The university has also removed group pages from its website.
WSU used, as justification, the passing of Senate Bill 1, which “eliminates institutional discrimination and indoctrination by removing DEI programs, trainings, and orientations” at public universities.
On its face, that’s nonsense. State Senator Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, and the bill’s primary sponsor, said in March that programs like the Bolinga and Latino Centers wouldn’t be prohibited under the bill.
(For disclosure, I taught at WSU for a decade and think SB 1 is a hideous piece of undefined nonsense passed by lawmakers looking to impart their ideological perspective on higher education. Just so I’m clear.)
Moreover, while Miami University earlier said it would close some departments, it apparently hasn’t eliminated student groups. As of this writing, the Black Student Action Association, the Association of Latino and American students, and several other organizations on the university’s “faculty and staff affinity groups” still had an online presence.
Instead of removing the mention of DEI from its website and disbanding the offices, WSU has gone much further. It has disrespected, discarded, and denigrated its students by taking actions it didn’t have to take.
Instead of issuing a feckless statement defending the indefensible, the university should have said what it meant. To wit: “We’re sidelining a certain class of students because we can’t make those white lawmakers who weaponized DEI mad since they might take our state dollars.”
Here’s what’s sad. These organizations do not and never have had exclusionary policies. White students can and do participate because they’re interested in learning about other cultures. That’s diversity at its core. It’s not a made-up concept of racial advantage. It’s about learning from other life experiences different from yours.
In kowtowing to a group of people who want to obscure DEI’s purpose for political gains, you hurt students seeking cultural knowledge. By closing the offices and eliminating the websites, the university has purposely made it harder for students of different backgrounds to come together.
Put another way, students from small rural towns who joined these centers to meet a diverse group of people have had that easy access ripped from them.
What’s happening in Ohio is a replay of the 1940s and 1950s, when white politicians, afraid of people of color gaining too much influence in society, created laws to disenfranchise them. Now, politicians talk out of both sides of their mouths, kind of like the character Two-Face in Batman. We want equality, they say, and then pass laws to help destroy student-run institutions that foster equality for all through their programs and events.
And Wright State folded like a cheap tent collapsing under a puff of air.
For years, I’ve told my former colleagues — all good, caring people who have never played politics in the classroom — that I would speak to their students whenever they needed.
No more.
I want to support them, but I won’t help a university that has abandoned its students, kicked diversity of thought and ideas in the teeth while becoming prostrate to lawmakers who have weaponized DEI into something it isn’t.
Wright State doesn’t deserve my support in any of its endeavors.
They don’t deserve yours either.
Don’t give it to them until they show, not just say, they value all students, not just the ones lawmakers want.
Ray Marcano’s column appears on these pages each Sunday. He’s been named best columnist in Ohio by the Ohio chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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