UT chancellor’s decision to fund pride center criticized
State lawmakers involved in a decision to strip funding from the University of Tennessee’s diversity office last year, including a Republican gubernatorial candidate, are criticizing new Chancellor Beverly Davenport for her decision to once again fund the school’s LGBT pride center.
“It is disappointing that the new Chancellor has decided to ignore the clear intent and legitimate concerns of the Tennessee Legislature, which defunded the [Office for Diversity and Inclusion] after it became clear that taxpayer funds were being used to promote a radical agenda that did not reflect the values of the State and our citizens,” gubernatorial candidate and state Sen. Mae Beavers, R-Mount Juliet, said in a recent news release.
The release states inaccurately that Davenport has announced plans to reinstate a diversity office at UT.
It follows comments Davenport made after a UT board of trustees meeting last week, saying she plans to hire a director for the UT pride center and spend some of the money the Legislature diverted in 2016 from the Office for Diversity and Inclusion to fund the center.
For the past year, the center has been paid for by private funds and largely run by students after lawmakers redirected the $445,882 in funding for the office to minority engineering scholarships.
In an email Tuesday, University of Tennessee spokeswoman Karen Simsen affirmed that Davenport sees the pride center as part of the student support services that ensure all students are able to succeed.
“To succeed in college, students must feel welcome; they must feel like they belong,” Simsen said. “That’s why student engagement and student involvement are a central focus from the start. Along with a position to lead the pride center, Chancellor Davenport plans to invest funds for education and training for Title IX and the prevention of sexual assault.”
HOW WILL UT
SPEND $445,882?
Beavers, in her release, wrote that Davenport plans to reinstate the diversity office, but Davenport hasn’t said either way whether there will be a diversity office. In her comments last week, she only said spending of the $445,882 that was diverted in a onetime move last year will take place in the Division of Student Life, which is a separate entity.
“The money will be spent on student success initiatives and programs that support an environment where all students can feel welcome and safe,” Simsen said Tuesday, responding to questions seeking clarification as to how the money will be spent and whether there will be a diversity office.
She did not offer any details on how much will be spent in the pride center versus other areas and said only that Davenport has spent her first five months at UT “engaging with many individuals and groups to gain a better understanding of the campus community.”
SEARCH BEGINS THIS SUMMER
UT is not now advertising for a chief diversity officer, but it will conduct a national search this summer for a fulltime director of the pride center.
“Having a pride center is an integral part of the university’s overall commitment to support student inclusion and success,” said Wendy Bach, associate professor of law at the UT College of Law and chairwoman of the Pride Center Working Group, a group of the Faculty Senate formed last year to look at the longterm viability of the UT Pride Center. “It’s great.”
Bach applauded Davenport’s decision and said it will help UT fall in line with the practices of peer and aspirational institutions across the U.S.
BEAVERS’ OPPOSITION
Beavers, meanwhile, listed several reasons why she does not support funding a pride center, linking the center to the student-run Sex Week as well as the diversity office’s promotion of genderneutral pronouns and inclusive holiday parties that did not mention Santa Claus or Christmas.
Reached Tuesday, Beavers said she was in a meeting and asked a reporter to call back later but did not respond to subsequent requests for comment.
Sex Week is a week of student-run events around sex education that has drawn the ire of some lawmakers in the past for its programming. It is run by the Sexual Empowerment and Awareness organization and funded by student programming fees, not the diversity office or pride center.
The promotion of gender-neutral pronouns and inclusive holiday parties on the website of the former diversity office played a role in lawmakers moving to defund the office, which also oversaw the pride center before last year.
Beavers also said in her release that conservative students on UT’s campus are “being bullied into silence and submission by professors and administrators who see any opinion that contradicts their own liberal viewpoints as being unworthy of protection.”
Davenport responded by saying the university is committed to protecting the First Amendment.
“We know that teaching and learning happen well beyond our classrooms and that students learn the most when they are exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints,” Simsen said in her email.
OTHER LAWMAKERS’ VIEWS
State Sen. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, a member of the Senate Education Committee and co-sponsor of last year’s bill to redirect diversity funds, also said this week he was “very disappointed” with the chancellor’s decision to fund a pride center but that he was still waiting to see how her actions would play out.
“Diversity is for black, white, Asian, Latino, male, female,” Hensley said. “We do need a diversity of those things, but when we get into every small group getting some special treatment, no, I don’t think we should spend money on that. Everybody should be treated equal in college. I’m a firm believer in that.”
State Rep. Martin Daniel, R-Knoxville, who has been a particularly outspoken critic of UT, said he wanted to see specific objectives laid out for the pride center, otherwise, “I would think it would be a waste of money — a waste of taxpayer money, state money and tuition money.”
“It sounds like a feel-good program,” Daniel said. “How are they going to measure the success or failure of the program?”