The UNC System Board of Governors sent out a memo to chancellors of public universities across the state calling for the immediate removal of DI and DI-R titles from classes and their graduation requirements.
“Accordingly, effective immediately, all general education requirements and major-specific
requirements mandating completion of course credits related to diversity, equity, and inclusion,
or any other topic identified in Section VII of the Equality Policy are suspended,” said the Feb. 5 memorandum from the Board of Governors.
Kimberly Van Noort, chancellor of UNC Asheville, emailed faculty, staff, and students on the morning of Feb. 6 to announce the school’s compliance with the new restrictions.
“At UNC Asheville, that means immediately suspending existing graduation requirements related to diversity intensive courses,” Van Noort wrote in her email.
She says in the email that anyone taking the classes can either keep them to help fulfill the 120 credit hour requirement for graduation or drop the class without penalty if they no longer need the class without the DI graduation requirement.
“Equally, I want to ensure everyone in our community that we remain steadfastly committed to fostering a culture of belonging, access, and student success,” said Van Noort at the end of the email.
However, some on the campus, including faculty and staff, don’t feel this is the administration’s true goal.
“Obviously, as a DI committee member who wasn’t consulted before that decision was made public and even more than that, who wasn’t consulted before the chancellor started suggesting to students to drop courses, I feel some kind of way about that,” said Blu Buchanan, sociology and anthropology professor at UNC Asheville.
In an email to those supporting the women, gender and sexuality studies department, department chair Amanda Wray deemed this memorandum a precompliance.
“This decision was made drawing on the precedent of an executive order,” Buchanan said. “Something that maybe folks don’t realize is that an executive order is not law. It hasn’t been made a law, it hasn’t been representatively decided on.”
While the executive order isn’t a law, Buchanan says it offered the UNC system a scapegoat for further removing DEI.
“Back in May, we also had the board of governors get together and eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion and access policies in the UNC system rulebook,” said Buchanan. “Not only do you have this memorandum, you also have the board of governors eliminating DEI. On top of that, you have folks like the chancellor, who, in the past in her role as interim provost, helped to scuttle the university fellows for the faculty diversity program.”
They said the method of addressing this differed between schools.
“The difference between here and, for example, UNC Wilmington, the email that went out was: ‘hey, everyone, I got this directive and I’m going to talk to faculty and we’re going to be in conversation about next steps,’” Buchanan said. “But we didn’t get that from our chancellor, right? At UNCA, I think it’s important to frame this as part of a larger, longer arc.”
According to Buchanan, this has been a process since before last year’s DEI removal.
“She was looking and talking about getting rid of adjunct faculty and talking about getting rid of certain departments and when pressed, particularly around getting rid of adjuncts in realizing that adjuncts are disproportionately likely to be marginalized, both because of their class status within the university and often because of things like gender and race. She said, ‘oh, well, I hadn’t really thought about whether it was going to impact certain groups more than others,’” Buchanan said.
According to Buchanan, many students have said this is something to be mad at the central office for, not at Van Nort, as the order came from above her head. However, Buchanan emphasized that this is part of a longer and larger agenda.
“(Van Noort) was in the UNC Central Office before she came to UNCA and she began to institute these changes. It’s important not to just see her as passively receiving these orders from above, but as part of an attempt by the broader UNC system to bring UNCA in line. To make it more profitable and to shape its student body to look a certain way,” Buchanan said.
They said this is part of a more significant shift in the country of neo-liberalization of colleges, which they described as colleges becoming business forms instead of education as a public good.
“What that logic means is we end up in a position where if you, as a school, put in $10,000 to recruit and you only get six Black students from that recruitment, but you put in the same $10,000 and you get 50 white students,” said Buchanan. “We know access to higher education is racialized, right? And whereas before the idea would be, we need those students at UNCA because this is a place where it has a public mission that is supposed to be the public good, instead it has become, well, it’s not that we’re racist. It’s not that we don’t want to focus on Black students, we just want to make our money.”
According to Buchanan, part of UNCA’s effort to make money and comply with the Board of Governors concerns personal money for Van Noort.
“The Chancellor, based on her contract, can receive up to 100% of her base pay that is $300,000 with the potential to get another $300,000 if she is evaluated as doing a good job by the UNC President,” Buchanan said. “It suggests that she has a fiscal reason to simply be the fastest person to comply with this memorandum, right?”
Buchanan also said she doesn’t care about marginalized communities on or off campus.
“The DI committee met with her on Tuesday of this past week and one of the things that we asked was, an executive order can just be written up. If Trump were to use some of the models, like the models we saw in Texas and Florida, where courses with certain keywords are either stigmatized or eliminated from the university,” said Buchanan. “If there was an executive order that came out with something like that and the UNC System decided to endorse, pass on, act on that executive order, would you comply? And she said yes, I would. I would have disagreements, but I would comply with that order.”
