The banning of an ill-defined term has caused hysteria and confusion
A year ago, The Chronicle’s Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez spoke to several experts in an attempt to define the term DEI for this newsletter’s readers:
The abbreviation DEI, short for diversity, equity, and inclusion, is everywhere, on university centers, in staff titles and administrative positions on college campuses, and in proposed state legislation.
But as some conservative lawmakers have set their sights on eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion offices or staff positions at public colleges, or from allowing colleges to use DEI statements in hiring and promotion, the definitions of the abbreviation and the words it stands for have become clouded.
Since that newsletter, conservatives have continued their concerted efforts to redefine and demonize DEI through editorials, blog posts, and congressional hearings. Those efforts has largely been effective.
Florida, Texas, and Utah have now banned all DEI activities and positions. Lawmakers’ refusal to define DEI in both the legislation and the accompanying regulations has in recent months created a real mess on college campuses, where administrators and their general counsels are attempting to relabel, reassign, and redefine offices and programs previously under the banner of DEI.
In January, before Texas’ law went into effect, Accuracy in Media, a right-wing activist group, dispatched undercover reporters to several colleges to ask student-service workers whether they’d define their work as DEI. What ensued, as The Chronicle’s Katherine Mangan wrote, got several administrators in trouble:
As director of student belonging at the University of Texas at Tyler, Tarecka Payne was still adjusting to how her job had changed under a new law banning diversity, equity, and inclusion activities when she was ambushed in her office and secretly recorded by an undercover reporter from a right-wing news group.
Payne was asked whether the DEI work she’d been assigned to when she was hired in July 2022 was off the table now that Senate Bill 17, which took effect January 1, had passed. “There’s really no ways of, like, doing the DEI work?” the reporter asked.
“No, you can still do it. You just have to be … creative,” Payne answered, pausing before carefully enunciating the final word.
Within days, the university suspended her while it investigates the video.
Tucked into the acronym DEI is a concoction of concepts, activities, realities, and intentions that are now core to many universities’ day-to-day functions as demographics change and students’ attitudes about race evolve.
In addition, colleges are required by the federal government and a number of accreditors to identify and prevent discrimination against protected groups of people.
From Katherine’s story:
The video has created turmoil across Texas by presenting the impression that the state’s public colleges are trying to skirt the law banning DEI activities. And it’s worried advocates in other states who’ve seen how groups that oppose diversity and inclusion efforts can mobilize to advance a narrative that DEI is a radical, un-American concept that needs to be quashed.
The stakes are high for both the institutions and employees. Texas and Florida were the first states that banned DEI activities with laws that are both ambiguous in their descriptions of what DEI is and harsh in their penalties for noncompliance. The ambiguities about those laws and how they might be interpreted have led lawmakers in other states to spell out dozens of specific jobs that should be eliminated.
What I’m reading...
- Florida State University is quietly dismantling DEI programs, writes Tarah Jean for the Tallahassee Democrat.
- A series of lawsuits have been opened against states’ diversity programs, writes Julian Mark for The Washington Post.
- Conservative groups have “co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it,” writes Nikole Hannah-Jones in The New York Times.