The University of North Texas has closed its DEI office in response to a new state law banning DEI offices, but its functions may simply be shifted to other offices. It is the first major university in Texas to close its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) office.
“The offices of Title IX, equal employment opportunity, and affirmative action will be moved to the division of finance and administration,” announced University of North Texas President Neal Smatresk in an email published last week in the Dallas Morning News.
The closure of the DEI office may have resulted in one significant personnel change: UNT DEI Vice President Joanne Woodard will retire this November, according to Smatresk’s email.
Other programs now located in UNT’s DEI office, including the multicultural center and pride alliance, are being “reorganiz[ed],” Smatresk announced.
UNT has 21 full-time DEI employees and six additional part-time staffers who are undergraduate or graduate students. It is “the first major Texas university to announce a plan to adhere to the new law,” according to the Morning News.
Two months ago, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion offices at Texas state colleges.
“An institution of higher education may not establish or maintain a diversity, equity, and inclusion office or hire or assign an employee of the institution, or contract with a third party, to perform the duties of a diversity, equity, and inclusion office,” states the legislation, Senate Bill 17, which goes into effect on January 1, 2024
But some conservative education scholars have warned that colleges that eliminate their DEI offices might continue the same functions in other offices.
“Whether it is the new constitutional bans on affirmative action in admissions, long established (but oft-ignored) bans on racial preferences in hiring, or laws prohibiting DEI practices, history teaches that absent concrete legal consequences for violating the law, university administrators will simply wink at the legislature while continuing to follow what they consider to be the path of moral righteousness,” wrote lawyer Louis Bonham in an article last month for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
A study by a California State University professor found that an increase in “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies at a college is linked to rising opposition to free speech.
“The rise of DEI bureaucracies has actually coincided with the beginning of a ‘Free-Speech Crisis on College Campuses,’” notes the study.
The study was published on Substack by Kevin Wallsten, a political-science professor at California State University at Long Beach.
“It was clear from the start that, regardless of what was on their websites, DEI bureaucracies were more likely to suppress than encourage free expression on college campuses,” the study observes.
The study examined 71 universities using survey data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2022 rankings of university support for free speech and a Heritage Foundation study on DEI offices issued in 2021
DEI offices often promote tenets associated with critical race theory and “anti-racism.” “Anti-racism” teaches students to hate their country and view it as incorrigibly racist. “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism….Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says Ibram Kendi’s best-selling book How to Be An Antiracist, used in some high-school classes. It advocates discrimination against whites, saying, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination [against whites]. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate, which loves this odious book.
