Arizona faculty double down on diversity, equity and inclusion

Despite political backlash, the University of Arizona is standing firm in its commitment to its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which the school says are key to its recruitment and retention strategy.

“Legislators are attempting to legalize censorship,” says a resolution the UA Faculty Senate passed in April, written in opposition to a proposed legislation that would have made it illegal for Arizona’s public colleges and universities to spend money on, or require participation in, DEI programs and initiatives.

“This bill infringes on freedom of speech and our civil rights and liberties. ... (It) not only impinges on our ability to investigate, invent, discover and to give account but also infringes our right to publish, teach, and research in and outside the classroom without interference or fear of reprisal,” the faculty statement says.

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In both 2021 and 2022, the UA spent $1.6 million a year out of its more-than $2 billion budget to support an administrative unit known as the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, whose goal is to “make diversity and inclusiveness a habit that is implemented and practiced by everyone consistently throughout the university.”

Why DEI is under attack

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 states, including Arizona, introduced some form of legislation that would put restrictions on DEI programs in 2023. As of June 1, lawmakers in Florida, Tennessee, North Dakota and Texas had passed some of those proposals into law.

But it’s not happening in Arizona, at least not this year anyway.

Arizona’s Senate Bill 1694 narrowly failed to make it out of the House last month. Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman from Queen Creek, who sponsored it with six Republican co-sponsors, did not respond to the Arizona Daily Star’s request for comment on the failure of the bill or any plans to file a similar bill next year.

When the bill was still moving through the Legislature, Hoffman said DEI trainings that schools like the UA regularly offer, which his bill would have outlawed, “have become a prevalent tactic of the left to shame employees and to shame folks within the trainings,” Capitol Media Services reported. Eliminating such trainings, Hoffman added, “gets us back to doing the job that they’ve been hired to on behalf of the people.”

“The bill says we don’t want public entities influencing the composition of their workforce based on race,” Hoffman said.

The legislation would also have barred public institutions from advancing theories of unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation, and anti-racism, among numerous other theories that touch on the marginalization or oppression of certain social, racial, ethnic and gender groups.

Advocates say DEI programs and trainings can help foster a more welcoming campus environment in addition to bolstering recruitment and retention efforts.

Democratic Sen. Priya Sundareshan of Tucson called Hoffman’s bill “incredibly hurtful,” and said DEI initiatives “help people and employees and students feel comfortable where they are.”

If the political tides in other Republican-dominated state legislatures are any indication, the push against DEI in Arizona likely won’t die with this year’s bill.

Over the past few years, some conservative politicians in Arizona — and across the nation — have criticized educators at all levels for “indoctrinating” students through certain teachings, accusations sometimes broadly referred to as critical race theory. Although that term has taken on new meaning as a conservative euphemism for teaching America’s history of discrimination against people of color, women, members of the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups, critical race theory itself is a 40-plus-year-old, graduate-level concept rarely applied to high school or undergraduate courses.

Eliminating DEI offices and programming, which are typically designed to help historically marginalized students matriculate and succeed in higher education, has surfaced in the national political culture wars as one of several proposed and enacted strategies — others include banning certain books and courses — to assert political control of ideologies taught or promoted in schools.

“If you look at the way this has actually been implemented across the country, DEI is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination,” Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news conference last month after signing Senate Bill 266 into law.

Just like the failed proposal in Arizona would have, the new Florida law prohibits public colleges and universities from spending money on DEI initiatives. “That has no place in our public institutions,” DeSantis said.

UA, other schools defend DEI

Arizona faculty leaders disagree.

Faculty senates at the UA, Northern Arizona University and Arizona State University have passed non-binding resolutions in support of investments in DEI as critical to the operation of accessible higher education in a state with an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse population.

According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Arizona’s diversity index is 61.1%, up from 54.9% in 2010; 61.6% of Arizonans identify as white, 12.4% identify as Black, 18.7% as Hispanic and 10.2% as multiracial.

Faculty Senate members at Arizona State University in Tempe and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, which both staff DEI offices, also issued resolutions this spring, as did UA's, reaffirming their commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“This is organic to who we are,” said Penny Dolin, chair of the ASU Faculty Senate and chair of the Arizona Faculties Council. “ASU continues to pursue maximum inclusion in the university. That means diversity, socioeconomic diversity, various religious principles, and more.” ASU President Michael Crow added in a statement that inclusion has been part of ASU’s charter for a decade. “Inclusion is a core value and it drives everything we do,” Crow said. “I talk about egalitarian access almost every day.”

NAU's Faculty Senate resolution confirms the school's "commitment to educate, support, and empower students from all backgrounds, identities, and lived experiences; the advancement of education that is diverse in thought and perspective; equitable for each student regardless of their socio-economic background or status; and inclusive of the breadth of both the personal and historical realities of all our students."

In response to questions about its commitment to DEI, Pima Community College referred to its governing board policy that says it "is committed to providing and supporting programs, services and training that will enable all students and employees to achieve their educational and career objectives." The same value, the policy continues, "will be utilized by PCC in employee recruitment and hiring."

Maricopa Community Colleges did not respond to requests for comment about response to proposed legislation against DEI programs, but according to its website, it has Council on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion that "supports the college mission of creating an inclusive and vibrant learning community where everyone is supported to achieve success."

The U.S. Department of Education designates the UA as a Hispanic Serving Institution because 25% or more of its full-time, undergraduate student body identifies as Hispanic, and the university has launched numerous programs to recruit more low-income and first-generation students as well as underrepresented faculty.

The university hired its first diversity officer in the mid-2000s. According to UA spokeswoman Pam Scott, UA created the role “to help develop teaching strategies for students from diverse backgrounds and to perform research to address the needs of a diverse society.“

Since then, the UA has significantly grown its investments in DEI initiatives. As of November 2022, “more than $2.8 million has been allocated to advancing campus racial equity efforts that are aligned with student priorities,” the UA provost’s website says.

Creating or expanding an office to administer DEI programming and support is something many colleges and universities have done over the past decade. According to a 2019 analysis by the education trade magazine INSIGHT Into Diversity, American colleges increased spending on DEI initiatives by 27% between 2014-2019. However, even with those increases, DEI accounted for an average of 0.5% in a school’s overall budget.

Sometimes, these investments in DEI have come after public criticisms of a campus’ intolerance of marginalized students or faculty. It happened at the University of Missouri in response to weeks of high-profile, anti-racism campus protests in 2015. Although it didn’t receive near the media attention, one year later in 2016, students at the UA raised concerns about the treatment of marginalized students on campus during a faculty listening tour.

“I felt scared and unsafe, like maybe someone would show up in the night and try to do something to me,” a Black UA graduate student said at the time, as she recalled finding a racial slur written on her mailbox. “I didn’t really know what to think because nothing like that had ever happened to me before.”

Asian, Native American, Hispanic, transgender and female students also reported discrimination or harassment from faculty members and fellow students, the Arizona Daily Star reported in 2016.

Soon after the revelations of the listening tour, the UA hired two new diversity officers and expanded the scope of its Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

Among other functions, the office provides support for outreach and retention efforts, provides resources to those reporting bias concerns, and is in the process of developing a diversity strategic plan. It’s working with departments and other units across campus to, according to its website, “move even further beyond rhetoric towards sustainable, accountable, action-oriented practices.”

The UA’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion “is one aspect of a multipronged approach to recruiting, retaining and supporting students and faculty from diverse backgrounds,” Scott said. “As the incoming classes have increased in size and diversity year after year so has the academic preparation which has helped lead to higher first-to-second year student retention.”

In 1980, about 10% of the UA’s student body identified as non-white. In 2022, 34% of students identified as a race other than white and 25% identified as Hispanic or Latinx.

According to numbers provided by the UA, first-to-second year retention rose from 83.3% to 85.6% between 2017 and 2022.

Data from the UA’s Office of Equity and Inclusion also shows that between 2012 and 2021, retention rates improved for biracial, white, first-generation and low-income students, among other groups.

View from DEI-banned Florida

Those are the kind of gains Andrew Gothard, an English instructor at Florida Atlantic University, said he and his colleagues are most worried about losing now that DEI initiatives are outlawed in Florida.

From his view as an instructor who’s interacted with students for more than 10 years, diversity, equity and inclusion programs are “unequivocally good for higher education,” and proven to help more students from underrepresented backgrounds attend and graduate from college.

“When students are no longer getting higher education degrees, they aren’t pouring that knowledge and experience and expertise back into their (communities) and that’s something that hurts everyone,” said Gothard, who also serves as president of the United Faculty of Florida. “We’re deeply concerned about the long term impacts this will have not just on the individual students but the totality of Florida in the coming decades.”

He said he’s already heard from students, parents and faculty who, in part because of Florida’s DEI ban, are either looking to leave the state or reconsider their intentions to get an education at — or work for — a Florida university.

Gothard’s message for Arizona’s higher education leaders is to find out what its campus communities actually want and need despite the “extreme, false partisan narrative” circulating about DEI programs.

“Get out there and counter that public narrative of what DEI — and higher education in general — actually do,” Gothard said. “When you do that, you’re going to put the people listening to both sides of this argument in a place where they have to decide what they want.”

The NAACP says new laws and policies championed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are "openly hostile" to Black Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. It has issued a travel advisory accusing the state of "trying to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools."

Kathryn Palmer covers higher education for the Arizona Daily Star. Contact her at kpalmer@tucson.com or 520-496-9010.

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Higher education reporter

Kathryn Palmer covers higher education for the Arizona Daily Star. Contact her via e-mail at kpalmer@tucson.com or at her new phone number, 520-496-9010.

Arizona Education Solutions

Arizona teens challenged to become Holocaust education content creators

Constructing a three-minute educational video about the Holocaust — one that is simultaneously organized, understandable and creative, not to mention accurate — is no easy feat. Still, the leaders of the Arizona Jewish Historical Society (AZJHS) suspected that by creating such a challenge with the First Annual Oskar Knoblauch YouTube Contest, they would find several Arizona high school students up to the task. With the release of the winning videos last week, the public can now judge for itself.

“All the students had a little different take on the project, and even those who didn’t win showed so much creativity,” said Mary Ellen Page, AZJHS Holocaust educator and one of the contest’s creators.

Red Mountain High School students Rannen Phillips and Adrianna Delci took first place in the group category for their striking interpretation of Phoenix Holocaust survivor Marion Weinzweig’s personal narrative. In their video “Duality of Faith,” a plaintive melody, simple yet ominous, plays in the background, while a ramped image shows Delci’s hands drawing a girl with long hair and a painful expression. Over the course of three minutes, it becomes clear that the girl in the drawing holds a Star of David while her wrists are bound by barbed wire superimposed with a cross.

Phillips reads her original poem based on the details of Weinzweig’s history as a Polish child hidden by her parents from the invading Nazis in a Catholic neighbor’s household and later, in a Catholic convent. When her father, who had survived the camps but lost nearly all of his family, came to liberate her, she shrank from him and for some time, refused to believe she was a Jew. Weinzweig has spoken publicly about her struggle with religious identity after her traumatic experience and what she’s called “the darkest period of my life.”

The video exemplifies one of the contest’s main goals, according to Anthony Fusco, AZJHS education coordinator. “We wanted students to tap into a collective form of consciousness by understanding the emotional connection that goes along with learning the survivor’s story,” he said.

On Wednesday, June 21, Phillips, Delci and nine other winners will be honored at an AZJHS award ceremony. There were 14 video entries overall divided into two categories, group and individual. Each category has a first, second and third-place winner, as well as honorable mentions. First-place winners receive $300; second-place and third-place winners receive $200 and $100, respectively. All winners also receive a signed copy of Oskar Knoblauch’s autobiography. Knoblauch is a local Holocaust survivor and the competition’s namesake, whose story is part of AZJHS’ original exhibit, “Stories of Survival: An Immersive Journey through the Holocaust,” which wraps up in August.

The entry videos — representing students from Canyon View High School in Waddell, Red Mountain High School in Mesa, Ridgeview College Preparatory High School in San Tan Valley and Saguaro High School in Scottsdale — incorporated music, survivors’ family pictures and clips from their public appearances intertwined with students’ original poetry, narration, as well as historical text and photos. Initially, TikTok was meant to be the contest’s platform but after it came under national scrutiny and was outright banned in some states — and some of Arizona’s schools — AZJHS switched to YouTube to platform the videos.

Hannah Mack, the second-place winner in the individual category, was one of the few students who still used TikTok to make her video. In the classic conversational TikTok setup, Mack filmed herself talking about Knoblauch’s story, pointing to certain photos and snippets of text to argue for the importance of Holocaust education in combating Holocaust deniers. She also talks about the vital role of upstanders, “someone who stands up for what is right and speaks out in their community,” encouraging her audience to do just that while promising it is something she intends to do as well.

Mack’s callout of Holocaust deniers is something Dr. Lawrence Bell, AZJHS executive director, can appreciate. “Social media can be very inane, but it is also where antisemites and other hateful people go to spread their messages,” he told Jewish News, via email.

“Our goal is to fight hatred with greater understanding and love and provide quality information in a way that is new and creative, yet which still engages the primary source,” he said.

Students could also include an element of role playing or acting, which is what honorable mention winner Michael Alvarado did. He filmed himself going about his day — brushing his teeth, going to the gym, walking home — while discussing how teenagers like him, “struggling to find their true selves,” can relate somewhat to Weinzweig because of the way she has described the emotional turmoil she felt for so many years after the Holocaust.

“She often talked about her regrets and what she wished she could have done instead. That’s why allowing yourself to be stuck in one part of your life and not allowing yourself to let go is unhealthy,” Alvarado said.

The idea for the contest was first sparked a couple of years ago while Page and Robin LaCorte, the Holocaust education coordinator for Martin Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, were doing coursework for Arizona State University’s (ASU) World War II Studies program in Tempe. Last year, when LaCorte ran into a representative from the Helios Education Foundation during ASU’s Genocide Awareness Week, who said the contest would be something Helios would like to fund, she started working on a grant to pay for AZJHS’ teacher training program, the teachers’ stipend for entering students’ work and the students’ prize money.

Page and Fusco have discussed expanding the contest to middle school students or making a few tweaks for next year, but they were very pleased with how the first competition turned out.

“We’re really pleased that we’re going to have 14 YouTube videos with a positive message about being an upstander and fighting racism or any other ‘ism,’” said Page.

Ultimately, the contest is one more way AZJHS is working to make compelling programming about the Holocaust for young people.

“This is the kind of thing that attracts kids — it’s talking to them through their language and it’s effective,” Page said. JN

To learn more about the contest, visit AZJHS.org.