University of Wyoming replaces Multicultural Affairs after lawmakers take aim at DEI efforts

FROM WYOFILE:

The office is being replaced with the Poke Center for Community Resources. This comes only months after the UW Board of Trustees opted to shutter the institution’s DEI office following legislative budget cuts and directives.

The University of Wyoming is replacing its Office of Multicultural Affairs with the Pokes Center for Community Resources, the school’s president announced Thursday.

The change — the office has existed at UW for 30 years — comes months after state lawmakers barred Wyoming’s lone four-year public university from spending state dollars on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. In response to the legislative mandate, the school’s trustees voted in May to close its DEI office and reassign certain staff.

UW President Ed Seidel wrote in an email Thursday to students and staff that the repurposed facility “will provide a centralized location where all students and their families can learn about institutional and community resources pertaining to basic needs and life skills development.”

“The center will serve as a conduit for education and material support in areas such as food and housing security, family support, employment and general living skills,” he added.

In preparation for the change, which was announced four days before the fall semester is set to begin, pride flags and art disappeared from the hallway and rooms where the office operated. For Laramie PrideFest Co-Chair Nicholas Jesse, it now looks sterile compared to the colorful, welcoming space he said it had been for him as a student.

“Having that resource was very important, not only to my identity as an LGBTQ student, but also just being a space that felt safe and comfortable,” he said of the office. “From an alumni perspective too, it’s just disappointing to see these spaces that have been around forever change in a pretty drastic way.”

Jesse said he also felt the space had already been open to anyone on the campus community. Former outdoor recreation and tourism management student Taylor Davis agreed. She was biking through the sea of lanyard-bearing freshmen on campus Thursday, and said she had often used the space as a student as a quiet place to do homework and print things.

“I also just used it as a space because it always felt safe and welcoming,” she said. “It’s always been a community center, but having it called the multicultural center allowed people of different ethnicities, different sexual orientations and different gender orientations to feel a little bit more comfortable in that space, especially with some of the historic relations with that [group] on campus.”

The Multicultural Affairs mission statement, still on the UW website, said it “advocates alongside historically and presently marginalized students to develop a holistic sense of self and belonging through community building and identity affirming intersectional programming. This work is accomplished through fostering campus and community partnerships to ensure student success at UW and beyond.”

DEI and UW

The change stemmed from a May decision by the UW Board of Trustees, according to Seidel. That’s when the group decided it would eliminate the university’s DEI Office at the behest of lawmakers who cut funding for the university and prohibited school leaders from spending state money on DEI resources. The state is UW’s largest source of funding.

At the time, the trustees also adopted a new definition of DEI, trying to match what legislators felt needed to be banned from the university. That new definition included promoting programs that advantage or disadvantage someone based on race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity or sexual orientation.

One of the groups most concerned with programming at the university was the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, which gained more seats in the recent primary. A group of state senators, including most notably Sen. Cheri Steinmetz (R-Lingle) and Majority Floor Leader Larry Hicks (R-Baggs), have also been critical of the university devoting resources to programs they say are out of step with what their constituents want from the school. Hicks, during this winter’s debate on the matter, said DEI programming promotes “division, exclusion and intolerance.”

Even with May’s trustee vote, many of the DEI office’s programs continued elsewhere, especially those like Title VI compliance and Americans with Disabilities Act coordination required by federal law. All UW staff kept their jobs, though the university vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion left shortly thereafter.

However, in a May 10 statement released following that decision, Seidel said further steps may be taken.

“While very few of our programs and activities can be construed as advocating or promoting preferential treatment, the working group [that offered recommendations after the Legislature acted] did find some areas warranting further consideration,” Seidel said. “We will take a deeper look in these areas and consider additional changes.”

He also noted that the board would no longer allow supervisors to require UW job candidates to submit statements about DEI or evaluate employee commitment to DEI in performance evaluations.

What happens next?

Programs facilitated by the Multicultural Affairs office that were organized on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity or sexual orientation will now have to be run by students “if they so desire,” Seidel wrote.

No one is losing their job, but four job descriptions are changing, the president wrote in his email.

That includes the assistant dean of students for equity and belonging, whose title is changing to the assistant dean for community resource development, according to UW Spokesperson Chad Baldwin. The Latinx coordinator will become s community resource coordinator, working to help provide clothing and financial literacy to campus residents, among other things. The intersectional coordinator will also become a community resource coordinator, with a focus on “family resources.” And there is a proposal to reassign the gender and sexuality coordinator to work with the restorative justice program.

The Poke Pride Center under the Multicultural Affairs office will also be transitioning into a “clothing and resources closet” with donated professional and seasonal clothes. While he supports helping students get clothes, Jesse said the change is a bit of a sad irony. When revealing an LGTBQ+ identity to friends and family, it’s often referred to as “coming out of the closet.”

“The Poke Pride Center focused on LGBTQ and other marginalized students, and turning it into a closet was kind of intriguing to me,” he said. “So I don’t know what the rhetoric is behind that, and if that was purposeful, but that caused a fair amount of concern.”

Balwin wrote in an email that the terminology was “not intended to be pejorative.”

“That is simply a common description for a place where clothing is made available in this fashion,” he said. “And, as noted in the president’s message, the Pokes Center for Community Resources will maintain computer lab access and space for hosting programs, events and regular study hours.”

Previously, the Poke Pride Center stated its goal was to support members of the LGBTQ+ community while welcoming all people regardless of their identity.

The center had informational pamphlets, LGBTQ+ swag, books and more. It also hosted meetings for LGBTQ+ student groups, had a computer lab and study area and had queer-specific programming.

The trustees and Seidel reviewed state-funded programs across the campus to ensure that none favored one group over another, excluding some programs that are federally required. Still, Seidel wrote in May that UW would pursue private funding sources for “preferential” programs deemed essential to help students.

His latest email echoed that point.

“When it comes to some high-profile events – such as the Shepard Symposium on Social Justice and the Wyoming Latina Youth Conference – the university will continue to support them by partnering with the UW Foundation to generate private funding,” he stated. “We will also continue to seek the support of the Black 14 members to resume the Black 14 Social Justice Summer Institute.”

The Black 14 were a group of Black football players who were kicked off the UW team in 1969 for asking head coach Lloyd Eaton to protest racial injustice with armbands. Members of that group formed the Black 14 summer institute to foster “leadership, social justice, and diversity skills” in high school students. However, they decided not to put the institute on this year because of the state’s actions to defund the DEI office, under which their summer program lived.

UW also has memoranda of understanding with the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes and “remains fully committed” to working with them to secure non-state funding that supports students who are members of those tribes, Baldwin stated.

There are diverse student groups on the UW campus, but many don’t have permanent physical meeting spaces. If they no longer feel welcome at the new Pokes Center for Community Resources, they may have one fewer place to go.

Jesse said Laramie PrideFest is opening its first physical office space in September, which will be available to people around the community and university. That’ll be on the third floor of the Laramie Plains Civic Center in room 343, he said.

“I think we’re just going to have our work cut out for us as far as re-navigating some of these historically sound partnerships with the university,” he said.

Seidel noted at the end of his email that the changes wouldn’t affect classrooms, research or academic freedoms. He also pointed students and the UW campus to look at their FAQ page if they have questions.

“Other core principles are that the university is committed to being open and welcoming to all; supporting and treating everyone fairly and respectfully; being politically neutral as an institution; basing hiring and grading exclusively on merit; and considering the needs of all students, faculty and staff,” he wrote.

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.

This story was posted on August 23, 2024.