We, the students of UNC-Chapel Hill and our corresponding peers at other UNC institutions, stand against the removal of DEI funding for our schools.

On March 27, the Board of Trustees committee held a meeting about the potential dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives within UNC. On April 17, the Board of Governors held a similar meeting.

Marty Kotis, the vice-chair of UNC’s Budget, Finance, and Infrastructure committee, says: “I believe DEI simply causes divisiveness, and the reason I think that is I’ve heard from a lot of people whose kids are applying to schools or who are applying for a job or applying to contract with various government entities and feeling like they’re being, frankly, discriminated against” (Killian, 2024). 

To clarify, Kotis is making an argument for anti-affirmative action policies rather than anti-DEI policies; the two are not the same and should not be conflated. Applying for schools is a completely different subsect and issue than DEI policies. 

Even then, on a larger scale, legacy admissions often work as affirmative action for white students. A report on Harvard University’s admissions concluded that “almost 70% of Harvard's donor and legacy applicants are white… for the classes of 2014-2019, Harvard legacies were admitted at a rate of 33.6%, compared to 5.9% for non-legacies. About 28% of Harvard's class of 2019 were legacies” (Drozdowski, 2023). 

This report shows that non-white families are less likely to be donors and legacies. One can extend these findings to the conclusion that, thus, people of color have less access to academic spaces.

It is also important to note that Harvard University’s applicants do not exist in a vacuum; although these statistics are Harvard-specific, they can be extrapolated to virtually all Universities, especially private ones. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill considers legacy status in the admissions process, however to what extent is unknown. 

In a recent report on marginalization in the workplace, Oxfam relays a Pew analysis which “found that the difference in median household incomes between white and Black Americans has increased significantly over the past century ‘from about $23,800 in 1970 to roughly $33,000 in 2018 (as measured in 2018 dollars)’” (Khan, 2024, p 8). 

Disparities are not shrinking, they are widening– not only in the workplace and in household income, but they also transcend into academic spaces. Now it is more important than ever to make people of color feel invited into academia from which they have been historically and systemically excluded. This includes the sustenance of DEI positions and efforts.

Marty Kotis “does not believe it’s the job of government or public universities to achieve that goal through quotas or promote a certain political view of diversity” (Killian, 2024).

Whatever the board of trustees’  personal beliefs on discrimination are, they cannot argue against the prevalence of systemic discrimination against people of color. Diversity efforts at the University of Chapel Hill at North Carolina should accurately represent the state’s population.

Diversity and Inclusion offices represent the University’s willingness to support the many different people in our student body, faculty, and staff. The University should heavily consider continuing with its current DEI funding efforts to support and represent the entirety of its students and others whom the loss of funding would impact.