Demographic shifts and declining enrollments are hitting the University of Wyoming, the Cowboy State’s only four-year public university. UW enrolled fewer than 11,000 students in the fall semester of its 2023–2024 academic year, down from 13,750 in the spring of 2011–2012 and lower than any semester since the spring of 1997–98. The state cut more than $40 million from the university’s budget in 2020, prompting the board of trustees to eliminate around 80 positions to cover the shortfall. As its student body declines, more budget cuts are sure to follow.
The need for cost-cutting and UW’s growing DEI bureaucracy got the state legislature’s attention last session, when it joined a throng of states in defunding its university’s DEI offices. Governor Mark Gordon vetoed a provision that would have defunded all DEI programming, but even so, UW has not followed the spirit of the legislature’s ban, or Gordon’s insistence that the school drop its “woke” initiatives.
In March, Wyoming’s overwhelmingly Republican legislature slashed $1.7 million in state funding for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices. The UW Board of Trustees complied, closing its Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and reassigning its staff. It also prohibited the school from requiring potential faculty members to submit DEI statements during the hiring process and prevented DEI from being part of faculty promotion materials. UW’s vice president of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion left for another school in July, and the university appeared to shutter its Office of Multicultural Affairs in August.
Yet a closer look reveals that as DEI offices closed, many diversity efforts were rebranded under new names. Many of those offices’ personnel have simply gotten new job titles while still working on DEI projects.
A number of those rechristened efforts will proceed under the guidance of professor Brandon McElroy, appointed as vice provost for Access and Engagement in August. The office McElroy oversees will strive “to cultivate a diverse academic community through the recruitment and retention of students, faculty, and staff”—in other words, DEI under another name. Consider how the university closed the Office of Multicultural Affairs but opened the Pokes Center for Community Resources in its place. Any doubt about the center’s mission were dispelled by its announcement on social media: “We are still here!!!”
The new center has retained many of the former DEI office’s personnel. Melanie Vigil, formerly the program director of Multicultural Affairs, has become the assistant dean of Pokes. Maia Marces, the university’s former intersectional program coordinator, is a community resource coordinator in the new center. That’s also the new title for Bianca Infante De La Cruz, the former Latine Program coordinator.
Texas, which also passed legislation banning DEI offices in state universities, similarly saw schools try to evade the law. That prompted the law’s chief sponsor, State Senator Brandon Creighton, to send letters to noncompliant universities and threaten to call them to Austin to explain their actions. “I am deeply concerned,” wrote the Houston-area Republican, “that many institutions may choose to merely rename their offices or employee titles.” After Creighton’s letter circulated, the University of Texas at Austin laid off or reassigned as many as 60 personnel. Wyoming legislators should follow Creighton’s example and call UW on its defiance.
For Wyoming legislators, tackling bloated DEI efforts is just the first of many needed higher-education reforms. Wyoming legislators were among the first to consider eliminating their public university’s gender studies programs; they should follow through, and slash majors and minors like African American and Diaspora Studies, Asian Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies. Similar right-sizing has occurred at Texas A&M, a university in much better financial shape than is UW. As enrollment craters, policymakers should review and eliminate UW’s explicitly progressive programming, both for purposes of budget-cutting and to refocus the university on its educational mission.
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