In Utah, university staffers are working to keep Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programming alive despite a new state law banning it.
To do this, they’re hoping to market DEI differently and slip it into academics, where there’s less red tape.
“It’s complicated,” explained University of Utah Education Coordinator Lucas Alvarez while speaking with Accuracy in Media’s undercover investigator on hidden camera.
“I mean, like, the programs that we’re doing, I think technically we’re still allowed to do them but they have to be marketed a certain way.”
He further described “campus partners,” such as faculty, who “are wanting to help kind of do the strategic work.”
They’re able to do this “because they have academic freedom,” he added.
But when Alvarez was confronted by AIM President Adam Guillette in person with footage of his own statements, he refused to comment.
“Im not gonna comment,” he repeated several times.
It was a different story when Guillette caught up with Alvarez’s boss, however.
University of Utah Director of the Center for Community and Cultural Engagement, LeiLoni McLaughlin, said Alvarez’s statements on shifting DEI programming and just marketing it differently were false.
She also sought to clarify his comments about faculty partners. “I think what he was referring to was the professors having academic freedom to do research and speak from their expertise in the field that they’ve studied,” McLaughlin said.
She explained that due to the new law, “every university has had to shift.” But she claimed this isn’t solely a marketing change.
Last year, Utah followed the lead of many other red states, signing into law a ban on DEI in public colleges and universities, K-12 schools, and state offices.
Clearly, someone isn’t telling the truth about DEI at the University of Utah. And if Alvarez’s comments are correct, woke ideology is still being pushed in the notoriously conservative state, despite a law being passed against it.
If university officials are willing to do this in red states, there should be no doubt it’s happening all over the country.
AIM is on the ground to make sure your tax dollars aren’t going to illegal DEI. And when we find clear defiance of the law, we expose it.
Go to SaveUtahSchools.com, where you can send one message that will go directly to the university’s trustees.
Let them know that radical administrators shouldn’t be devising strategies to undermine laws and support their divisive ideology.
Also consider making a tax-deductible contribution to AIM to support our investigative work.
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