As expected, the entire University of North Carolina system has abandoned any formal bureaucracy based on DEI, though apparently some vestiges of DEI will remain. The vote passed the Board of Governors almost unanimously, and, better, the basis for the banning appears to be the adoption of a form of institutional neutrality, i.e., like Chicago’s “Kalven Principles.”
There are two articles below, the first from Inside Higher Education and the second from the Citizen Times of Asheville, NC. Click on either headline to read. As both articles note, this change is part of a nationwide pushback against the more invidious aspects of DEI. (There are some useful aspects, but they don’t have to go under DEI or be part of a huge and expensive bureaucracy.)
From Insider Higher Ed:
The piece:
The University of North Carolina System Board of Governors voted on Thursday morning to eliminate a policy requiring diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices, and to ask individual campus chancellors to cut positions and spending on DEI.
The vote, which passed 22 to 2, will institute a new “equality within the university” policy to replace DEI. Chancellors at the System’s 16 campuses must each submit a report outlining steps they’ve taken to comply with the DEI ban to System president Peter Hans by September.
“Our public universities must take a stance of principled neutrality on matters of political controversy … it is not the job of the university to decide all the complex and multi-dimensional questions of how to balance and interpret identity,” Hans said at the board meeting. “This policy will preserve the university’s role as a trusted venue for that vital debate.”
Board member Pearl Burris-Floyd, who is Black and voted yes on the policy change, stressed that the decision should not lead to the widespread disappearance of essential services for minority students, and that the board has not “turned their backs on them.”
“Even if it’s not called DEI, we have a way to help people and make that path clearer for all people,” she said.
DEI bans have been enshrined into law in Texas and Florida, where they’ve led to dozens of layoffs and the closure of student resource centers. Lawmakers in North Carolina had proposed a similar legislative mandate, but ultimately deferred to the UNC board.
The vote also comes shortly after the board of the System’s flagship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, voted to divert $2.3 million in DEI funding to police and campus safety in the wake of pro-Palestinian student protests.
Note the “stand of principled neutrality on matters of political controversy” averred by the President. That’s simply Kalvenish institutional neutrality, and kudos for the UNC system to adopt it. I don’t know if people will lose their jobs (I’d prefer dismantling via transferring people or not replacing them), but that’s not my call. The system has to go.
And from the Asheville Citizen Times:
An excerpt:
The UNC Board of Governors adopted a policy requiring “institutional neutrality” and eliminating funding for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in a nearly unanimous vote May 23 at its regular meeting in Raleigh, with all but two members voting in favor.
The vote repeals two DEI policies adopted in September 2019, which required each of the state’s 17 public campuses — which include UNC Asheville, Western Carolina University and Appalachian State — employ roles such as a chief diversity officer and to set goals for advancing diversity and inclusion, among other requirements.
The Board of Governors has 23 voting members. The two “no” votes came from members Joel Ford and Sonja Phillips Nichols. Two board members, Gene Davis and Pearl Burris-Floyd, spoke in the meeting regarding the policy and why it had their support prior to the vote.
What I don’t get is why the two people who supported DEI were not among the “no” votes. Perhaps they weren’t voting members. At any rate, note the emphasis on “institutional neutrality” in the first paragraph. I hope that the UNC system enforces it, for keeping our own University neutral requires constant vigilance. Administrators and chairpeople seem to be unable to keep their gobs shut on political and ideological issues.
Here’s how they’ll enforce it:
The chancellor and student affairs director at each institution must provide written certification of compliance and what actions they’ve taken to comply with “the University’s commitment to institutional neutrality and nondiscrimination” by Sept. 1.
They’ll also have to report reductions in force and spending, “along with changes to job titles and position descriptions, undertaken as a result of implementing this policy and how those savings achieved from these actions can be redirected to initiatives related to student success and wellbeing,” the policy says.
But of course many places will try to do an end run around it. Appalachian State (part of the system) may be one:
Appalachian State University Interim Chancellor Heather Norris, regarding the policy change when it was proposed, reaffirmed the school’s commitment to supporting students.
“While there are a lot of unknowns, and we cannot answer questions about specific implementation details at this time, I can assure you our university’s commitment to supporting all of our students is unwavering, and we remain dedicated to providing a compassionate, high-quality college experience that is focused on student success,” Norris said in an email obtained by the Citizen Times.
To me that seems like coded language for “well, we will obey the formal rules, but we’re still gonna have DEI.” And of course this is going to happen with respect to the Supreme Court’s prohibition of race-based admission. Colleges everywhere are now asking prospective students to write essays on hardships they’ve overcome, and that, of course, is a blatant invitation to invoke race as one of those hardships. Even that kind of ask may be illegal, so this whole mishigass isn’t over yet.
Good to see the pendulum swinging back to using rational common sense. Decent people can support those who need it without $1m of bells and whistles.
Chancellor :
“I can assure you our university’s commitment to supporting all of our students is unwavering, and we remain dedicated to providing a compassionate, high-quality college experience that is focused on student success,”
I don’t know any way to get around these short, aspirational declarations without abandoning them altogether, or expanding them into some other treatise… Kalven comes to mind, as a way to sort or aim or direct these towards a clear interest or value….
That is, make a strong, positive claim to defend the (or any) university from the postmodern/critical studies departments.
I think faculty at all institutions (mine included) are concerned about administrative bloat. I think the goals of DEI initiatives are worthwhile, but I’ve been amazed how much funding has been put into it. I hope that more of that funding can be put toward actual scholarships for students instead of the cost of administration to recruit them. Perhaps that will be a side effect of this policy change.
This is good news for my colleagues at universities in North Carolina. I married into a family of tar heels and love the place.
But this shows how polarized such changes will be, and how uneven the landscape will become over time. Universities in some jurisdictions will become liberal again. But large swaths of the academic landscape will stay mired in transgender ideology.
For example, yesterday my university asked me (and all other employees) to log into the university employee information system and indicate my gender. Not my sex. The choices were not male or female; instead they were “woman/girl”, “man/boy”, or “non-binary”. Fortunately there was also a “decline to answer” choice. IDK what happens if one simply refuses to log into the site and answer the question at all.
The university is required to do this because the provincial government in 2023 passed a new law that requires employers to provide data on the genders (not the sexes) of its employees. All universities in my province must request these data from employees and send those data to the bureaucracy (and of course the university is full of its own bureaucrats who embrace gender ideology and would do this on their own unbidden).
Public opinion could change overnight back to the sensible protection of the sex-based rights of women and girls, and the rejection of gnostic belief in gendered souls. But the bureaucracy and the laws will not change so fast. It would take at least a decade of non-socialist provincial governments to unwind all this. There seems little prospect of that.
That seems a good thing.
Hopefully, this can spread, as one major campus makes it easier for others to follow.
One can’t know how far this may spread, but if it becomes the norm over a few years, then public trust in our university system can return.
Yes. Wouldn’t that be great!
And while I’m here, because of you, Mark, and your pictures of insects and your adoring narrative about them, I can hardly squash an ant any more without feeling I’ve hurt one of your personal friends. I’ve always gone out of my way to capture non-venomous critters from inside the house and release them outside, but I despise ants. One summer I had 5 separate species building HUGE anthills in my backyard. We couldn’t walk out there without being bitten/stung.
In North Carolina, the state legislature appoints the UNC 24 Board of Governors members. UNC refers to, in this case, the entire NC public university system, not just the well known UNC-Chapel Hill. So this single board oversees ALL the public colleges/universities and the state-wide residential high school for science and math. The NC legislature is republican/very conservative; the governor is a Dem (Cooper). In Virginia, each college has its own board of visitors and those boards are appointed by the governor. In VA the legislature is controlled by Dems; the governor is Republican (Youngkin). I do not see DEI exiting my VA anytime soon.
Bravo
As Martin Luther King said: “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”*
Bye, bye, DEI.
*This beautiful phrase has a history that stretches back to the 19th century: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/
The ideology of DEI and the personnel of its bureaucracy are both intertwined with another recent university trend: the conflation of education and even research with therapy. This approach is instantiated in the spread of offices and deanships of “Faculty Well-Being”, which bring to academia the outlook of Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire. One example can be enjoyed at: https://intranet.be.uw.edu/facultystaff/office-of-academic-affairs/faculty-well-being/
I hope this becomes a trend throughout academia and then into the corporate world. In our manufacturing firm, we task our engineering staff with trying to cut pennies of material out of parts (granted, we make literally millions of some things) to preserve our bottom line profit margin, while we employ a large crew of DEI professionals including one in the C-suite who add no value to the product or the customer experience and hurt the overall profitability of the firm and my profit-sharing bonus. I have noticed that this has divided our staff – whereas in the past we operated mainly color blind, noticing the cultural aspects of races but not really thinking about it when working on widgets, to now where we are told to notice how Hispanic vs. Black vs. White vs. Asian engineers have different working styles and how we need to really pay attention to race during our design process. It isn’t working. Now engineers look at coworkers and see the racial stereotypes that were presented by the DEI team rather than seeing talented individuals.