OREM — Utah Valley University has abruptly shut a center created last year in response to the 2024 state law dismantling diversity initiatives at Utah’s public universities.
The Center for Intercultural Engagement was created to comply with HB261, which mandated an end to efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at Utah universities, according to the UVU Review, the university’s student newspaper. Operations of Multicultural Student Services, the Women’s Success Center and LGBTQ Student Services, while in revamped form, had been folded into the center per last year’s move, but now the center itself has been axed.
A statement Tuesday from the Orem-based university cited, in part, “intense legislative oversight.” Students launched an online petition to voice their displeasure with the center’s elimination, announced to the UVU community last Friday, April 11. “These are not exclusionary programs, and they do not cause harm, but the sudden removal of them and all of the dedicated staff who have given years of their lives to these initiatives will cause irreparable harm!” reads a statement from one of the 1,305 petition signers as of Tuesday afternoon.
Additionally, the university announced elimination of an unspecified number of jobs in academics and administration to comply with HB265, the measure approved by Utah lawmakers earlier this year mandating spending cuts by Utah’s universities. UVU serves nearly 47,000 students, according to its website.
“Thanks to the proactive hiring freeze we implemented last fall and careful personnel management, nearly one-third of the eliminated positions are currently vacant or are being discontinued following retirements or contract expirations. The total number of affected roles represents less than 2% of UVU’s full-time workforce,” the university said in a statement.
UVU is required to cut $8.9 million from its instructional budget, per HB265, part of $60.45 million in all that eight post-secondary institutions in Utah will have to trim. The funds cut can be reinvested elsewhere, part of a broader push to get universities to invest funds to better meet state workforce demands, and UVU plans to bolster its focus on “workforce alignment and timely student completion.”
The university statement didn’t delve deeply into details of the elimination of the Center for Intercultural Engagement, but UVU isn’t alone in shuttering or revamping operations that had been geared to minority, female and LGBTQ students due to HB261. Weber State University in Ogden last year closed several “identity-based centers” geared to Black, Latino and LGBTQ students, among others, as did the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Since the creation of the center last year, UVU “has made a good faith effort to operate the Center for Intercultural Engagement within the confines of the law. However, given the required budget allocations, as well as the strict enforcement of state law and intense legislative oversight, it became clear that the center could not meet the students’ needs in a meaningful way,” the university said. “We are reallocating resources to a variety of efforts to serve all students and magnify the impact focusing on student success.”
More specifically, the university said it would put a focus on its Student Success Center, tasked with helping university students contend with everything from financial aid to campus life. “We empower Wolverines to flourish academically and achieve exceptional results in the classroom and the broader community,” its website reads.
HB261 called for the dismantling of diversity initiatives at Utah’s public colleges, public schools and other government entities. Such initiatives aim at aiding traditionally marginalized groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, but HB261 proponents say all people in need, regardless of personal identifiers, should be able to tap into them. While UVU’s identity centers were eliminated to comply with HB261, the university still provides “cultural education, celebration, engagement and awareness,” as permitted by law, the university said.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
