Mayor Randall Woodfin of Birmingham, Alabama, said in a February Facebook post that if Alabama’s proposed anti-DEI bill became law, “I have no problem organizing Black parents and athletes to attend other institutions outside of the state where diversity and inclusion are prioritized.” Alabama Gov. Kate Ivey signed SB 129, which bans Alabama colleges from having diversity, equity and inclusion programs or departments and instruction on “divisive concepts,” into law March 20. It remains to be seen whether Woodfin will follow through on his threat. Still, the statement raises an interesting possibility. What if colleges in states that are not passing anti-DEI legislation began recruiting promising student-athletes in DEI-hostile states with a “Go to college where you are wanted” pitch?
Despite its critics’ hyperfixation on race, DEI is about far more than that.
Many public universities, especially those in the South, rely on the revenue generated by student-athletes to help keep the lights on, and the specter of divestment and a boycott of student-athletes, regardless of race, is one that an administration and its donors would be unlikely to ignore. Many behind the anti-DEI movement would likely scoff at the idea that such a boycott would have a tangible effect, but that is because they ignore the documented impact that college sports have on the economy in many states, including Alabama, and they do not understand how DEI in higher education works.
It is critical to point out three facts about DEI. First, there is no national framework for DEI because every community is different. There is no check-box approach to diversity, equity and inclusion work because universities vary intensely from place to place; the diversity situation at Harvard is not the same as in Kansas, Oregon or Alabama.
Second, despite its critics’ hyperfixation on race, DEI is about far more than that. When the topic is how diverse an organization is, how inclusive it is, and if it practices equity, the characteristics that are most commonly discussed can include sex, gender, race and disability. On college campuses, a DEI framework might consider how many poor, first-generation or homeless students there are and if they are made to feel welcome or unwelcome. There might be questions about what the school can do to better accommodate veterans, students who are parents, students with religious dietary restrictions, and students having to navigate mental and physical health issues. DEI efforts have elevated this robust awareness of diversity among student populations. But, tellingly, these other categories that are the focus of DEI offices are rarely, if ever, mentioned in national debates. Those debates focus almost exclusively on race.
Lastly, DEI involves both civil rights compliance and outreach to historically excluded or marginalized communities. Every college in Alabama is still obligated to comply with civil rights laws. That means the bill Ivey signed, at least in the context of college life, targets outreach programs that seek to help students feel more connected to their campus communities.
Consistent with the problem of culture wars being waged by people who have no sense of history or context, not enough critics have bothered to ask why colleges are engaging in DEI work. The answer is that American colleges have institutional memory, know the history of higher education in this country very well, and when they look back, they don’t like what they see.
The history of American higher education is one of exclusion. The most glaring example is of Black students being barred from enrolling in certain colleges in the South, such as the University of Alabama and Auburn University. (Some states created Black colleges to keep the races separate.) Even at predominantly white colleges where they were not barred from enrolling, Black students often faced ostracism and harassment. This history of exclusion is not limited to Black students. Consider the well-documented history of Jewish exclusion at Ivy League institutions. The history of exclusion also includes the banning of women at Yale until 1969 and at America’s military colleges until 1976. Add to that the marginalization of queer students and Muslim students, the latter of which became depressingly familiar in the wake of 9/11.
It’s a shame the state seems willing to destroy all that goodwill in the name of an unyielding and deranged culture war.
The sad truth of American life is that society remains profoundly segregated across racial, ethnic and class lines. One of the primary tasks of the university is to create a community out of the sheer amount of diversity that arrives on campus every fall.
To the point about the culture war’s regrettable lack of context, Alabama officials are not acknowledging how historically white institutions, especially in the South, used some version or another of diversity, equity and inclusion over the years to rebrand themselves. Every historically white college in a Jim Crow state was segregated, and many, the University of Alabama included, were key battlegrounds in the fight for civil rights. For years, the University of Alabama had the awful reputation as the place where segregationist Gov. George Wallace stood “in the schoolhouse door” to symbolically object to the first Black students’ enrollment.
In part because of the integration of its historically dominant football team, the university worked hard to create a new image of itself as an institution that embraces the complex and beautiful diversity of Alabama. That new image gave Mayor Woodfin and many other Black Alabamians permission to identify, say, as “Bama fans.” Today, Southern higher education, ranging from the large SEC schools to the small regional colleges in towns most Americans have never heard of, is among the most diverse in the country; as a Southerner, this is a fact that I celebrate.
It’s a shame the state seems willing to destroy all that goodwill in the name of an unyielding and deranged culture war. The people behind this new law seem not to have considered that even without the prompting of the mayor of one of the state’s largest cities, Black athletes might decide to steer clear of the state’s biggest schools. They seem not to have considered that the kinds of students (and student-athletes) that the state worked to keep out a few short generations ago could easily decide to close the door on Alabama today.