Utah law targeting DEI leads university to close LGBT, women’s centers

“What am I going to do without my space on campus? How’s my friend group going to stay together?” said Harris, who finished her sophomore year this spring. “It’s attacking a space that’s very personal to me.”

Across Utah, public schools, universities and government agencies must make shifts to comply with the law, which goes into effect Monday. The state becomes the latest where Republican legislators have restricted DEI programs, amid a broader conservative effort to limit what is taught in schools and make diversity programs a flash point in the nation’s political debate.

Laws in other states have forced some universities to eliminate programs and jobs and, more commonly, to change hiring practices, such as ending requirements for diversity statements from job candidates. Some type of change to diversity requirements or programs has been made at 164 college campuses in 23 states since January 2023, according to a tally by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

At the University of Utah, administrators said they have had less than two months — the bill was passed in January, but the state higher education office’s guidance about how to comply with the law came down in May — to make final decisions about how to reorganize their staff and services. The school won’t lose its student services and will continue holding cultural events, but complying with the law will require a significant change in approach, administrators said.

“This definitely is having a profound impact,” said Lori McDonald, vice president for student affairs.

The Utah law labeled services for different communities — racial, ethnic, religious, gender-based or sexuality-based — as “discriminatory.”

Although it left their funding in place, it effectively directed schools to reorganize those services, such as mental health, career and scholarship help, under generalized campus centers catering to all students. Furthermore, the state’s guidance indicated those services couldn’t operate in centers that also did cultural programming.

At the University of Utah, school officials said that means closing its specialized centers in favor of two umbrella offices: one for all cultural programming and another for all student services. The school’s Division of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion has been eliminated. About 45 staff were affected, many of whom will be reassigned to the two new centers.

“This is not the path we would have chosen,” University Provost Mitzi Montoya wrote in a note to deans and faculty Thursday. “But … it is our calling to rise to the challenges of the day and find a better way forward.”

On Friday, a farewell was planned for the university’s LGBT Resource Center, which asked supporters to “join us to laugh, cry and celebrate” its 21-year run. An Instagram post advertising the goodbye party drew dozens of comments and broken-heart emojis.

“I’m starting school in the fall and am so upset this won’t be a resource for our community,” one person wrote. Another said, “Every single person in this building made me feel at home.”

Added a third, “I found support here [when] there was nowhere else.”

Along with the LGBT Resource Center, the university’s Women’s Resource Center and the Center for Equity and Student Belonging will close. Both the women’s center and the Center for Equity and Student Belonging, previously known as an ethnic student affairs center, had been in operation for more than 50 years, Montoya noted.

The law doesn’t mandate the closure of student centers, allowing them to stay open as cultural centers as long as they don’t also provide student services. Utah state Rep. Katy Hall (R), the bill’s House sponsor, said some universities had chosen to close centers “to better meet the goals” of the law.

The idea of leaving the centers open without providing the services they were created to house felt disingenuous, McDonald said, and university officials weren’t sure enough staff would be left to run them after some employees move to the student services center.

The university plans to keep its Black cultural center open; staff are working on how it will operate under the law as a gathering place, McDonald said. Those plans will have to be approved by the state, university officials said.

The law does not affect classroom instruction, academic freedom or academic research, the Utah System of Higher Education said in its guidance.

This spring, lawmakers in Alabama and Iowa passed similar bills to restrict DEI programs, and Wyoming removed state funding for the state university’s DEI office, forcing its closure. In mid-June, Republican members of Congress introduced a bill proposing to end all federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs and pull funding from government agencies, schools and others with DEI programs.

The law’s passage in Utah played to the more conservative wing of a divided Republican Party, said Michael Lyons, a political science professor at Utah State University. In an election year, Gov. Spencer Cox (R) and other GOP lawmakers faced the need to win over party delegates in Utah’s caucus-based nominating process.

“It’s not surprising to see them take very conservative positions,” he said.

Upon signing the bill, Cox said it offered a “balanced solution” by repurposing funding “to help all Utah students succeed regardless of their background.” His office did not respond to a request for comment from The Post this week.

Hall, the bill’s sponsor, said on the House floor that the measure came about because she had heard “serious concerns about the landscape at our higher education institutions” from “students and many professors.”

“I hope that students who benefited from these centers in the past know that the expectation is that they will still be able to receive the services and support that they need to succeed,” Hall told The Post.

Utah House Minority Leader Angela Romero (D) said she feared the bill would end up erasing people and identities, noting in a floor debate that she might not have succeeded at the University of Utah if not for the support of the ethnic students’ center. Free-speech advocates have also said such laws have a chilling and censoring effect on campuses.

Utah State University said this month it would reassign programs and clubs that had been housed under the school’s Inclusion Center and would ensure that its Latinx Cultural Center and a proposed Native American center comply with the law. The school said it would create a new center for community and cultural matters. Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, has closed its Division of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and identity-based centers and reorganized staff positions.

At the University of Utah, where staff members are still working out plans for the new centers, Harris, the student, remembered the LGBT center as a cozy place that made college much easier — and worried about what the changes might mean for future students.

“I could just walk into a space,” Harris said, “and I knew that everyone there was safe to talk to.”