Who Leads America’s DEI Offices? Here Are Their Stories.

At the annual conference of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education in Baltimore last week, faculty members, staff, and administrators gathered to learn from one another, commiserate, and strategize.

Lawmakers in at least 19 states have introduced bills in the current legislative sessions that would restrict colleges’ efforts to improve diversity, equity, or inclusion, with six states proposing to ban DEI offices or staff altogether. Those advancing the bills argue that the administrations working to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion are discriminatory and a waste of taxpayer dollars, and that they inhibit academic freedom.

There were numerous signs at the conference that business was not as usual.

One audience member received a warm round of applause after introducing himself as working at a college in Florida. A session titled “Slow-Burn Tactical Hell: Doing DEI Work During Situational and Prolonged Crisis Mode” promised practical advice. One keynote speaker, Ijeoma Oluo, who writes and speaks about race, urged the audience to celebrate small victories even while under attack. And one session — closed to the media — focused on how to reclaim the narrative around the framing of diversity, equity, and inclusion in education.

What does it mean to work in a diversity, equity, and inclusion office on a college campus in 2023? The Chronicle spoke with four administrators at the conference, working in red and blue states, at public and private institutions, both two-year and four-year colleges, from early on in their careers in diversity, equity, and inclusion to the more well-established, about what they do and what they’re thinking about at this critical time in their field.

Emilio Solano

In some ways, Emilio Solano, assistant provost for institutional equity and community engagement at Willamette University, has come far from his first jobs as an eighth-grade history and English teacher and later, assistant high-school principal. But Solano has also wound up right where he began, returning to his hometown of Salem, Oregon.

Solano, who is in his first year as assistant provost, views his role as that of a quarterback and coordinator for all things diversity, equity, and inclusion at Willamette, a private, liberal-arts college with 1,236 undergraduate students, of whom 63 percent are white. In the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, 73 percent of tenure-track faculty are white, 24 percent are people of color, and 4 percent unknown; among those hired since 2016, 79 percent are people of color.

Solano recently created a website for the Office of Institutional Equity, an office of one. “The office is me,” Solano says, laughing, “and I’m very real with that.”

André Chung for The Chronicle

Willamette recently undertook a strategic-planning process; one goal was to formalize the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Solano is proud of getting the University DEI Committee off the ground and says he’s already seeing departments come together to talk about common challenges such as faculty retention or recruitment. “It’s neat to see, like, the law school and the art school talking to each other [to say] let’s meet on the side and let’s brainstorm because we’re going through the same thing right now,” Solano says.

Solano says that much of his work is “not always super visible” to students, staff, or faculty. The diversity committee, for example, spent four months defining diversity, equity, and inclusion and figuring out what the terms mean in the context of Willamette. But Solano said that work has helped to get everyone at the university on the same page about goals and language, laying a critical foundation for the work ahead.

Among the priorities at the top of Solano’s list is thinking about how the university can expand its work with local tribal communities. For example, one faculty member who has built a strong relationship with the Grand Ronde, a federally recognized Native American tribe, including curating art from the tribe at the college’s art museum and teaching about Indigenous studies, will be retiring soon, so Solano has been trying to figure out how to keep Willamette’s partnership going and fill the gap in the curriculum.

Solano is also looking forward to getting the results of the university’s recent campus-climate survey, the institution’s first since 2019, which asked students, faculty, and staff about their perceptions of the campus climate, including experiences of discrimination and harassment. He’s also started thinking about how the university should measure its success in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and whether to focus on goals related to admissions or retention of faculty and staff, or financial aid, for example.

When Solano was thinking about whether to take the job, he was warned that most people burn out in such roles after two or three years. “They do something different because they either realize there’s too much to do or the institution doesn’t feel supportive of them, and so they leave,” Solano says. “They realize that they were promised something that is impossible to do.”

For now, though, Solano is holding on to his belief that institutions can change for the better, to help more students reach their full potential.

Andrea Abrams

As an anthropology professor, Andrea Abrams has taught courses on cultural diversity, race, and gender at Centre College in Danville, Ky., which has 1,320 undergraduate students, 72 percent of whom are white. Five years ago, during a sit-in protesting the way the college handled incidents of racial discrimination, students demanded, among other things, an office to oversee diversity and inclusion. Administrators asked Abrams to serve as an interim vice president to the new office.

Abrams saw it as a good opportunity to apply the theory she had been teaching in anthropology and took the job, intending to stay only until the college had found a permanent hire. But she found the job so rewarding — and challenging — that she decided to stay, while continuing to serve as an associate professor of anthropology.

Today, as vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion, Abrams oversees an office with four other staff members. Together they train faculty and staff to create a more inclusive environment, for example, by offering workshops on how to make classrooms more inclusive for neurodiverse and differently abled students and how to help international students feel a sense of belonging. They also handle cultural and social-justice programming for the college, and run the programming for students who want to work in diversity, equity, and inclusion or conduct research in the field. The office also coordinates a half day each November dedicated to helping students, faculty, and staff learn about different perspectives, which includes workshops on talking across political differences and dealing with racial trauma, panels on the experiences of LGBTQ students, and classes on hip-hop dance and making kimchi.

André Chung for The Chronicle

“My job is to make sure that Centre is actually a more diverse place,” says Abrams. That includes ensuring diversity in hiring and making sure that policies are fair, for example.

Abrams has been watching the attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion at colleges around the country with concern. She recognizes that, as someone at a private college, and with the protection of a Democratic governor (albeit in a mainly red state), she has advantages that some of her counterparts across the country do not. Still, she fears the attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion will hurt all of their work.

“The point seems to be to vilify diversity, equity, inclusion, to say that it is inherently unequal because you’re privileging a certain group,” Abrams says. If some states succeed in eliminating DEI offices at public universities, she says, there will be a chilling effect at all kinds of institutions.

Even at private institutions, Abrams says, improving diversity, equity, and inclusion takes constant effort. “It’s still work. There’s still a struggle to get everyone to believe that it’s important, that diversity actually matters, that efforts toward inclusion are, in fact, equitable and necessary.”

To Abrams, the current attacks are evidence that those efforts have been working, and that college campuses are more diverse and more equitable today than they used to be. More equity, she says, means more sharing of resources and opportunities. Those who used to be able to keep those resources and opportunities to themselves have fewer privileges now and they’re resentful that the privileges they used to take for granted are no longer there, Abrams says. Those changes — coupled with the country’s demographic changes — have sparked the current backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion work on college campuses, Abrams believes.

Abrams says her field was caught off guard by how quickly the attacks have come, how quickly they have escalated, and how coordinated the assault has been. She worries about the damage that can be done if those critics get their way. But she also senses a renewed sense of commitment among her colleagues to their work, and a resolve to push back.

So much good work has already been done to make college a welcoming place for people of all kinds of backgrounds, Abrams says. She hopes it will be enough to keep the current attacks from taking hold.

Ricardo Nazario-Colón

Ricardo Nazario-Colón, chief diversity officer at Western Carolina University, says that there is a misconception that he and his colleagues in diversity, equity, and inclusion offices on college campuses across the country only serve certain kinds of students. “If a student comes to my office or any of my colleagues’ offices, regardless of the background of that student, we will provide services to that student,” Nazario-Colón says. “There is no administrator in higher ed who would say oh, I can’t help you — my job description says that I cannot work with you or my job description doesn’t serve you.”

“That is a false narrative,” says Nazario-Colón.

Nazario-Colón became the first person to serve as chief diversity officer at Western Carolina, a public university with 10,145 undergraduate students, 77 percent of whom are white, in Cullowhee, N.C., close to seven years ago. In May, he will begin a new position as senior vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclusion and chief diversity officer for the State University of New York system.

André Chung for The Chronicle

Reflecting on his time at Western Carolina, Nazario-Colón says that he and the university have grown together. Today, it’s second nature at the institution to consider the implications related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in decision-making, rather than thinking of them as competing interests. “The individuals that come to that institution understand that this is a value of the institution,” he says.

Nazario-Colón sees himself as a guide, helping people figure out how diversity, equity, and inclusion manifest themselves in their areas of work, rather than telling them what they should do. Recently, for example, the university completed its first strategic inclusive-excellence action plan, part of the university’s broader strategic plan. The action plan includes goals around equity, access, and success; climate and belongingness; curriculum and scholarship; infrastructure and commitments; and community and partnerships, with goals and measurable outcomes for each. “I may have been the bus driver on this, but really it took members from across campus and the support of senior leadership to be able to accomplish that,” he says.

Nazario-Colón believes the very identity of the United States is at stake in the current debate over diversity, equity, and inclusion. He says that those who oppose the work of DEI offices on college campuses don’t realize the broad spectrum of students they serve, including first-generation college students, students with disabilities, and students who receive Pell Grants. “There’s a lot out there that’s being challenged with really no understanding of the impact that these decisions are making.”

Unnamed, from a Tennessee community college

One DEI administrator, who works in compliance at a community college in Tennessee, agreed to speak with a reporter on the condition that her name not be used, because she was worried about the potential impact on her job.

“There is a definite fear,” she says. She even questioned whether she should attend the Nadohe conference this year because she worried about the potential ramifications of going to a convening with the word “diversity” in the title.

Last week, Tennessee’s General Assembly, which drew attention recently for expelling two of its Black members for participating in a gun-control protest, gave final legislative approval on a bill that would allow students and employees to report alleged violations of a divisive-concepts law adopted the previous year. That law states that students and employees may not be penalized for declining to support certain divisive concepts, such as that one race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another or that an individual by virtue of their race or sex is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive.

The current bill, which would allow reports of potential violations, would require institutions to investigate each report and create corrective action plans for any violations. The bill would also require employees whose primary or secondary job duties or job title includes diversity, equity, or inclusion to strengthen and increase intellectual diversity and individual liberty among those with divergent points of view and allocate at least 50 percent of their duties to supporting the academic success of students eligible for Pell Grants.

Tennessee lawmakers have also introduced bills this year that would end mandatory implicit bias training and prohibit public colleges offering health care-related degrees from requiring diversity, equity, and inclusion training or education as a condition of admission or graduation.

Some of the DEI administrator’s colleagues have been discussing whether to try to scrub the word diversity from job titles and department names to protect their work.

If she were younger and just starting out in the field, or lacked the support of family and friends, she would probably be looking for opportunities in the private sector. “No one is in higher education for the money,” she says.

“The work is too hard to not be committed to it,” she says. “So much of what we deal with is hard, emotional, time-consuming. You have to have a degree of empathy to reflect the entire student body and faculty and staff. That passion is a requirement to do the job.”