Declaring victory too soon can lead to an ultimate defeat, the Louisiana Board of Regents chairwoman should know.
Recently, Regent Misti Cordell, who last year was appointed to the Board and ascended to its top position, declared and end to the state’s battle against institutionalized diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in higher education. These efforts, whether in the form of programmatic attempts to privilege students and faculty members on the basis of protected characteristic categories, usually by race, or in the form of behavioral requirements to do the same such as forcing job applicants to explain how they would do that, have stoked controversy as they rely upon the hypothesis that government and societal institutions are irredeemably racist or discriminate against others in certain protected classes, requiring discrimination in favor of the alleged victim classes that thereby becomes discrimination, if not harassment, against those not members of the favored classes.
Cordell asserted that “the DEI nonsense is DONE. The Legislature killed it. The Regents stripped it out. Louisiana is not going back. If it shows up in old paperwork, that doesn’t change the reality – those bad ideas belong to the past, not our future.” But little of that statement actually is the case in any permanent sense.
First, Louisiana’s eccentric higher education governance system makes the Regents the strategic leader of it all, empowered to coordinate provision along broad policy goals within the confines of statute. Among other things, it develops a (in its most recent form, somewhat unrealistic) master plan and the funding formula, makes capital outlay requests, oversees degree programs, and deals with merger and transfer of institutions among the four management systems.
Under this authority, the Regents could make a policy statement that would define and circumscribe DEI, for example, in use of courses as part of the general education requirement that all students must fulfill to obtain a degree. But it hasn’t. In fact, in the 2019 Master Plan it makes mention of achieving greater “equity” in several places, usually in the context of greater degree attainment by racial minority students that at some points drifts close to, if not lapsing into, DEI language, such as “The Board of Regents will lead the way in developing and implementing key initiatives to eliminate performance gaps, bring equity, and provide opportunity and social mobility for underserved Louisiana residents.”
But even if the Regents took a more proactive stance concerning DEI, such as by preventing its inclusion as an uncontested foundational element in instruction of GER coursework, what goes on in practice is almost entirely out of its reach. That’s as the convoluted system places day-to-day operation of institutions in the hands of the four management boards, where they are the entities that would make policy abut DEI and enforce it. And they largely have been absent without leave on the issue.
Only the Louisiana State University System has taken any real, if minimal, steps at all to rein in DEI. Its Board of Supervisors last year banned the use of practices such as requiring diversity statements for hiring and set review of programs for whether these privilege race-conscious activities. But the others – the University of Louisiana, Southern University, and Louisiana Community and Technical College Systems – haven’t performed even this tepid step.
What has been done has occurred at the level of individual campuses, and not in response to a Regents-performed, legislatively-demanded study on institutional spending on DEI efforts that largely was a whitewash by respondent institutions but rather to federal government mandates. For example, when the University of Louisiana Lafayette formally closed its Office of Campus Inclusion, it claimed it did so as a result of “a federal directive,” presumably from a Department of Education guidance letter. LSU’s main campus didn’t even wait to rename its equivalent office, doing so not long after DEI critic Republican Gov. Jeff Landry took office last year.
Yet don’t mistake a surface action for public consumption as substantive retreat. Even as ULL did that this spring, for its masters of education in curriculum and instruction degree it still was requiring DEI-based coursework. And while the LSU System may have forsworn some DEI-related activities and done some renaming, its campuses still were spending money on others. And in its last meeting, the Southern University System Board of Supervisors actually approved of hiring a Southern University official that would “Support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives through culturally competent programming and staff development.”
Understand that a lot of academia is treating the outgoing wave of DEI influence as starving the above-ground foliage to withering, but leaving they, the roots, intact and they feel if they can hunker down and wait this out, they have DEI blossoming again when the tide turns. No; in order to decimate DEI as an operating ideology in academia, you have to tear out the roots – reassign or dismiss its many, perhaps too many, true believers – or lay down ironclad rules with accountability attached to hem them in and neuter any spillover effect.
The management boards hardly have done that, and the Regents, despite Cordell’s assertions, haven’t, either. It’s all been ephemeral policy changes at the institutional level that aren’t bought into by the vast majority in academia and when they feel the heat is off will reverse these, probably quietly and without the publicity that exposed them, but the indirect spending that still continues will increase and the bureaucratic winking and nodding will no longer be necessary with hidden efforts to implement the orthodoxy that continue at present will come out of hiding, even if not flaunted.
Unless there’s legislation and a commitment to enforce it externally from higher education. Legislators had a chance to accomplish this last year and the House came through, but the Senate and its leadership came up wanting. That shouldn’t happen next year, and Landry should make it a priority to get that passed. As part of that, the bill should commit the Legislative Auditor to regular reviews of campuses to discourage any behind-doors attempts to promulgate DEI.
To complement that, Cordell could lead the Regents to making that clarification to GER courses to prevent foundational DEI pedagogy. That would move from assertion to genuine action that puts her money where her mouth is. Like a toxic dump site, DEI continues to seep into Louisiana higher education and will flood it if ever given the chance, so it’s counterproductive to call the matter mission accomplished without taking the further steps to cap it from infiltrating Louisiana higher education delivery.
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