In December 2023, Gov. Kevin Stitt issued an executive order seeking to downsize or eliminate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices and bureaucracy at Oklahoma colleges and prevent colleges from engaging in illegal discrimination.

Officials at Oklahoma State University have claimed the college has complied with that order.

But a new report, “How Higher Ed is Rebranding DEI Departments,” says OSU officials simply relabeled the university’s DEI office without making any substantive changes.

The report was released by the Legal Insurrection Foundation, a free-speech organization that operates CriticalRace.org, a site that catalogs DEI activity at more than 700 institutions of higher education.

“Over the last year and a half, several states have taken action against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) on college campuses. But banning something never results in its eradication. A year ago, we wrote about this problem—that DEI isn’t going away, it’s just going underground,” the report stated. “Whether campuses are renaming their DEI offices, or moving administrators into other departments to do the same work, DEI still exists.”

The report focused on colleges in 11 states that have passed laws or implemented executive orders that ban or restrict DEI programs at state universities.

“Out of the 26 Universities we have evaluated in states where DEI laws have been passed, 10 claim to have eliminated their DEI offices (and related activities) and have replaced them with new offices that have similar programming and/or personnel,” the report stated.

Oklahoma State University was among the schools the report identified as having made only cosmetic name changes to DEI programming.

At Oklahoma State University, the Office of Institutional Diversity was renamed the Division of Access and Community Impact after Stitt issued his executive order.

OSU officials did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Emails obtained through an open-records request indicate a similar pattern occurred at the University of Oklahoma. OU emails showed university officials repeatedly emphasized renaming DEI programs to comply with Stitt’s executive order.

On Dec. 13, 2023, Belinda Hyppolite, OU’s vice president of diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer, emailed numerous school officials, stating that OU “will work to realign to ensure we can continue to support this campus community. No one is losing their jobs …”

Also on Dec. 13, 2023, David Surratt, the vice president for student affairs and dean of students, sent a letter to the student affairs leadership team, stating in text that was both bolded and underlined saying that “there are no plans to terminate any staff.”

The OU emails were obtained through an open-records request filed by the American Accountability Foundation. The organization Do No Harm later provided the email records to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.

In reports provided to the state to demonstrate compliance with Stitt’s executive order, most colleges in Oklahoma claimed to have no DEI offices, personnel or programming and few schools reported making any substantive changes as a result of the executive order, including officials at both OU and OSU. 

[For more stories about higher education in Oklahoma, visit AimHigherOK.com.]