Trevon Straughter recounted the moment he found out his job was being eliminated. It was Friday, March 21. He was working from home and had just picked up some Southern Kitchen for lunch. Then he got the feeling that he should check his email quickly before returning to work.
Straughter had been working as a program and event specialist in VCU’s Division of Inclusive Excellence, which focused on initiatives of diversity and inclusion.
He saw an email from Alison Miller, Virginia Commonwealth University’s chief human resources officer, sent at 2:43 p.m. which said, “the university must follow federal and state laws regarding discrimination and perceived discrimination.”
The email was sent the same afternoon VCU’s Board of Visitors voted to dissolve Straughter’s department to comply with a directive from President Donald Trump’s administration to end “illegal” DEI initiatives.
The vote was 11–4; all four no votes came from men of color.
“We recognize the significant impact this change will have on you,” the email from Miller stated. “The university will be developing plans about transitioning programs and personnel to other areas where appropriate.”
Full-time staff members were told there’d be a meeting with HR the following week to discuss next steps.
When he read the message, Straughter wasn’t totally surprised by the news: He and his colleagues had been asking senior leadership for a contingency plan for this scenario for months, to no avail. He told VPM News it was also something he brought up when interviewing for the position in 2024.
“That was one of the first things that I asked folks who were interviewing me,” Straughter said. “‘What are our plans to be sustainable?’”
Straughter has been very committed to VCU’s diversity mission since he was an undergraduate student on campus a decade ago — and in the multiple university positions he’s held since then.
He said friends refer to him as “Mr. VCU” because they’ve seen his image on- and off-campus so many times: in the airport, in the University Student Commons building and on the School of Education building.
“I am not a small fish at VCU,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of great work, and I’ve given a lot to VCU.”
But he still experienced a sense of immediate shock and went into a “cone of silence” as friends and colleagues reached out with questions about what the decision meant for him. He didn’t want to speak with anyone yet, because he didn’t have answers.
“It’s different when it actually takes place and you realize, ‘OK, while everyone else will go to work on Monday to their normal jobs, I will not be going to my normal job,’” Straughter said.
That Friday afternoon, his team convened a meeting in which he said colleagues just “held each other close” and began to process what had just happened to over a year’s worth of work.
‘It’s like erasure’
While Faye Belgrave said she never wanted to be an administrator, she said she took on the role of chief diversity officer for the university to run the Division of Inclusive Excellence in October 2023 because she wanted to make a difference.
While she’d worked as a psychology professor and researcher for most of her career, Belgrave’s also been a fierce advocate for diversity and inclusion–related initiatives at VCU.
The office included seven full-time staff as well as one part-time employee, a couple of faculty advisers, a handful of student fellows and a couple of work-study students according to Belgrave.
Under her direction, the bulk of the office’s work involved holding workshops and discussions with staff and students about how to be more inclusive, and about how to handle conflict, she said.
The office had been convening half-day workshops for faculty and staff in partnership with the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities — to better equip them to facilitate discussions among colleagues across different perspectives and ideologies. The goal of this program was to ultimately have a trained facilitator in every department across the university, Belgrave said.
Another project involved training students to facilitate dialogue sessions with their peers about a variety of topics, like current events or cultural differences.
They’d held educational seminars open to the entire university community, including a series last year about antisemitism and anti-Palestinian sentiments, amid the ongoing campus protests over the war in Gaza.
The office was also planning to administer a campus climate survey this fall to assess staff and students’ feelings of respect, belonging and support.
“There’s nothing we did that discriminates,” Belgrave said.
The resolution dissolving her office cited an executive order and related federal guidance from the Trump administration arguing that DEI initiatives have created hostile environments for students of particular races, and are therefore discriminatory.
However, the US Department of Education’s guidance also states that educational programs and cultural events are permissible under federal law, as long as they’re not limited to students of one particular race.
Now, the future of these programs at VCU remains uncertain. Some scheduled events and trainings were canceled, Belgrave said. As a result, Straughter told VPM News, some vendors lost out on income they’d been counting on.
Student fellows who’d been trained to organize dialogues were just getting ready to start holding sessions, Belgrave said, and have been waiting to hear about next steps for their work.
There’s only one program that Belgrave and Straughter are aware of that did continue as planned: an awards ceremony for members of VCU’s community dedicated to creating an inclusive atmosphere on campus.
Belgrave said she had one brief conversation with university leadership following the office’s dissolution to discuss possible next steps for the existing programming. But a transition meeting she was supposed to have with senior administrators was canceled — and hasn’t been rescheduled.
“Just because our office is no longer there doesn't mean we could not continue to do the work,” Belgrave said. “But when the office was dissolved, there was no structure. I was not given any structure to do anything.”
Michael Porter, associate vice president for public relations at VCU, did not answer VPM News’ questions about what programming from the former Division of Inclusive Excellence would continue or cease, only stating that “VCU administrators continue to have discussions about how the Campus Climate Survey may be implemented in the future.”
Porter did confirm that immediately following the BOV vote to dissolve the office on March 21, it “ceased to exist and the website was removed. VCU Technology Services maintains the archive of deactivated sites following Library of Virginia standards.”
With the website’s deletion, Belgrave said it feels like all of that work never existed: “It’s like erasure.”
‘This has been hurtful’
During a meeting with VCU HR the Monday after the dissolution, Straughter said staff were told the university would be looking for other vacant positions for possible reassignment — or employees could choose to leave and take severance pay (otherwise known as workforce reduction).
“They didn't really want to do workforce reduction,” Straughter said. “That was not really the goal, but to be able to do reassignments for all of us.”
He said staff were still mourning the loss of their roles during that Monday meeting — and that they requested time and resources to process what had occurred three days prior. They were ultimately offered two weeks of administrative leave, effective March 31, while the university explored other potential positions.
Straughter said the expressed goal, according to an email from HR, was for staff to move into those new positions by mid-April.
“It just felt like everything was moving very fast,” Straughter said. “Everything was on a timeline: we need to get these things done within the next two weeks.”
When HR came back to staff members with further details about reassignments in early April, Straughter said some of his colleagues were only presented with one job option — and with significant pay cuts.
His situation was a bit different: Straughter was offered a job as an outreach specialist in the university’s technology services department with a salary of $53,300 — $300 more than his Division of Inclusive Excellence role.
Straughter was informed of the position on April 7. He was initially given until April 10 to decide, though he was able to get an extension until April 14 to ensure he’d have time to get questions answered before making a choice.
Ultimately, he said the dismantling of his office — along with concerns about a lack of upward mobility in the reassigned role — led to Straughter taking a break and a severance package from VCU.
The process left him feeling disrespected.
“I would just be doing a disservice to myself to continue with VCU at this current time,” Straughter told VPM News. “For me, this has been hurtful. It's been a hurtful process. We felt very rushed.”
Straughter needs time to grieve before even considering next career steps. This time of year is already a hard time for him: He lost his mother to stage three lung cancer in spring 2017, and said the loss of his work feels similarly heavy.
“It’s been hard to not put those two things together and feel the weight of both of them at the same time,” Straughter said.
He’s had to step away from alumni groups he’s been deeply involved with, like the Black Alumni Council and Rams for P.R.I.D.E., because he was “in a lot of celebratory spaces there, and it’s hard to celebrate right now when you know what has happened.”
But for him to consider working at VCU now, he said the university would need to atone and reckon with its identity and values.
“Who are you at the end of the day?” Straughter questioned. He pointed to VCU’s tagline in recent years, “Uncommon VCU.”
“If it is that we are uncommon, then we should be that,” he said. “Be uncommon in your approach. Be uncommon in how you handle these things that are happening.”
Straughter said he’d like to see VCU stand up to the Trump administration, an uncommon approach from Virginia’s public colleges amid recent actions.
As of mid-April, a handful of Virginia schools — including one four-year public institution — signed onto a letter condemning the administration’s actions as “unprecedented government overreach" and “political interference.”
“At some point, you need to take a stand,” Straughter said. “You need to take a stance on something, because as people say, if you stand for everything, what do you actually believe in? We can’t tout that we’re a school of diversity, equity and inclusion … and then we are canceling out programs. It’s contradictory to the message and the mission. And anyone can see that.”
VPM News asked VCU if other options were presented to staff members; Porter said in a statement that “it would be inappropriate to discuss personnel matters.”
‘I was silenced’
A few weeks after VCU’s Board of Visitors voted to dissolve the Division of Inclusive Excellence, Belgrave was deciding which of her awards and mementos to pack up and take home with her — and which to keep in the office for the time being.
“Just so when I move out, people don’t assume that I’m gone,” Belgrave said.
Belgrave will return to her prior work as a tenured psychology faculty member, which she says is less stressful than the inclusivity work she’s been doing; research has cited the tremendous mental and physical stressors placed on chief diversity officers.
“But with that reduction in stress comes the disappointment and the grief and the sadness that what I've stood for all of my career has really been dissolved,” Belgrave said.
Belgrave has had a decorated career as an internationally recognized researcher – publishing countless research papers and several books including African American Psychology, now in its fourth edition.
Over the last two years, she’s been working on edits for the fifth edition, which is slated to come out in August. This work “kept me grounded,” she said, especially among recent anti-DEI rhetoric across the country.
She helped push for a racial literacy course requirement at the university that the BOV ultimately voted down last year. According to Belgrave, she’s stayed at VCU since the late 1990s because she felt the university was committed to diversity and inclusion.
That’s why she felt the board’s March decision to do away with the office she worked so carefully to build up was cold and callous. Belgrave was not allowed to speak with the board about her office’s work immediately before they voted to dissolve it.
Prior to the closed-session discussion, she said Rector Todd Haymore identified several VCU administrators who should stay in the room during the conversation — and her name wasn’t one of them. (The board voted on the resolution shortly after exiting closed session.)
As a Black woman who is often “a minority of one” in meetings, she said the experience left her feeling disrespected and excluded.
“No matter what your opinion, everybody should have an opportunity to have a voice,” Belgrave said. “And I was not given a voice. I was silenced.”
VPM News asked VCU and Haymore why Belgrave wasn’t brought into the closed session.
In an email to VPM News, Haymore said: “The Board of Visitors was well aware of Dr. Belgrave’s team’s work prior to the March meeting where the Division of Inclusive Excellence was discussed. She had previously shared her team’s work with the board, including a formal presentation at the board’s retreat in October 2024, and separately with individual members. The board followed its practice regarding employees, whose jobs are being discussed, do not attend closed sessions that concern them.”
‘It’s hard to even process’
On a quiet weekday afternoon, Stephanie Rizzi works out of the VCU office suite that she used to share with Belgrave, Straughter and others. She still has a list of “big goals” on a dry-erase board in her office.
In the now-dissolved Division of Inclusive Excellence office space, Rizzi is the last person standing. She was given the option of remaining in her current office or relocating. While she chose to stay put, she said it’s been lonely being away from her former colleagues.
Rizzi’s job and salary are unchanged, because her work as Project Gabriel’s director is tied to a state mandate for Virginia’s five oldest public colleges and universities — to identify and memorialize the enslaved individuals who were forced to labor for the institutions.
While her role is largely different from the roles of her former colleagues, she did interact and engage with the Inclusive Excellence office on a daily basis.
“It’s not just the physical absence of people, but the absence of the work that has created some grief,” Rizzi said.
She’s deeply disappointed that the work she knows was happening got cast by the government and VCU as though it was engaging in work that wasn’t right.
“And I think that’s the thing that frustrates me the most, is that we were working to make things better, and then this narrative is coming out that we’re discriminating,” Rizzi said. “It’s hard to even process.”
Rizzi knows what discrimination looks and feels like: As a VCU student in the 1980s, she walked into The Commonwealth Times' office one day to express interest in writing for the student-run paper.
“They were all white, and they all looked at me as though I said nothing,” Rizzi said. “They didn’t respond to me. And then I just turned around and walked out and never thought about it again.”
She said while she knows the environment there has gotten better over the years, Rizzi said the Division of Inclusive Excellence was dedicated to making the entire VCU campus more inclusive for everyone.
“People think discrimination doesn’t exist anymore,” she said, “and that’s just not true at all.”
