earn $65,000 a year or less.

A program called Success Connects was started by the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives, which is also under the DEI office. It offers one-on-one coaching sessions, peer-support chats, and study skills and goal-setting workshops. Participants gained higher GPAs, were more involved in campus activities, and reported in surveys a greater sense of belonging.

Changing perceptions about the university is one of the main goals of its expanded outreach. “The University of Michigan is either seen by some families as inaccessible — it doesn’t admit people like me — or unapproachable — if I am admitted, will I find a home there?” says Carla O’Connor, director of Wolverine Pathways.

The university hopes that its $10-million Trotter Multicultural Center will create a welcoming environment for prospective students. Approved in 2014 and opened in 2019, the walls of its sunny, comfortable lounge are covered floor to ceiling with black-and-white mural-sized campus newspaper photos that trace decades of student activism. Michigan students are shown protesting the war in Vietnam, decrying racism, defending affirmative action, and many times over the decades, demanding better representation on campus.

Two leaders of the Black Student Union sat down with a Chronicle reporter shortly after graduation in a conference room at the center to talk about DEI. Brooklyn Blevins, a rising senior who serves as speaker of the group, says that the first phase of DEI seemed “sort of like a primer” to explain to majority groups why DEI matters. For decades, Black students had been making demands for greater diversity and inclusion. Their latest document took a less combative tone, Blevins says, to give the university’s new president and DEI leader time to work with them. “Coming straight out of the gate really hot with the new officers would be a lot,” Blevins says. “We didn’t want to sever the relationship before it even started.”

Kayla Tate, who graduated in April, was last year’s BSU speaker. Explaining to white people why Black students often feel so isolated is tiring, she says. “So many times I’ve been the only Black person in my classes,” Tate says. “Having to intentionally seek out my community because there isn’t a critical mass of Black people — that’s work. Staying up ‘til 3 a.m. writing the political platform — we’re students ourselves — it’s labor on top of labor.”

A first-generation student from Detroit — a city whose population is 78 percent Black— Tate was apprehensive about the university when she went on a campus tour and saw few people who looked like her. What won her over was visiting the multicultural center, which had just opened, and seeing exhibits by artists of color. She credits the center, and the friends she met there, with helping her overcome doubts about whether she would fit in. Other colleges that accepted her sent her T-shirts and banners. With Michigan, “it’s such an elitist school that the attitude seemed to be ‘you’re lucky you got in.’”

Ono, the university’s president, and Chavous sat down with the students and agreed to involve them more in DEI planning by placing them on committees that will make recommendations in the fall. Ono said he agrees “100 percent” with the priorities of their platform: raising Black student enrollment, giving students more input in decision-making, investing in K-12 education to produce more college-ready students, and “explicitly combatting anti-Blackness.” An example of anti-Blackness, the student document says, is a deeply entrenched pattern, which current DEI efforts haven’t erased, of failing “to engage rigorously with the unique needs of Black students.”

Combatting anti-Blackness, “improving structural inequities, and bridging the opportunity gap” in public schools: These are big asks for a DEI office of any size. “Some of them know — OK we’re not going to eradicate racism in a semester, but what can we do that pushes the needle forward in a real way that others can build on,” Chavous says. “Eradicate inequality — that’s overwhelming,” she adds. A smaller, actionable step might be to recruit scholars with expertise in racial equity.

Blevins understands that many of the problems the students want to see fixed will take much longer than the four or five years most spend on campus. “We have so little time here, and often nothing comes of our efforts,” she says. As they approach graduation, student leaders try to pass as much information and strategies to the next generation of leaders so the momentum for change continues.

“We’re at a pivotal point now because we finally got a seat at the table,” Blevins says. “I’m hopeful for progress but choosing not to be naïve because these same promises have been made so many times in the past.”

When Black students complain about the climate at Michigan, some administrators worry that they’re scaring away potential applicants. “That’s victim-blaming,” Tate says in response. The “More Than Four” document echoes that. “We understand that having a reputation for being an unsafe space for Black students potentially deters prospective students and hinders their desire to attend,” it reads. “However, the Black students who endure this negative campus climate will not — nor should they be expected to — be silent about the harm, isolation, and inequities they experience.”

Those who oppose affinity groups and multicultural centers often argue that they segregate students. Tate says spending time in a place that feels like home gives her the confidence to spend the overwhelming majority of her time in what can feel like an “oppressively white” campus. “When I feel more grounded, that’s when I can go out and interact with others,” she says. “When I don’t feel grounded, I stay in my room and my grades suffer.”

Chavous’s research bears this out. Students who have a strong connection to their identity and heritage, she says, tend to be more motivated and persistent. “It doesn’t make you more insular — it makes you more proud in a way that gives you confidence to interact with others.” When she was growing up, her world history class made no mention of Africa, she says. Her parents, both civically engaged educators, encouraged her to read at home about current and historical Black role models and shared recollections of their own involvement in the civil-rights movement.

The Trotter Multicultural Center is a place where students can celebrate their own cultures, and learn about others. It came about because of decades of student activism at Michigan, including a 2013 Twitter campaign, #BBUM or Being Black at the University of Michigan. It was prompted, in part, by a planned fraternity party advertised as “Hood Ratchet Thursday” with an invitation that welcomed all “bad bitches, white girls, basketball players, thugs, and gangsters.” Tweets like these revealed common but unspoken frustrations and insecurities:

The campaign, which went viral and prompted similar hashtags from other top universities, sparked a nationwide conversation about how isolated and stigmatized minority students often feel. Students also issued seven demands, including bringing Black undergraduate-student representation up to 10 percent — a demand that hasn’t been met — and building the new multicultural center.

The center, which replaced an aging structure farther from campus, has proven popular with a wide variety of students. Tensions have occasionally risen when Black students have had to compete with other students for conference spaces. On a recent Friday afternoon, Ali Curry studied for a GRE exam in the new Trotter lounge, which she described as “definitely the hub for Black students.” Until 4 p.m., it’s a quiet place to study, and after that, it’s somewhere to hang out with friends, play cards, watch movies, and listen to music. The building includes meeting rooms, study nooks, a roof deck, and kitchen.

“I grew up in Ann Arbor, and I’m from a predominantly white school and neighborhood, so I’m used to being one of the only Black people in a space,” Curry says. “But many of our students from areas like Detroit grew up surrounded by other Black people, and being among so few can give them a level of anxiety. It’s so important for them to have a place that feels like home.”

Plaques and photos throughout the building emphasize its roots in Black student activism, but as a multicultural center, it’s intended as a place where different groups can mingle. Curry understands Trotter should be open to all, but she feels that white students should respect that “this was founded as a result of Black activism, as a safe space for Black students.”

Last year, a Black graduate student wrote a letter to the Board of Regents complaining of “white student organizations kicking Black and brown students out of spaces within Trotter because their white organizations reserved the space.” The student, Byron D. Brooks, said white students were “colonizing” a building that was supposed to be “a Mecca for students of color.”

Charles Hilo, who at the time was a senior serving as editor in chief of The Michigan Review, a student-run publication with a conservative/libertarian bent, fired back. “If students, whether white or Black, feel uncomfortable around people of other races the solution is more integration, not less,” he wrote. In a closing dig, he added, “I wrote the entirety of this piece while sitting in the Trotter Multicultural Center. Cry more, Byron.” In other columns, Hilo and his co-writers complained that Michigan’s DEI efforts pit students against each other, make them unhappier, and force everyone to walk on eggshells to avoid offending someone.

As evidence, the writers pointed to the results of the university’s 2016 and 2021 climate surveys. The percentage of students who were satisfied with the overall campus climate decreased from 72 percent in 2016 to 61 percent in 2021. Students in less-privileged groups generally felt less positive. Skeptics suggest that calling attention to inequities and setting up offices to tackle them encourage people to look for problems where they don’t exist and to turn small disagreements into bigger battles requiring interventions from administrators. (Neither Hilo nor Brooks could be reached for comment.)

The university sees it differently. Because of the intense institutional focus on DEI, the university’s progress report suggests, “those responding in 2021 have a greater understanding of DEI issues and challenges and may bring a more critical lens to their evaluations of the campus climate.”

The university acknowledges that more work is needed, but points out that, between 2016 and 2021, other factors besides DEI were weighing heavily on students, faculty, and staff, including the Covid-19 pandemic, racial unrest, and growing political divides.

Studies have shown that students perform better and are more likely to persist when they have opportunities to interact with faculty members from their own background, Chavous says. Michigan’s ban on affirmative action means that the university can’t factor race or gender into its hiring decisions, but it can still cultivate diverse applicant pools.

During the first phase of its latest DEI plan, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts started the Collegiate Fellows Program, focused on recruiting early-career academics with demonstrated commitments to diversity through teaching, research, and service. Over the first six years of the program, the university hired 50 fellows from a pool of nearly 4,000 applicants. Nearly all are now on tenure track. About 90 percent of the recipients are people of color, Chavous says, and nearly 70 percent are from underrepresented racial groups.

Faculty are offered mentoring and professional development, and because they’re brought in as a cohort, “they come in with a built-in network of friends,” says Elizabeth R. Cole, a professor of women’s and gender studies, psychology, and Afroamerican and African studies, who oversees the program. Cole also directs the National Center for Institutional Diversity, a campus-based program that researches the benefits, challenges, and opportunities for expanding diversity efforts. The center was started as a result of the state’s affirmative action ban.

Ono, the president, told listeners in the public session on DEI that his reasons for supporting diversity are partly personal. The son of a college professor who immigrated from Japan, Ono said he and his family experienced racism within the white, middle-class neighborhoods and schools where he grew up. “Having been a target of racism as a kid, I know how much it hurts and how much it gets in the way of a young person achieving at their optimum if they’re going to an institution where they don’t feel welcome,” he said.

While the field may be under attack elsewhere, he said, “it’s incredibly important for me to clearly show I’m behind DEI 1.0 but also, as we embark on DEI 2.0, that we do so with more vigor and more determination and more support from me and everyone here.”

The job won’t be done, Ono added, “until the students are convinced that they feel the impact of the work.”