At the University of Tennessee, the campus DEI program is now called the Department of Access and Engagement.
Louisiana State University also renamed its diversity office after Jeff Landry, a Trump-backed Republican, was elected governor last fall. The Division of Inclusion, Civil Rights, and Title IX is now the Division of Participation, Civil Rights, and Title IX.
And at the University of Oklahoma, the office of diversity is now the Department of Access and Opportunity.
In what appears to be an effort to appease or even lie to opponents of diversity and equity programs, university officials are rebranding their DEI offices under different names, changing employee titles and rewriting requirements to eliminate words such as “diversity” and “equity.” In some cases, only the words have changed.
For some universities, opposition to diversity programs comes at a difficult time. They face an incoming student shortage, the result of a declining birth rate and skepticism about the value of an expensive college degree. Others worry about how the competitive admissions ban will affect the complexion of their campuses.
In both cases, many college officials feel they need DEI offices to market to an increasingly diverse generation of students and the faculty they can attract. While no two campus diversity programs are exactly alike, they often preside over a variety of functions, including running student cultural centers, ensuring regulatory compliance, and hosting racial bias workshops for students and faculty members.
Conservative critics have questioned the cost of what they call DEI’s bureaucracies, which in some places have budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, and attacked the programs as leftist, indoctrination factories.
In a recent webinar advocating continued DEI efforts, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said the backlash is based on “a few anecdotal examples of some terrible educational module gone awry.”
Announcing the renaming of Louisiana State’s DEI program, the school’s president, William F. Tate IV, said there was no political pressure.
But he recently told the faculty senate that “we’ve certainly paid attention to the ripple effects that have occurred on campuses across the country.” He vowed that the university, one of the most diverse in the Southeastern Conference, is “still committed to PPC.”
Todd Woodward, a university spokesman, said the idea of ”engagement,” now used instead of “inclusion,” was at the heart of the university’s strategic plan before Governor Landry was elected.
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, at least 82 bills opposing DEI in higher education have been filed in more than 20 states by 2023. Of those, 12 have become law, including Idaho, Indiana, Florida and Texas.
This led to layoffs and closures. The University of Florida recently announced it will lay off more than a dozen diversity officers. At the University of Texas at Austin, the Center for Multicultural Engagement has closed. And about 60 administrators received notices that they would lose their jobs, according to the state chapters of the NAACP and the American Association of University Professors. Some Texas campuses have closed their LGBTQ centers.
But some schools, even in states with DEI crackdowns, reacted more modestly.
Florida State University, Tallahassee, appears to be taking a “damage mitigation approach.” Will Hanley, professor of history at FSU, said in an interview.
The school has reorganized jobs and turned the Office of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion into an Office of Equal Opportunities Compliance and Engagement.
But there were limits to how far it would go.
FSU students are required to take two “diversity” courses, which include dozens of topics such as Buddhist ethics, German LGBTQ literature and history. A faculty committee recently proposed renaming the requirement “perspectives and awareness”.
The school senate rejected the idea. At the Senate meeting, Dr Hanley, who specializes in the Middle East, said the new name would confuse the very intent of the requirement.
“In the context of the attacks on PPC, I wondered if changing the name of this requirement gives weight to those attacks,” he said, according to his minutes the meeting.
In Georgia, David Bray, an economics professor at Kennesaw State University, sees things differently and says diversity officers should have been eliminated rather than given a new title. Kennesaw State announced last December that its chief diversity officer will now be the vice president overseeing the Department of Organizational Effectiveness, Leadership Development and Inclusive Excellence.
The move came after the state Board of Regents approved a policy change barring Georgia’s 26 public colleges from requiring applicants and employees to fill out diversity statements.
“It’s the same lipstick on the ideological pig,” said Dr. Bray, who is gay and opposes diversity programs, arguing they promote equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity. “Once the PPC was exposed as the political left, now they are reinventing the language and have transformed themselves into the ‘sense of belonging’ crew.”
But for many administrators, name changes are often an effort to keep the mission of diversity programs intact.
Donde Plowman, the chancellor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, told the faculty’s Senate in November that the school “has not historically done well” in attracting students from underrepresented groups to its campus. The percentage of black students decreased between 2020 and 2023, from 5.5 percent of total enrollment to 4.2 percent.
After a professor asked if prospective professors and lawmakers “looking for red meat” would be deterred by changing the name of the DEI program, the Division of Diversity and Engagement, Dr. Plowman said: “What’s happened is that these words have become a weapon — they create noise and distractions away from the real work.”
Thus, it was recently renamed the Division of Access and Engagement.
Dr. Plowman “consistently discussed the change in access and engagement on campus as an extension of our mission to reach and support students, faculty and staff,” said Tisha Benton, spokeswoman for the chancellor.
Tennessee lawmakers seemed wise to the resolution. A bill introduced in January specifically stated that such offices “regardless of name or designation” should not operate.
The legislation appeared destined for passage in the overwhelmingly Republican legislature. But the mood changed during a committee meeting after members reviewed a letter from the Jewish Alliance of Knoxville, which expressed concern that the ban would limit how the University of Tennessee approaches Jewish student support.
The bill was killed, unanimously, on a voice vote.
