Forum Post
There is a disturbing and abrupt shift at WSU to remove the word “Diversity” from activities formerly known as DEI activities. For example, instead of DEI statements from faculty job applicants, we are requesting “land-grant mission” statements, and the word “diversity” can no longer appear in job descriptions. Assoc Deans and others whose titles previously included the word “diversity” now no longer are described using that that word – instead, they are in charge of “equitable and inclusive” practices. Is WSU suddenly ashamed of its diversity efforts, or afraid of their political ramifications? What should we read into the timing of these regressive changes in relation to release of the “institutional neutrality” policy?
Response
The Faculty Senate Executive Officers have been notified of this forum post and will respond back once more information becomes available.
Comments
As Senate Chair I reached out to several campuses regarding this concern. I emphatically heard that this is not the case on all campuses and was provided with documents which confirm diversity has not been removed from job titles or strategic planning. If the writer would like to reach out to me individually with more details we will address directly through our steering committee and further discussion with the impacted faculty.
WSU has most certainly shifted its position. Dr. Lisa Guerrero’s title has changed from “Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusive Excellence” to “Vice Provost for Access and Opportunity.”
Washington State has not directed the removal of equity, diversity, and inclusion related language. Yet, WSU is doing exactly that “in anticipation of” federal pressure or federal cuts and under the guise that implementing changes to equity, diversity, and inclusion related language will remove WSU from being “targeted.” Such acts of self-silence, preemptive compliance, and anticipatory obedience demonstrate the moral and ethical turpitude of leaders and institutions.
Instead of acting with courage, WSU has directed individuals and offices to remove equity, diversity, and inclusion from job titles and scrub equity, diversity, and inclusion related language from WSU websites and programs. WSU has not sent any system-wide communication about its directives.
Perhaps WSU sees the ongoing brazen assaults and threats by an authoritarian regime as “an opportunity to implement ‘reforms’ they have long sought” (AAUP).
Universities like WSU that preemptively comply with potential policies even before they are formally enacted and “yield without resistance betray their mission and the students they serve” (“Cloaking Inequity,” by Julian Vasquez Heilig).
I completely agree that WSU is quietly pulling away from diversity. Several years ago President Schulz expressed concern that less than ten percent of tenure-track faculty are people of color, and I would guess that the percentage is even lower today, with few if any prospects for improvement. After all, the College of Arts and Sciences recently suspended majors in Women’s and Gender Studies and in Comparative Ethnic Studies, and prospects for recovering them seem bleak. Several Ethnic Studies faculty have left WSU and, with the budget cuts and freezes, they are unlikely to be replaced. Currently no one is left to teach African American Studies, and none have been available for almost a decade to teach Indigenous Studies. This makes the university’s performative land-acknowledgement statement seem hypocritical. (Few students of color believe that the statement is anything more than trendy performative grandstanding, anyway.) The nation’s demographics are changing rapidly, and our students of color will become an increasingly important part of any scheme to boost enrollment. But these same students of color will demand to be taught by people from their own communities. Unless WSU’s leaders make a concerted effort to boost hiring and retention of faculty of color, the university will hit an impasse of its own making. And the solution stares right into their blue eyes. Defy political pressures from DC and strive to improve true education. Hire more faculty of color and work hard to retain them. Right now there’s no real incentive for any tenure-track faculty of color to stay here in a lily-white campus in a lily-white town. The world of the late twenty-first century will demand change, yet it seems that WSU is committed to remaining stuck in nineteenth-century ideas.