ECU faculty wants their DEI and they want it RIGHT NOW, bro.
It appears the wokeness-enabling N&O newsroom wants it too:
As professor Amanda Klein was settling into the fall semester at East Carolina University, she logged on to the university’s Faculty Senate website to check the date and time for an upcoming meeting of the senate’s Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Klein has been a member of the committee since it was established in 2021 and previously served as its chair.
But when she got to the Faculty Senate website in early September, she didn’t see the committee or its scheduled meetings listed in their normal location. Instead, she received an error message that the webpage — which previously contained three years’ worth of the committee’s meeting minutes, annual reports and other DEI resources — couldn’t be found. “That was really gutting to see that,” Klein told The News & Observer, adding that she hadn’t been informed of the website’s removal, or the reason for it, prior to discovering it herself
But Klein soon learned why the change had been made. At the committee’s first meeting of the academic year, Klein and the other committee members learned from Faculty Chair Anne Ticknor that the move came as a result of ECU’s efforts to comply with the UNC System’s new “Equality Within the University of North Carolina System” policy.
The policy, which the Board of Governors approved in May, repealed the public university system’s previous DEI requirements that were implemented in 2019. Among other ideals, the policy emphasizes “institutional neutrality,” which prohibits the state’s public universities — through their administrators or other leaders — from taking stances on political or social issues.
Guidance on the policy, drafted by the UNC System’s legal staff and released this summer, did not explicitly ban DEI efforts at the universities. But the practical applications of the policy resulted in DEI offices being closed across the system and dozens of DEI-related jobs being eliminated or significantly altered, among other changes.
In addition to the committee’s webpage being taken down, Ticknor informed the committee that, based on information she had received from ECU administrators, the group would need to rename itself and establish a new charge, or description, for its work — removing the ties to DEI in both — to comply with the neutrality requirements set forth in the new system policy. ECU appears to be the only UNC System school that directed its Faculty Senate or Faculty Council to scrub one of its committees of its ties to DEI to comply with the equality policy. At least two similar committees, at UNC Greensboro and UNC-Chapel Hill, remain unchanged. […]
I could have sworn our GOP-dominated UNC boards defunded DEI. What is going on here? What say you, current board members and current statewide candidates Dave Boliek and Chapel Hill Republican Bradford Paisley Briner IV?
MORE:
[…] The variation represents one of several discrepancies in the effects and impacts of the equality policy that have surfaced since universities reported their efforts to comply with the DEI repeal last month. In a statement to The N&O, UNC System spokesperson Andy Wallace said that “each university was tasked with applying the policy to its own unique circumstances.”
The move at ECU also comes despite many aspects of professors’ work and responsibilities, including service on university committees, largely being exempt from the stipulations of the new policy, per the guidance from system legal staff. The N&O asked ECU for an explanation of administrators’ reasons for altering the Faculty Senate’s DEI committee, particularly when it appears that other campuses did not make such a change.
Spokesperson Jeannine Hutson said the university “complies with all policies and guidance of the UNC System and state law” and that the Faculty Senate “was asked to make any updates needed to ensure” that was the case. Wade Maki, a UNCG professor who represents faculty across the UNC System as chair of the Faculty Assembly, said he wasn’t sure of ECU’s exact reasoning for changing the Faculty Senate’s DEI committee. But the reaction on campus is clear, he said. “Is that a matter of interpretation? Is that a matter of over-compliance or just risk-tolerance?” Maki said. “I don’t know, but those faculty are very much not pleased about it, and they’re very surprised that this isn’t happening on other campuses.”
FACULTY ‘PRETTY MUCH EXEMPT’ FROM POLICY
When UNC System legal staff this summer released its guidance on the changes campuses were expected to make to comply with the equality policy, many faculty were relieved to see that they and their work had largely been spared from the new restrictions, Maki said. “That guidance has a thread whereby faculty-driven activities, be it teaching, research, service, are pretty much exempt from the policy, so long as we are not representing the institution,” Maki told The N&O. “And we were very pleased to see that in there. We thought that’s very important for faculty to do our work.”
Maki said his understanding of the legal guidance was such that the exemptions for service activities would be extended to faculty governing bodies, such as a Faculty Council or Faculty Senate — generally interchangeable terms — that are elected by faculty to represent faculty. “And so I would not expect any changes there as a result of the guidance,” Maki said.
But there were caveats and room for varying interpretations of the guidance, he said. While the legal guidance noted the importance of faculty service across the university system, it stated that any “administratively-directed service” performed by faculty or other employees “must not include content endorsement or advocacy.” Wallace, the UNC System spokesperson, did not specifically address a question from The N&O about legal staff’s definition or examples of what might qualify as “administratively-directed service.”
But the guidance includes two examples, including one about hiring committees. In that scenario, universities are no longer allowed to “appoint employees to represent policy or social viewpoints” on the committees. “Generally, the more administratively directed a given act of service by university employees is, the higher the expectation of neutrality must be,” the guidance states. While faculty senates and councils are generally considered “advisory service roles” driven by faculty, Maki said, there could be discrepancies in how universities interpreted the groups’ connections and reporting lines to administrators, who are required to remain neutral under the new policy. Some administrators might view the groups as “arms of the administration” and therefore consider them as administratively-directed activities and not faculty-driven, Maki said.
“That’s an interpretation,” Maki said. “I don’t necessarily share that interpretation, but we also know that administrations have different risk tolerances, and so some of them may be being extra sensitive on this issue because of their local politics, geography, something they’re just more worried about than others.” According to a Q&A webpage by the ECU Office of University Counsel, all “units” across the university with DEI-related committees — not just the Faculty Senate — were required to “shift their focus to broader student, staff, and faculty success and wellbeing, rather than matters of contemporary political debate or social action” and rename themselves to comply with the policy. “University committees or task forces, including department and college-level committees, must adhere to the policy’s neutrality requirements,” the webpage states.
The webpage also states that faculty may participate in “self-governing groups or caucuses if they are independent and do not represent the university.” Ticknor, the ECU faculty chair, said faculty governance at ECU is somewhat unique compared to the other campuses in the UNC System because the Faculty Senate receives financial support from the chancellor’s office, making the group’s ties to the university administration more direct. The chancellor is also tasked with approving the activities and actions of the Faculty Senate, Ticknor said — including the initial establishment of the DEI committee three years ago. Ticknor said the group is “not an arm of administration,” but “the chancellor has to approve everything we do, so we do have that understanding.” A memo from the chancellor’s office prompted the changes to the faculty group, Ticknor told The N&O.
PLANS FOR COMMITTEE GOING FORWARD
Ticknor said she feels that the equality policy is being implemented equally for committees across ECU’s campus, but she was surprised to learn that the university’s Faculty Senate was the only one in the UNC System asked to change its DEI committee. There are only a handful of universities that appear to have standing committees on their Faculty Senate or Faculty Council dedicated to DEI. That includes UNCG and UNC-Chapel Hill, where the committees remain despite the policy change.
(UNC Charlotte, which did not appear to have a DEI committee as part of its Faculty Council prior to the policy change, required other DEI-related committees in academic departments across its campus to remove their references to DEI.) Speaking to reporters last month, UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts directed The N&O’s questions about the status of the committee at that university to Faculty Chair Beth Moracco, but said: “The faculty have complete purview over their own committees, how they’re constituted, what they’re named.” Moracco confirmed to The N&O that the Faculty Council’s Community and Diversity committee remains active and that she has not been asked to change the group in any way.
The group is responsible for “fostering community and promoting pluralism in the University by encouraging social interaction, mutual acceptance, and respect among various groups on campus.” At a meeting of the university’s Faculty Council last month, UNC-Chapel Hill Provost Chris Clemens said the policy does not require “a prohibition on the word ‘diversity,’ God forbid.” The webpage for the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee of the UNCG Faculty Senate also remains online and active. The group’s mission is to “support and promote equality of opportunity and a healthy campus climate, with a focus on the areas the Faculty Senate oversees.”
Maki said the UNC System-level Faculty Assembly, which represents faculty across the university system, had a DEI-related committee as recently as the 2022-23 academic year. The committee is on a hiatus of sorts — mostly due to a lack of interest among current members, not because the group was asked to disband it. Maki said he is open to reviving the committee if Faculty Assembly members express interest in doing so, and he does not believe the new equality policy would prevent the group from doing so.
“I have not been dissuaded in any way from doing that,” Maki said. Klein, the ECU professor who is a member of the formerly named Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, said the group’s work since its inception in 2021 included a variety of projects, such as surveying locations on campus that were difficult to access for those with disabilities or wheelchairs, mapping locations on campus that had bathrooms with single-stalls and baby-changing tables and providing information to students about their potential biases in evaluations of faculty.
“These are all things that are intended to make ECU a better place to work,” Klein said. Klein told The N&O Tuesday that the committee is nearing a decision on its new name — an effort that took up two of the group’s monthly meetings so far this academic year. It’s unclear what kind of activities the committee might be able to pursue after it is renamed and the members decide on a new purpose and description of their work. But Klein is determined to do as much as she can. “I think if you throw up your hands and get completely discouraged by these policies, I think that’s what the folks who craft these policies want us to do,” Klein said. “They want us to think it’s too much trouble and it’s too controversial, but I think protecting rights and equality of opportunity is not a political issue.”
