I met Renee Wells in the summer of 2014 when she arrived at NC State University to take the helm of the school’s LGBTQ Pride Center. The Black Lives Matter movement was in the news, fueled by outrage over the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York.
NC State reacted to the heightened national concern over racial justice by setting up committees to update policies related to DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion.
Wells probably wasn’t a good fit for NC State, a large but cautious public university with a small and declining percentage of African American students. For one thing, she did more than talk. She advocated for social change, even if it ran counter to the policies and preferences of North Carolina’s conservative state legislature.
She worked to blunt the impact of the state’s anti-transgender “bathroom bill” that required public facilities to restrict the access of trans individuals. She developed a Queer Youth Leadership Summit for local LGBTQ high school students, created educational programs on social justice for faculty and staff, trained students to advocate for social change and launched a gender pronouns awareness campaign.
Virtue Signaling
In my division, University Communications, a flurry of activities promoting diversity and inclusion involved window dressing rather than concrete action. We included so many images of Black people in our marketing materials, student leaders objected that we were promoting an image of the school that had little connection to reality. The chief communications officer replied that the look was “aspirational.”
When that same administrator reminded me to include diversity stories in our internal communications, I said, “I work in a building with 65 white people. Is there anything you could do to make this place more diverse?”
There wasn’t, he assured me. “I can only hire from the pool of candidates that I get from human resources,” he explained.
Making Sense
I was frustrated but remained at NC State until 2023. Wells, however, left in 2018 for a position at Middlebury College in Vermont. When I heard recently that she had returned to North Carolina to serve as assistant vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion at Queens University of Charlotte, I knew we needed to talk.
I wanted to make sense of the newest trend in higher education: the abandonment of many of the DEI initiatives that schools had eagerly embraced between 2014 and 2020. Our conversation is certainly not the last word on the topic. For her part, Wells believes the community-building work of DEI is foundational to higher education and will continue, regardless of the language used to describe it. I believe institutions will come to regret their moves to defund and de-emphasize programs that strive to create a welcoming campus environment for everyone.
Time will tell.
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