North Carolina’s public universities must provide a detailed accounting of their diversity, equity, and inclusion training to Republican state lawmakers by next week.
The assignment comes from the Joint Legislative Commission on Governmental Operations of the North Carolina General Assembly, which requested information from the University of North Carolina system on diversity training programs and associated spending at its 17 campuses. Both chambers of the state legislature are controlled by Republicans.
With the request, North Carolina joins Florida, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, where state officials have issued similar directives to public colleges in 2023. The letters vary in scope, but they generally ask colleges to detail their spending on efforts to recruit and retain diverse students, faculty, and staff.
The North Carolina letter, obtained by The Chronicle, was addressed to a UNC-system official and dated March 14. It requests information for the current fiscal year and the previous three fiscal years. The letter does not mention the state’s community colleges. NC Policy Watch first reported on the letter’s existence.
The commission asked for a long and detailed list of items, including an inventory of all employee trainings covering diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, “or other similar topics.”
The letter specifies that colleges should report back about any training program that discusses or references diversity, equity, inclusion, or accessibility — as well as subjects like racism, antiracism, oppression, systemic racism, sexism, gender, unconscious bias, critical race theory, intersectionality, or social justice.
Colleges must provide: a description of the training topic, key learning objectives, estimated time to complete the trainings, dates of the trainings, and whether the trainings were optional or required. Among other things, the commission asked for a summary table of the job classifications of all of those who attended the trainings.
The North Carolina request is focused primarily on diversity training. In Florida, colleges provided state officials with information about required courses and all programs that discuss diversity or critical race theory, as well as the names and titles of employees who are involved. In Oklahoma, colleges had to account for “every dollar” spent on diversity activities over the past decade.
North Carolina has drawn national attention in recent years for what some faculty members and others have described as political interference in university governance, including in matters related to diversity and race. One of the most high-profile incidents played out in 2021, when UNC-Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees declined to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author of “The 1619 Project.” The decision came amid conservative backlash to her hiring and concerns from a prominent university donor. Hannah-Jones was eventually given tenure at Chapel Hill but chose to go to Howard University instead.
State officials in North Carolina and elsewhere have not made clear how they plan to use the information about diversity, equity, and inclusion, often shortened to DEI. But across the country, Republican politicians have proposed banning colleges’ efforts related to diversity. Critics argue that such offices and programs are a waste of taxpayer dollars and violate academic freedom.