LSU’s shift on diversity lacks transparency, critical input, faculty say
12th February 2024 · 0 Comments
By Piper Hutchinson
Contributing Writer
(lailluminator.com) — Faculty members say LSU’s move away from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) language happened without their input and with little transparency after the fact.
LSU abruptly announced earlier this month it was renaming its Office of Civil Rights, Title IX and Inclusion to the Office of Civil Rights, Title IX and Engagement. Around the same time, the university deleted its diversity message from its website, and references to diversity and inclusion were dropped from numerous LSU webpages.
In weeks that have followed, LSU’s leadership has been repeatedly criticized by faculty, staff and students who do not understand why the changes were made – or what it means for the university community moving forward.
Last Wednesday, in their first public comments since the changes took effect, LSU President William Tate and Vice President for Civil Rights, Title IX and Engagement Todd Manuel left the public with more questions than answers – and haven’t responded to those questions since then.
When asked after the meeting whether he would take questions from the news media, Tate replied “nope,” pantomiming locking his mouth and throwing away the key, and walked away. When pressed, Tate responded to a single question: Has LSU been contacted by the Claremont Institute, an anti-DEI organization that is targeting Louisiana for DEI policy-rollback legislation? Claremont has not contacted the administration, Tate said, and then responded to further questions with the same lock-and-throw-away-the-key gesture.
A spokesperson for the university also declined to respond to a list of email questions.
Diverging in governance
In over an hour of remarks and Q&A responses with faculty senators at a meeting last week, Tate and Manuel – both Black men – attempted to respond to faculty concerns about what moving away from the term “diversity” means for a university still healing from its problematic racial past.
After the meeting, faculty said they felt Tate and Manuel offered more insight on what “engagement” really means, but that more dialogue is needed to clear up unanswered questions.
“I am struck by the irony that this move to engagement happened without any engagement,” business administration professor Roy Heidelberg said.
Senate Vice President Dan Tirone said faculty should have been engaged about the changes before they were made.
“I think that one of the first steps should have been consulting with the [Faculty Senate] DEI Committee because they really should be the conduit for that office to the faculty and in the shared governance model, that would have been how I would have hoped things would have proceeded,” Tirone said in an interview.
The DEI Committee acts as a liaison between faculty and the Office of Engagement, Civil Rights and Title IX, specifically working with its staff to evaluate “initiatives to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The lack of faculty input seems like a potential problem to Steven Procopio, president of the good-governance group Public Affairs Research Council.
“More input on the front end is always better, and that should be a common procedure that the administration should use,” Procopio said.
In response to faculty concerns, Tate has agreed to meet monthly with Faculty Senate leaders.
A strategy change
At last week’s Faculty Senate meeting, Tate said faculty were engaged in a separate strategic planning process that involved the diversity topic.
Tate said the change in language was part of the university’s strategic planning process that has stretched on for two years. LSU’s dedicated strategy chief, Mark Bieger, left the university last summer, leaving the strategic plan unfinished.
“We shifted to engagement… because it was just important to rename it and make it clear that we were going to put resources behind it in the strategic plan,” Tate said. “And that’s what you tend to do in strategic plans. You name what you’re going to fund.”
Tate told faculty members that the concept of engagement repeatedly came up in the strategic planning process, which included surveys of 200 people across the LSU System. The LSU System employees more than 12,000 people and enrolls tens of thousands of students across its seven institutions.
Those survey responses were not publicized. But a word frequency visualization, which shows how often terms showed up in response to questions about LSU’s core values, was posted to the strategic planning webpage. It shows the terms “diversity” and “inclusive” both came up more frequently than “engagement.”
The Illuminator obtained more than 200 pages of email communications about the strategic plan between Tate and Bieger in the six months leading up to Bieger’s July departure in a public records request. Despite Tate’s insistence that engagement is a key part of the strategic plan, the word does not appear once in their correspondence, nor do the terms “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion.”
LSU’s current Faculty Senate leadership, which was elected in April 2022, has not received an update on the strategic planning process, nor have faculty been notified about it in the more than 20 months since then. Prior Faculty Senate leaders received at least one briefing – in March of 2022.
‘It’s just not confidence-inspiring’
The lack of transparency could put Tate at odds with the faculty – and possibly result in a vote of no confidence for the president.
At least one faculty senator, mass communication professor Bob Mann, has floated the idea of introducing a resolution of no confidence in Tate for his handling of the DEI scrub, particularly in the lack of transparency.
“They’re not giving us the whole story,” Mann said. “It just defies common sense and belief that it was all spontaneous.”
Mann said the administration needs to be given an opportunity to answer more questions about what happened – and to prove that the change in language doesn’t mean the university’s commitment to diversity is changing.
“If I thought that they were really walking away from diversity instead of just changing the way they talk about it, I think the faculty would be outraged,” Mann said. “I think the faculty is concerned… that the language changes in the ways that they were done, indicates that they may be backing away from the commitment to diversity.”
Mann also pointed out that LSU leadership did not show up to testify at a state legislative hearing last year on a resolution calling for an examination of DEI spending – one that Louisiana Community and Technical College System President Monty Sullivan called “racist.” Sullivan joined Commissioner of Higher Education Kim Hunter Reed and then-University of Louisiana System President Jim Henderson in defending DEI measures. LSU’s absence calls into question the university’s commitment to diversity, Mann said.
Tate told the Faculty Senate that he still backs DEI principles – mostly.
“We’re committed to most of the ideas that are associated with DEI because fundamentally we’re committed to equal opportunities,” Tate said.
“It’s just not confidence-inspiring,” Mann said.
This article originally published in the February 12, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
