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North Carolina’s four-year public universities can no longer have in their general education requirements any mandated “course credits related to diversity, equity and inclusion,” the University of North Carolina system’s general counsel ordered last week in a memo to campus chancellors.
The UNC system includes 16 institutions with and without the UNC moniker, plus a specialized high school. The memo said the order was effective immediately, despite coming well into the spring semester. It also didn’t define what DEI means, and it’s unclear how the universities will carry it out.
“Faculty governance at the various campuses weren’t consulted,” said Beth Moracco, chair of the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill. She said, “I’ve heard from many faculty, and I would describe it as: We’re stunned.”
Moracco said curricular requirements have “traditionally been the domain of faculty” and “pulling one piece of a curriculum out also jeopardizes the rest.”
Andrew Tripp, the UNC system’s senior vice president for legal affairs and general counsel, wrote to chancellors that the change is an effort to comply with President Donald Trump’s Jan. 21 anti-DEI executive order. Tripp noted that the executive order says federal agencies must require each contractor or grant recipient, such as a university, “to certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws.” Tripp wrote that “interpretation of what constitutes compliance with these requirements will largely be left to the federal agencies.”
He noted further outstanding questions about what Trump’s order means, but wrote that “even though some form of additional federal guidance is expected, and the law in this area remains unsettled, the risk of jeopardizing over $1.4B in critical federal research funding [the figure from fiscal year 2023–24] is simply too great to defer action.”
Moracco said, “A fundamental challenge, both with the executive order and with this memo,” is they don’t specify how DEI “is defined, operationalized or even measured.” She said, “It’s hard to know what you need to change,” adding that there’s danger of “overcompliance.”
UNC Asheville is interpreting the memo as ending that university’s requirement that students take two “diversity-intensive courses,” spokesman Brian Hart said. He provided lists of over 150 courses that fulfilled that requirement, including Philosophy of Sex and Gender but also Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and the History of Mathematics.
Beyond general education requirements, the memo also said there can’t be “major-specific requirements” for credits related to DEI, but it allows chancellors to approve “tailored waivers” to keep these requirements in place. Hart said UNC Asheville is still working with the UNC system office on how to adhere to this section.
The UNC system was backtracking on DEI even before Trump was re-elected. In May, the UNC Board of Governors repealed the system’s DEI policy.
