Are changing demographics enabling Democrats and college leaders to fight back?
To get a sense of the current state of conservative attacks on colleges’ diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, it’s important to watch Wisconsin, where a monthslong battle over whether colleges should employ DEI officers has reached a culmination.
State Republican officials are convinced that DEI efforts create unfair advantages for students of color, pitting them against white students, and indoctrinating all students with liberal ideas.
Speaker Robin J. Vos of the Wisconsin Assembly, a Republican, says DEI stands for “division, exclusion, and indoctrination” and is “the single-most important issue” in the country.
Through bureaucratic maneuvering, Republicans in the Assembly have held hostage an expected pay raise for all 35,500 public higher-ed employees until the state’s colleges get rid of all their DEI officers. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, has sued.
From our Erin Gretzinger:
“In the 2023-25 biennial budget, Gov. Tony Evers proposed an 8-percent raise over two years for state employees. The Republican-controlled legislature proposed a 6-percent raise, which was passed and signed into the budget by the governor. However, the pay adjustments cannot be carried out until they are approved by the Joint Committee on Employment Relations. This phase of the legislative and budgeting process then became a leverage point: While the Republican-led committee approved the raises for all other state employees in October, it declined to grant the wage increases for UW system employees.”
The issue in the Badger State, where a Democrat is governor but Republicans control the legislature, has been simmering for some time now.
This year, the $32 million the state says it spends to employ 188 DEI officers almost torpedoed the entire state budget, when Republicans tried to cut it from the funds for colleges. As a compromise, Governor Evers allowed for the $32-million cut but vetoed the elimination of the positions.
There’s a long history of Republicans attacking college leaders in Wisconsin, where resources are thin, antitax sentiment is strong, and a large swath of residents feels alienated from the university system.
For all the ballyhoo over DEI staffing, it’s worth taking a look at the state system’s enrollment and diversity challenges.
While enrollment is up at the flagship campus, in Madison, the numbers at regional campuses continue to plummet.
From Erin’s story:
The withholding of funds over DEI comes as the UW system faces other budgetary challenges. In mid-October, the system officially closed a two-year campus and ended in-person instruction at two others. Meanwhile, 10 out of the 13 four-year institutions in the system will run deficits this year, and two universities have announced layoffs over the past few weeks.
Meanwhile, the state’s public-school system, which feeds its university system, is growing increasingly diverse.
Close to a third of Wisconsin’s public-school students this year are students of color, compared with only a quarter a decade ago, and just 20 percent two decades ago, according to a recent story in The Post-Crescent, a newspaper in Appleton.
And during campus protests in recent years, those students of color have made it clear that they feel excluded by administrators, faculty, and students.
Gretzinger is a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 2021, she smartly compared the rhetoric and demands being made by students of color that year with the demands made by Black students involved in student protests in 1969. The similarities are striking. Both groups ask for more administrative support for Black students. Both groups complained of anti-Black attitudes on campus. And both groups pointed out the dismal state of diversity.
One of the students’ demands in 2021 was to honor the demands of 1969.
From her story in UW’s Badger-Herald:
In 1974, early race and ethnicity data indicated that 2 percent of UW students were Black, according to the UW news site. Preliminary data from 2020 shows that 2.19 percent of students identify as Black — less than a .2-percent increase in over nearly half a century. The 1969 and the 2020 demands both call for increased efforts in this area.
In 2022, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel took a similar tack, interviewing several Black students and alumni to better understand why the college’s Black enrollment has never exceeded 3 percent.
Black students described combative interactions with white students and faculty members on campus, with many constantly having to justify their presence. Those stories, which often hit local news, are well known in the state’s communities of color, and discussed when high-school students determine where to enroll for college.
From the Sentinel story:
“I don’t want to paint it with a broad stroke of like, ‘This was terrible,’” said Eric Fleming, an alum. “I had a great time. But I think: What could have been possible had I not had to carry this burden of race, this burden of other people’s discomfort? What would have been possible had I been able to have an experience without all of that?”
Many of the state’s Democratic leaders, along with college administrators, have rhetorically been mostly passive about the necessity of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, arguing at the statehouse and in media appearances that DEI is not only about race, is widely accepted in corporate America, and is good for the state’s economy.
UW-Madison’s DEI website today features, among other things, forums, data, and programs aimed at closing enrollment and retention gaps between students of color and white students.
And the UW system this summer went forward with hiring a chief diversity officer, despite Republicans’ pledge to do away with that office.
Whether such efforts can undo years of discrimination and reverse enrollment patterns has yet to be determined.
Much of the national media has centered its DEI coverage on Texas and Florida, where two sweeping anti-DEI laws backed by high-profile governors have drawn the ire of students and faculty over perceived free-speech violations. But it’s purple states like Wisconsin, where demographics are changing, college enrollment is declining, and tax dollars are stretched, that may help us better understand DEI’s fate.
What I’m reading:
- Enslaved Americans had a very different understanding of civil rights than Black Americans living in the Jim Crow era, according to this Wall Street Journal review of Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, by Dylan C. Penningroth.
- Have progressive attitudes toward racial justice turned into a form of tribalism? Fintan O’Toole, in The New York Review of Books, explores a provocative new argument made by Susan Neiman in her newest book, Left is Not Woke.
- The actor Richard Roundtree’s portrayal of Shaft gave Americans “the first picture to show a Black man who leads a life free from racial torment,” according to Anita Gates’s New York Times obituary.
