DEI policy set to be repealed for UNC System. How diverse is board making the decision?

The UNC System Board of Governors is scheduled to vote Thursday on a policy that would repeal existing diversity, equity and inclusion mandates across the state’s public universities, likely impacting efforts with stated missions to support students, faculty and staff from diverse backgrounds.

But the board making the decision lacks the same level of diversity seen on the campuses it oversees. The lack of diversity on the board is not a new trend, but it’s one that is perhaps more noticeable ahead of Thursday’s vote.

The Board of Governors, which sets policy for the state’s 16 public universities and the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, consists of 24 voting members selected by the General Assembly and one nonvoting student member, who is chosen by the UNC Association of Student Governments.

Each legislative chamber — both of which have been in Republican control since the 2010 election — appoints six candidates in odd-numbered years. Legislators selected the most recent group of new members last summer, with picks that slightly increased the limited racial diversity of the board but reduced the amount of women in the group.

One seat on the board is currently vacant, as Lee Roberts resigned in January to become the interim chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill.

Still, of the 23 members currently on the board, the majority are white, including 15 white men who account for about 65% of the membership. The board also includes four Black members, accounting for about 17% of the membership, and one Indian-American member.

UNC System enrollment data shows that, in the current semester, about 52% of all students are white. About 21% of students are Black, and about 6% of students are Asian.

Five board members, or about 22%, are women. About 59% of students across the system are female in the current semester.

The News & Observer previously reported that a 2020 survey of more than 20,000 students and employees across the UNC System found that 75% of respondents believed the system’s leadership was not diverse.

The report stated that diverse leadership “is an important component of both ensuring racial equity and aiding institutions to perform at a high level of excellence.”

Samuel Scarborough, a UNC-Chapel Hill student who is a member of the Southern Student Action Coalition and TransparUNCy, a group that highlights political connections in North Carolina higher education, said more diversity on the board could lead to decisions that better reflect students and people of the state.

“If the board’s makeup was more diverse in terms of race, economic class and gender identity, those board members would have a better opportunity to empathize with students, faculty and staff in their day-to-day lived experiences, so that they can work on policies with those same constituencies to make the system better,” Scarborough said.

Should the board mirror student demographics?

When the state House of Representatives appointed new members to the Board of Governors last summer, Rep. Kelly Hastings, a Republican who chairs the chamber’s nominating committee for the board, told The N&O that the House’s nominations — which included a Black woman and an Indian-American man — were “a diverse group of people” who were “very qualified.”

“It’s always good to have people from different backgrounds. I think that brings a lot of diversity to the table, especially with a public university system,” Hastings told The N&O last May. But diversity is “not the overriding factor” in nominating people to the board, he said at the time.

The board has also been criticized for its conservative political leanings and partisan influences, leading Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to form a commission to suggest changes to the processes used to appoint members. Among other suggestions, the commission last summer recommended increasing the size and diversity of both the system-level Board of Governors and the campus-level Boards of Trustees.

The commission was co-chaired by former UNC System presidents Margaret Spellings and Tom Ross.

“The bipartisan Commission on the Governance of Public Universities found that a lack of diversity among university leadership and governance boards is both a disservice to students across the UNC System and leads to the controversy and volatility that we are seeing threaten our public universities,” Ross said in a statement after a Board of Governors took the first step to approve the DEI repeal last month. “Our universities should encourage diversity on their campuses and governance boards and have leaders, administrators, faculty and staff that reflect the extraordinary diversity of our amazing state.”

Democratic Rep. Maria Cervania, who hosted a press conference Wednesday at the General Assembly highlighting the importance of DEI in higher education and workforce pipelines, said she hopes all board members try “to represent voices that may not be at the table.”

Still, Cervania said boards and commissions across the state would “ideally” include members who are “representative of our population.”

“I think if there’s more people who are in this industry, or in education, or in work who look like the people of North Carolina, it provides much more of a richness of decision-making and a richness of goal-setting strategy or in efforts towards making North Carolina look like what it looks like now, or what it wants to be,” Cervania said.

Scarborough, the UNC student, said he believes it is “crucial” for the Board of Governors to represent the demographics of the state, given the UNC System’s mission to serve the people of North Carolina.

UNC trustee wants ‘equality of opportunity’

But not everyone agrees with the notion that the system’s governing boards should inherently be diverse or reflect the demographics of students or other groups they oversee.

Marty Kotis, a member of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees who previously served on the Board of Governors, told The N&O Tuesday that diversifying the boards could be “a very slippery slope.” Making the boards match the demographics of their campuses or the state at-large “doesn’t really account for personal choice” from those who make the nominations, Kotis said.

“If you say that it has to mirror something exactly, I think, you know, the only way to do that is, you’re discriminating,” Kotis said. “You’re engineering the system to obtain a particular outcome at that point.”

Kotis said he believes in “equality of opportunity,” not “equity of outcome,” a notion he also extends to the debate over existing DEI programming and his position against the efforts.

“I think that’s a critical difference,” Kotis said. “Everyone should have the exact same shot, no matter what their race, gender or the various categories.”

At UNC-Chapel Hill, Kotis serves on a board of 15 members, 11 of which are white — accounting for about 73% of the board, compared to the student body, which is about 55% white. Two members are Black, including the student body president, who is selected by students and not appointed to the board by the Board of Governors or lawmakers. Two members are Indian-American.

Three members of the UNC-Chapel Hill board, also including the student body president, are women. They account for 20% of the board, while women account for more than 60% of the student body.

NC State University’s Board of Trustees also noticeably lacks diversity, with just one Black member and three women, including the student body president, on the 15-member board.

What board members are saying about DEI programs

Ahead of the Board of Governors’ vote Thursday, the exact implications of the new policy — which emphasizes equality over the current policy’s focus on diversity and inclusion — remain unclear.

If the board approves the policy, the UNC System’s legal affairs division is expected to issue guidance to campuses on how to comply with the new directive. But there are some clues about what programs and jobs could be targeted by the policy, which directs chancellors to inform UNC System President Peter Hans by Sept. 1 of any “reductions in force and spending, along with changes to job titles and position descriptions” that result from the policy being implemented.

According to annual campus reports on DEI spending and efforts obtained and reported by The N&O, the programs that could be impacted by the new policy span a wide range, from those dedicated to recruiting underrepresented students to those that support students with disabilities or veteran status.

In an opinion piece published in The N&O and The Charlotte Observer, Board of Governors Chair Randy Ramsey pointed to a handful of examples of programming or incidents that show, in his words, “it’s inappropriate to require university students or employees to adhere to a particular view of race, gender or other controversial topics.”

Among other examples, Ramsey cited DEI efforts in the UNC School of Medicine, including a previous requirement for applicants to provide diversity statements as a condition of employment, promotion or tenure, and recommendations from a social justice task force in the school. Ramsey also cited a previous requirement for students applying to NC State University to describe how they would contribute to the university’s diverse environment.

“These are all fine discussion topics for the classroom or in a student-led organization, and our proposed policy very clearly protects the right of faculty and students to tackle difficult and controversial topics in whatever way they see fit,” Ramsey wrote.

Through a policy banning “compelled speech,” the Board of Governors had already banned diversity statements last year, prior to proposing the policy targeting DEI efforts more broadly, and neither UNC nor NC State currently require applicants to submit such statements. The social justice task force’s recommendations were also not implemented, as reported by The N&O.

Asked by The N&O about any DEI programming he had first-hand experience attending, Kotis pointed to his 10-plus years serving on the Board of Governors and the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees and said he had “seen a lot of the reports” on the issue. He also cited the previously required DEI statements as an issue, calling them a “political litmus test.”

The UNC-Chapel Hill board last week voted to divert the university’s $2.3 million in annual DEI spending to public safety. While Kotis supported that decision, he said it’s possible to “chew bubble gum and walk at the same time” — indicating that some efforts that support students from diverse backgrounds, such as the university’s new offer of free tuition to some students based on their family’s income, will likely continue even with the changes to DEI at the campus and UNC System levels.

“I think it’s not an either-or on what the Board of Governors is proposing,” Kotis said. “You can do both.”

Scarborough said he wishes the Board of Governors would leave the existing DEI policy in place, though he acknowledged that the current mandate is “not perfect and there are definitely ways that it could be improved.”

He noted that a board committee approved the policy last month with no discussion, and said he wished members allowed for more deliberation on the issue, including by involving students.

“I think if the board’s makeup was more diverse, there would be more support for DEI,” Scarborough said. “And even if it wasn’t full-hearted support, there would be a lot more deliberation on DEI.”

In the Spotlight designates ongoing topics of high interest that are driven by The News & Observer’s focus on accountability reporting.