The University of Kentucky is closing down its Office of Institutional Diversity, making it the latest of several large public universities to change its tune on the contentious diversity, inclusion, and equity offices. 

“We share the value that out of many people, we are one community,” the university’s president, Eli Capilouto, announced Tuesday, the Lexington Herald Leader reports. “We share a promise with Kentucky that all who turn to us should have the same opportunity to live a healthy, long life or cross that stage.

“But we’ve also listened to policymakers and heard many of their questions about whether we appear partisan or political on the issues of our day and, as a result, narrowly interpret things solely through the lens of identity,” he said. “In so doing, the concern is that we either intentionally or unintentionally limit discourse.”

The president, who had reportedly heard concerns from legislators and others in recent months about DEI — also said the school will remove mandatory diversity training and that employees won’t have to write diversity statements during the hiring process. The school will replace the diversity office with a community relations office, and will no longer make statements surrounding political topics, the Leader notes. 

The school joins a growing list of colleges and universities banning the offices themselves or being forced to by state law. This month, UNC Charlotte announced that it was changing its DEI initiatives, including shutting down three DEI offices, and the University of Mississippi announced on Friday that it was disbanding its Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. 

An increasing number of states have been banning DEI offices at public universities after the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision banning affirmative action put national attention on the issue of race-based initiatives and whether they are constitutional.

Much of the state-level legislation is drafted after model legislation produced by the Goldwater Institute and the Manhattan Institute, as the Sun has reported, which aims to shut down DEI offices as well as ensure that other university operations aren’t affected by race-based discrimination. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s college DEI legislation tracker indicates that since 2023, across state legislatures and Congress, 85 anti-DEI bills have been introduced — 28 have final legislative approval or have already become law, and 53 have been tabled or haven’t passed. 

While Kentucky’s legislature failed to pass bills earlier this year that would have targeted DEI, the topic is expected to emerge again in the coming months. 

“We will get a chance to hear from the university and find out more details on what they are doing at our next Interim Joint Committee on Education meeting in September, when the topic of DEI will be on the agenda,” a Republican state senator, Mike Wilson, said, according to the Kentucky Lantern. He said the university announcement shutting down its diversity office is a “positive step in the right direction” and that he hoped other colleges would follow suit.

At Kentucky, the Office of Institutional Diversity’s mission, before it was shut down, had been to “enhance the diversity and inclusivity” of the university and recruit “an increasingly diverse population of faculty, administrators, staff, and students,” its website notes.