UK’s Capilouto may have scrapped DEI policies, but don’t forget the real culprits | Opinion
In 2019, University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto gave an interview to UK’s Louis Nunn Center for Oral History for something called “I Am Diversity: The Unconscious Bias Initiative Oral History Project.”
In the interview, Capilouto recounted returning to his home state of Alabama to visit Montgomery’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which honors victims of lynching from every state, and its nearby counterpart, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.
He spoke with real emotion of the 4 million people held in slavery in the American South, the estimated 4,000 lynchings of Black people in the post-Civil War South, and the terror of Jim Crow laws that were enforced with violence, including in Kentucky, where 168 people of color were lynched.
“Each name has a story that has to echo through a community,” Capilouto said. “Some of those things we have never reconciled that still need more work. But if that is your history, if that is what you must carry with you, that’s different than most of the people that surround you.”
He then went on to speak of efforts made to promote diversity, equity and inclusion at UK, including increases in a diverse student body, scholarships, trainings and other developments.
“W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that the challenge of the 20th Century is the color line,” Capilouto said. “Well it’s the 21st Century and it’s still a challenge.”
But on Tuesday, Capilouto abruptly changed that point of view when he announced he was abolishing the Office of Institutional Diversity, and ending any diversity training on campus.
Capilouto made a pragmatic, if overly cautious, calculation to end DEI before the Kentucky General Assembly forced him to.
DEI is the latest imaginary culture war target. The far right wing of the GOP supermajority, stung by its failure to pass such laws last session, are determined to continue their holy war on Black and brown students another time around.
The General Assembly does carry a a big stick: Nearly $360 million in funding, an increase of $50 million from the year before, plus required approval for all the buildings UK wants to build, whether for UK HealthCare or on the main campus.
Policy of appeasement?
DEI is such a threat in our commonwealth. After all, six of Kentucky’s eight public universities, like our legislative and executive branches, are headed by white men. But Heritage Foundation marching orders are Heritage Foundation marching orders, and the acronym “DEI” has become radioactive.
The GOP has a point about one thing. In trying to correct the historic inequities that persist to this day, many universities created yet another layer of costly administration whose role in actually correcting inequities became unclear.
For example, in 2023-2024, the former vice-president of the UK Office of Institutional Diversity, Katrice Albert, made a salary of $377,000, and her chief of staff, Damon Williams, made $217,000. They now work for the newly established Office of Community Relations.
Capilouto clearly believes righting historical wrongs through education. The question remains whether UK will continue the work of welcoming, including and educating students under-represented minorities without an explicit mandate to do so.
“I am hopeful that UK can integrate the work that we have done to make education accessible to everyone into all of campus,” said Anastasia Curwood, a history professor who is also director of the Commonwealth Institute of Black Studies.
“The president has stated that we as a community value bringing together multiple communities into our UK community, and I hope that the new approach will continue to make that happen.”
There is also the question of whether Capilouto’s move is a policy of appeasement that will be treated by the GOP supermajority like the Nazis treated the British government in the 1930s.
In 2022, Kentucky Republicans went after critical race theory, because they think, for example, it’s a “divisive concept” to note the straight line between slavery and today’s criminal justice system. Who’s to say they won’t think Capilouto’s policy doesn’t go far enough and pass a law outlawing the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies or the Office of LGBTQ Resources?
Sure, it’s divisive to say our society is still plagued by racism, but it has the added bonus of being true.
The real culprits
So let’s blame the real villains of this piece, the far right wing of the Kentucky legislature. They are the ones convinced that higher education is a liberal breeding ground.
They’ve obviously never heard academics joke about indoctrination: “if I could indoctrinate students, I’d get them to put down their phone and read the syllabus.”
Those lawmakers don’t know or don’t believe that American racial laws and policies still affect educational access today. They think educating students on those finer points of U.S. history is somehow warping their brains. They haven’t spent much time on UK’s campus because if they had, they’d know that it’s hardly a bastion of liberal thought.
Could anyone who watched the 2022 video of UK student Sophia Rosing screaming the N-word at a Black classmate really think UK is too “woke?”
If only the zealots in the General Assembly could be as pragmatic as Capilouto about the future of Kentucky. They’d realize that this kind of extremism alienates Kentucky’s diverse best and the brightest who either leave here as soon as they can or refuse to come back.
Like most culture wars, this one is a distraction from the hard work Kentucky lawmakers need to do to make our schools better, our universities stronger and our economy more successful. But that takes vision, not demagoguery. That takes open minds, not parochial ones.
It takes hard work they are so far unwilling to do.
This story was originally published August 22, 2024 at 6:48 AM.
