\n<\/p>\n
Diversity and leadership consultant Maurice A. Stinnett looked out at a room of 800 diversity, equity and inclusion officers last Thursday and made a hard ask.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho is responsible for being courageous in the face of adversity, even at the risk of job loss?\u201d he called out. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou and me,\u201d the crowd shouted back. <\/p>\n
\u201cWho\u2019s responsible for encouraging themselves and saying that I\u2019m still going to carry on and do this work?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou and me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The impassioned speech kicked off the second day of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education conference, where diversity officers came together in Philadelphia to grieve and gather steam after a tumultuous year of rebranding and cuts to DEI offices, programs and jobs.<\/p>\n
The mood at the event oscillated between mourning and celebration. Some sessions spoke directly to the unique political challenges of the moment, including talks on academic freedom and the \u201chollowing\u201d of DEI infrastructure and its impact on students of color. Others offered a sense of normalcy, focusing on topics like best practices for campus climate surveys and techniques to support multilingual learners. And some activities aimed to deliver some plain old fun after a long year, including a musical performance by Philadelphia\u2019s Mummers and a dance party on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Speakers doubled down on a message of hope, telling beleaguered higher ed diversity officers that their efforts on campuses would continue, despite state bans and anti-DEI executive orders and crackdowns from the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cPolitical forces, forces that have never believed in the promise we are here to advance, have waged a sustained, coordinated and, at times, devastating campaign against the work and the people who do it,\u201d Caroline Laguerre-Brown, NADOHE\u2019s board chair, told the crowd.<\/p>\n
She urged the room full of hundreds of attendees to take a moment of silence \u201cfor every colleague who has been forced out, every office that has been shuttered, every program that has been defunded and every student that lost a mentor, every institution that has lost its way,\u201d but she ended it on a rallying cry that \u201cNADOHE is not going anywhere,\u201d to whoops and applause. <\/p>\n
Emelyn dela Pe\u00f1a, NADOHE\u2019s new president, struck a similar note, acknowledging that higher ed institutions face a \u201cgreat deal of uncertainty\u201d as they struggle \u201cto interpret shifting legal guidance\u201d and withstand political pressures. But she stressed that \u201cthe underlying goals of diversity work in higher education have not changed.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI also feel hope,\u201d she said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t the first time higher education and other sectors have faced backlash when expanding access and opportunity. Our field has always evolved in response to external pressures. The question isn\u2019t whether the work continues but how it continues with clarity and integrity.\u201d<\/p>\n
NADOHE conference attendees listen to keynote speaker Maurice A. Stinnett. <\/p>\n
Stinnett, one of the conference\u2019s keynote speakers, urged continued action even in a political landscape where \u201cprogress almost feels impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTransformation is possible. Action is not optional,\u201d he told the cheering crowd. \u201cDon\u2019t keep showing up to NADOHE\u2019s conference and go home and do nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
But amid the calls for hope and perseverance, some participants also expressed worry their confidence would flag once back on their campuses.<\/p>\n
One attendee said in a question-and-answer session with Stinnett that they felt \u201ca rush of courage and strength\u201d at NADOHE but that it\u2019s harder for DEI officers to keep feeling courageous when they\u2019re sometimes \u201cthe only one\u201d bringing up equity issues at a time of heightened scrutiny and hostility.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are internalizing that in their body,\u201d they said. \u201cWe\u2019re getting breakdown. We\u2019re getting burnout\u201d and suffering from health issues like hypertension due to the stress. \u201cHow do we find that courage, where do we find the faith, to keep doing that without our bodies breaking down?\u201d<\/p>\n
Multiple presenters acknowledged that DEI work on campuses is changing\u2014and would have to change to survive a tumultuous period of dried-up federal funding, shifting legal guidance, pressures to change curriculum and programming, and heightened government scrutiny.<\/p>\n
Stinnett argued in his speech that the \u201clanguage may need to shift slightly\u201d without compromising the mission.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn this evolving landscape, the cleverness and adaptability of the DEI practitioner will be vital,\u201d he said. \u201cBy reframing the conversation and finding innovative ways to engage stakeholders, you can continue to champion diversity and inclusion, ensuring that the principles of equity remain at the forefront of higher education. But you\u2019re going to have to be clever\u00a0\u2026 You know this\u2014I\u2019m preaching to the choir.\u201d<\/p>\n
Several sessions touched on how diversity work on campuses might adjust and respond to the moment. <\/p>\n
Chloe Poston, vice president of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives at Davidson College in North Carolina, gave a talk on how to reframe diversity efforts to broaden support for them. She encouraged diversity officers to reach out to \u201cthe middle,\u201d students and staff on campuses who are apathetic to diversity work or don\u2019t understand how it affects their lives. <\/p>\n
For example, she described meeting with campus employees, including white, blue-collar workers not especially interested in DEI, to get to know them and ask about their needs. She also said she held focus groups with conservative students after data, disaggregated by race, political affiliation and other characteristics, showed they were reticent to share their views on campus.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t need to change hearts and minds of your opponents,\u201d Poston said. \u201cYou just need to make the work relevant to other people\u2019s experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also told diversity officers to emphasize how diversity practices serve values often touted by DEI opponents, like \u201cmeritocracy\u201d and \u201cintellectual diversity,\u201d and to challenge critics to be spell out their concerns regarding diversity, equity and inclusion at an institution.<\/p>\n
She acknowledged this may be harder in some states, but \u201cI encourage you to push for specificity,\u201d she said. \u201cAsk exactly how your practices are exclusionary. Don\u2019t allow a national narrative to be overlaid onto your campus.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other speakers, including Mike Gavin, president and CEO of the Alliance for Higher Education, encouraged similar outreach to those who are \u201ccomplacent\u201d or \u201cpersuadable.\u201d But he also argued that colleges and universities shouldn\u2019t bend on DEI initiatives under pressure from states or the Trump administration. He encouraged diversity officials to continue to put race \u201cat the center\u201d of their work.<\/p>\n
He acknowledged that higher education has \u201cwork to do internally\u201d but insisted institutions, rather than policymakers, identify the problems and ways to improve. \u201cI\u2019ve been in these meetings, you\u2019ve been in these meetings, in the last five, six years where we start to say, \u2018If we could just message it this way\u00a0\u2026\u2019 No. We have to get out of that. It\u2019s not a messaging problem. It\u2019s an authoritarianism problem.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Diversity and leadership consultant Maurice A. Stinnett looked out at a room of 800 diversity, equity and inclusion officers last Thursday and made a hard ask. \u201cWho is responsible for being courageous in the face of adversity, even at the risk of job loss?\u201d he called out. \u201cYou and me,\u201d the crowd shouted back. \u201cWho\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47640,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[3772,2762,7624,4490,7696],"class_list":{"0":"post-47639","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-diversity","9":"tag-gather","10":"tag-grieve","11":"tag-officers","12":"tag-rally"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/47640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}