May 30, 2023
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida announces the signing of SB 266 and other legislation on Monday. Public colleges in Florida will soon be prohibited from spending money on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs after Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a much-discussed piece of legislation into law on Monday. The new law also bans colleges from offering general-education courses that “distort significant historical events,” teach “identity politics,” or are “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.”
May 30, 2023
The bill, in its new form, would bar universities from having diversity offices, creating diversity offices, hiring employees to conduct DEI work or requiring any DEI training as a condition for being hired by or admitted to the university. All hiring practices must be “color-blind and sex-neutral.” The bill would also bar universities from asking job candidates to provide written answers about how they consider diversity in their work. If the bill becomes law, which is expected, Texas will join Florida in banning DEI activities at the state’s public universities.
May 9, 2023
This page contains information about Extension’s DEI Assessment, including background on the project, information on the status of the project, and frequently asked questions. Updates will occur as this project continues to move forward.
May 5, 2023
MONTGOMERY, Ala. —Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey on Friday announced she replaced her director of early childhood education over the use of a teacher training book, written by a nationally recognized education group, that the Republican governor denounced as teaching "woke concepts" because of language about inclusion and structural racism.
April 3, 2023
Studying abroad can be a transformative experience. However, first-generation college students may face additional challenges and feel that international experiences are out of their reach. A course in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences was created to help first-gen students achieve their travel goals. The one-week embedded course — ERM 499: Costa Rica Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resources — allows students to spend spring break exploring the ecosystems and culture of Costa Rica and learn how conservation and community are intertwined.
March 29, 2023
As the world of higher education awaits a U.S. Supreme Court decision expected to strike down race-conscious admissions policies, a new report from the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University is offering more evidence of what a post-affirmative action landscape might look like. Its findings are unambiguous: selective colleges and universities are likely to become less ethnically and racially diverse. And although certain admissions models using socioeconomic status (SES) allowed colleges to match or even slightly exceed current levels of diversity, they require systemic changes to admissions practices that are not considered realistic.
March 24, 2023
Explore where college diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are under attack. By Adrienne Lu, Jacquelyn Elias, Audrey Williams June, Kate Marijolovic, Julian Roberts-Grmela, and Eva Surovell The Chronicle is tracking legislation that would prohibit colleges from having diversity, equity, and inclusion offices or staff; ban mandatory diversity training; prohibit institutions from using diversity statements in hiring and promotion; or prohibit colleges from using race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions or employment. All four proscriptions were identified in model state legislation proposed this year by the Goldwater and Manhattan Institutes.
March 17, 2023
State lawmakers in 13 states have introduced at least 21 bills since December that aim to restrict colleges’ efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, a Chronicle analysis has found. While supporters argue that the measures are needed to push back against a “bureaucracy” that impedes intellectual diversity, critics warn that the measures could drastically curtail colleges’ efforts to recruit and retain students of color and place the institutions afoul of accreditation standards.
March 10, 2023
More women than ever are single, a new report says — and that has significant implications for the U.S. economy. Single women — who are postponing marriage or forgoing it altogether — are a growing economic force, accounting for a larger share of growth in the job market, homeownership and college degrees, according to an analysis of federal data.
March 6, 2023
If approved by Congress, the park at Ocmulgee Mounds would be co-managed by the Muscogee Nation—the tribe forcibly removed from their ancestral lands more than 180 years ago. Now, the Muscogee—one of the largest tribes in the United States—and local partners are leading an initiative to declare Ocmulgee Mounds the first national park in Georgia. If successful, Ocmulgee will also be the first national park co-managed by a removed tribe, one of the five forced from their lands in the summer of 1836 in a tragedy that history recalls as the Trail of Tears.
March 1, 2023
Newspapers across the United States have pulled Scott Adams’s long-running “Dilbert” comic strip after the cartoonist called Black Americans a “hate group” and said White people should “get the hell away from” them. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the USA Today network of hundreds of newspapers were among publications that announced they would stop publishing “Dilbert” after Adams’s racist rant on YouTube on Wednesday. Asked on Saturday how many newspapers still carried the strip — a workplace satire he created in 1989 — Adams told The Post: “By Monday, around zero.”
January 30, 2023
The College Board began piloting an elective Advanced Placement course in African American studies at 60 high schools across the country last fall. Designed to offer students an evidence-based introduction to African American studies, the course explores the “vital contributions and experiences of African Americans” through the multidisciplinary study of history, politics, geography, science, literature, the arts and humanities. Twelve days into the new year, the Florida Department of Education, which oversees the Advanced Placement program in the state, sent a letter to Brian Barnes, senior director of the College Board Florida Partnership, rejecting the proposal to offer the curriculum on the grounds that the course content is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”
January 17, 2023
Penn State Extension webinar covered different mushroom varieties and the supplies and equipment needed to grow at home.
December 9, 2022
The team discussed how they adapted the Coming Together curriculum for Penn State Extension, the reach and impacts of their work thus far, and their plans for taking it to a wider audience. Patreese Ingram, Justine Lindemann, and Cristy Schmidt formed the Pennsylvania team that attended the five-day CTRU training in 2019. Image courtesy of Southern Rural Development Center. Coming Together for Racial Understanding is an award-winning program of the national Cooperative Extension System (CES), designed to grow a community of Extension professionals well prepared to foster meaningful community conversations around race, thus leading to positive change. The program, which launched in 2018 under the leadership of the Southern Rural Development Center, is implemented first by training core state-level teams, who then provide training to a larger cohort within their home state’s CES system. In October 2019, Penn State’s Patreese Ingram, Justine Lindemann, and Cristy Schmidt attended the week-long Coming Together training as Pennsylvania’s core team. We caught up with them to find out more about their experience and plans going forward.
December 8, 2022
After more than a century of Black activists’ fight for college access, Black enrollment this past decade tumbled at an alarming rate. For nearly half a century, the story of Black students in the United States was a story of success. Black enrollment grew from 282,000 in 1966 to more than 2.5 million in 2010, the result of, among other things, civil-rights activists’ efforts to dismantle Jim Crow laws, colleges’ adoption of affirmative-action policies, and the federal government’s subsidizing of low-income students’ tuition.
November 23, 2022
Professor John Sanchez is an Associate Professor at Penn State’s Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. Sanchez teaches courses including “News and Media Ethics” and “American Indians in the Media.” His research and journalism focus on American Indian identity in the 21st century, and he has published articles for many notable news outlets, such as Communications Quarterly, Journal of American Indian Culture and Research, and Teacher Education Quarterly. He is a Freedom Forum Teaching Fellow and an Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)/Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication (ASJMC) Freedom Forum Journalism Leadership in Diversity Fellow and serves on the executive boards of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) American Indian Studies Consortium and the American Native Press Archives. Sanchez also serves as a consultant to the Board of Directors of the American Indian Policy and Media Initiative.
October 9, 2022
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Founded to educate the enslaving elite of this Southern state, allied for generations with the cause of white supremacy, roiled by racial tensions in recent years over the fate of a Confederate monument and treatment of Black faculty, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been thrust into an unlikely role in a legal clash that has reached the Supreme Court. It is making what could be the last stand for affirmative action in public university admissions.
September 19, 2022
GRAND FORKS, N.D. — The tribal leaders arrived at the University of North Dakota last month for a somber, secret task. For three days, they scoured storage rooms, recited prayers and hauled boxes. The move required closing hallways, pausing construction projects and turning off smoke detectors so that the burning of sage or sweet grass would not trigger an alarm. It was a first step in the long process of returning artifacts and the remains of Native American people from the university to tribes.
September 8, 2022
At a time when affirmative action is under legal attack, students like it, according to a survey by Niche. In the survey of 21,866 students from the high school Class of 2022, diversity of the college student body was important to 84 percent of students, and the diversity of the faculty and staff was important to 81 percent. Almost half of the students said that a diverse student body was “a must-have feature” on their campus. On another topic, more students visited a campus prior to enrolling—81 percent but still fewer than the 95 percent pre-pandemic. However, there is a significant disparity; 75 percent of low-income students visited a campus, but 93 percent of highest-income-quintile students did so. See the survey at https://www.niche.com/about/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/2022-Niche-Senior-Enrollment-Survey.pdf
August 31, 2022
If you have experienced such fears once, you’ll probably confront them again as your career advances, writes Angela Fowler, who recommends having a set of tools that will assist you in overcoming them. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2022/08/29/advice-overcoming-impostor-syndrome-higher-education-opinion?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=55c42f09a4-DiversityMatters_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-55c42f09a4-199818881&mc_cid=55c42f09a4&mc_eid=62681ceeb6
August 31, 2022
The Supreme Court on Monday decided to wade back into the nation’s decades-long debate over the consideration of race in college admissions by agreeing to hear two cases brought by an anti-affirmative-action group against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The group, Students for Fair Admissions, alleges both institutions discriminated against Asian American applicants in their admissions processes.
August 5, 2022
Support for Harvard and UNC’s position floods the Supreme Court. Arguments focus on the Constitution, the impact on Asian Americans and saving lives. It seems like everyone in higher education has something to say about affirmative action. To judge by the dozens of briefs submitted to the Supreme Court Monday, they strongly support it. Of course, there are also those who oppose affirmative action and hope the Supreme Court uses cases involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to end it. They had an earlier deadline, in May. To learn why, see this article on those 34 briefs. Far more briefs were submitted Monday (although the Supreme Court does not normally consider the volume of briefs in its decisions). But they represented individual colleges, individual scholars and associations arguing for Harvard and UNC.
July 29, 2022
Men trail women from grade school through college. That’s a real problem. Feyten, chancellor and president of Texas Woman’s University, acknowledges the large disparities between men and women in higher education. The difference in the share of bachelor’s degrees going to women and men is in fact wider today than it was in 1972, when Title IX was passed — but in the opposite direction. Certainly, many people back then saw the gender gap as a crisis big enough to justify new legislation and organizing. As well as Title IX, the 1970s saw the passage of the Women’s Education Equity Act, mostly aimed at elementary and secondary schools, and the founding of the National Coalition for Women & Girls in Education.
June 20, 2022
Insider asked Black literary and historical experts to share their favorite works of journalism on race by Black authors. Here are the top pieces they recommended everyone read to better understand the quest for Black liberation in America: This article was originally published in February 2021.
June 3, 2022
Students are told that dolls aren’t just for girls, and that there are no ‘boy colors’ or ‘girl colors’ . Some lessons are direct: “Who can describe what transgender means?” In other classes, the discussion is more subtle: “Remember, families can come in all shapes and sizes!” Sometimes teachers simply shift their language to reflect gender diversity that may be in the room. Instead of “Good morning, boys and girls!” the teacher might say, “Good morning, scholars!” In Florida and several others states, educators are restricted in teaching about gender identity, but elsewhere, teachers are embracing the topic as the number of transgender and gender nonbinary children rises.
May 24, 2022
Higher Ed Leaders Prepare For Supreme Court Potentially Overturning Use Of Affirmative Action In College Admissions The Boston Globe (5/22) reported higher education leaders, “alarmed that the US Supreme Court could strike down affirmative action next year,” have started to discuss how they can “continue diversifying elite college campuses without using race as a factor in admissions.” As they fear “such a decision could reverse decades of effort to break down systemic barriers blocking marginalized groups from attending elite institutions, higher education leaders have reaffirmed their commitment to diversity.” National Association for College Admission Counseling CEO Angel Pérez told the Globe, “It’s not that this is going to be in lieu of race, but I think colleges will still have an opportunity to diversify their funnels. A lot of it starts with, how do you get students to even apply and come to the door?” He explained that “using these kinds of strategies have helped public institutions in California, which have not been allowed to consider race since 1996, when voters there passed a ballot measure that effectively outlawed affirmative action."
May 9, 2022
Executive Summary The moment they earn their bachelor’s degrees, black college graduates owe $7,400 more on average than their white peers ($23,400 versus $16,000, including non-borrowers in the averages. But over the next few years, the black-white debt gap more than triples to a whopping $25,000. Differences in interest accrual and graduate school borrowing lead to black graduates holding nearly $53,000 in student loan debt four years after graduation—almost twice as much as their white counterparts.
May 2, 2022
Americans do not favor the consideration of race, ethnicity or gender in college admissions decisions. A new Pew Research Center report found that 74 percent think race and ethnicity should not be considered in admissions decisions. For gender, 82 percent think it shouldn’t be considered. The results extend to every racial group and to Democrats as well as Republicans.
April 11, 2022
At a table in Fredericksburg, Va., surrounded by loved ones, Michael W. Twitty will celebrate Passover this year with a Seder plate that speaks directly to his identity. Mr. Twitty, an African American food historian and author, will make his haroseth, a dish that symbolizes the mortar Israelites used while they were enslaved by Egyptians, with pecans and molasses. The molasses represents the sugar cane that was central to the American slave trade, and the pecans represent African American resilience and celebration in the South.
March 10, 2022
Decades of federal housing discrimination did not only depress home values, lower job opportunities and spur poverty in communities deemed undesirable because of race. It’s why 45 million Americans are breathing dirtier air today, according to a landmark study released Wednesday. The practice known as redlining was outlawed more than a half-century ago, but it continues to impact people who live in neighborhoods that government mortgage officers shunned for 30 years because people of color and immigrants lived in them.
