Virginia Commonwealth University has hired an outside firm to review its compliance with a federal mandate to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. That’s in addition to the university’s own review, which has resulted in the shuttering and changing of multiple programs and some job reassignments or layoffs.
Provost Fotis Sotiropoulos said the university hired Cozen O’Connor because federal guidance isn’t clear about which programs are allowed — and said the firm will assist in identifying programs “that either illegally discriminate or are perceived to be illegally discriminating.”
According to Mike Porter, associate vice president of public relations, the consultants will “review and assist VCU in resolving 53 items already identified by the university” as well as items cleared by the university in its own review of staff, scholarships, programs and more.
The timeline for completion has yet to be determined, Porter told VPM News. But VCU has already begun making changes to programs and staff roles.
According to the board presentation, VCU’s own internal review identified seven scholarships that are undergoing changes as a result of the probe — though they were not identified, and the names were not provided to VPM News upon request.
A previously-required diversity statement for new faculty hires was eliminated along with a couple of questions used in the hiring process that Sotiropoulos said “were intended to elicit a response about the candidate’s diversity impact in the workplace.”
The Recruitment Inclusive Champion program was also disbanded; according to responses the university submitted to SCHEV last fall as part of a survey about DEI staff and expenditures, the program helped search committees attract and retain a diverse pool of talented candidates.
Faye Belgrave, VCU’s former chief diversity officer, told VPM News the Recruitment Inclusive Champion program wasn’t about racial preference but instead about being inclusive of perspectives on internal search committees by considering various aspects of identity like gender as well as differing levels of seniority.
“Because you don't want all of any one group to be on the search committee,” Belgrave said. “It just makes sense, because people bring different lived experiences.”
She added it was something the university previously touted and was proud of — and to see it eliminated so suddenly without much thought or public discussion felt like “blind compliance” to her. Belgrave further compared it to the Stanford Prison Experiment, which highlighted the powerful influence of social situations on human behavior.
“These are classic studies on compliance. And this is what this is like,” Belgrave said. “I feel VCU is just blindly, obsessively complying without truly understanding that you're compliant to things that may even be illegal.”
The university also conducted its own internal review of staff by identifying 60 people involved somehow in DEI-related work. As part of this probe, presented at the May 9 meeting, 13 positions were eliminated: 9 people have accepted reassignments, and 4 have left the university.
Meredith Weiss, a senior vice president who oversees VCU human resources, said during the meeting some of those reassigned staff will see a salary increase; others will see salary reductions.
Trevon Straughter, who previously spoke with VPM News, was among those who decided to leave the university after his office’s dissolution.
Porter told VPM News that its internal staffing probe began last November at the request of SCHEV. Belgrave and VCU HR were the ones who compiled the data and information.
“I remember thinking, ‘Why are we giving them the ammunition to kill us?’” Belgrave said.
The SCHEV survey was requested by George Mason University President Gregory Washington during a Council of Presidents meeting last fall in an attempt to take an unbiased look at universities’ DEI efforts and expenditures. The request was prior to both the 2024 election and anti-DEI directives from President Donald Trump’s administration.
According to SCHEV director A. Scott Fleming, the agency doesn’t have any current plans to publish the results of the survey, which was administered to all public Virginia institutions.
“We were responding to a moment in time when the policy environment was different and the results might have been more relevant,” Fleming told VPM News. “The policy environment in Washington quickly made it apparent that anything that we produced was going to be outdated.”
‘I don’t want to sit here and act like I’m OK’
VCU has been quick to conform with changing state and federal guidelines: Following a Trump administration directive to get rid of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, state Education Secretary Aimee Guidera in early March directed Virginia’s college presidents and board members to end any practice that contained racial preference.
By the end of that month, VCU’s Board of Visitors voted to dissolve its Division of Inclusive Excellence. The resolution wasn’t on the agenda, nor was it posted online ahead of the vote. Gurpreet “P2” Sandhu — a Youngkin appointee who was among the four votes against the dissolution — recently criticized the speed with which the board was asked to vote on the measure.
“Rather than trying to make a vote in an uninformed manner at the last minute, we should have punted the vote to this month,” Sandhu said on May 9.
Tyrone Nelson, a Ralph Northam appointee who also voted no, said considering how everything has unfolded, he probably would’ve resigned if his term didn’t end soon.
“I don’t want to sit here and act like I’m OK,” he said. “It’s wrong. It’s going to strip the core of the university, I don’t care what y’all say.”
Nelson said students will stop choosing to attend VCU if they feel like it’s not committed to the acceptance of diversity.
“People also want to know, at the end of the day, ‘do you care enough about me to fight for me … and not just fold at the hand of some threat that comes from a particular place?’” Nelson said to university leadership on May 9. “I'm saying this as fact, not as opinion.”
After the March vote to dissolve the Division of Inclusive Excellence, Nelson told VPM News that he questioned how much of the decision was driven by state policy, not federal policy.
“We wouldn’t be in this situation if we didn’t have a governor co-signing on this,” he said at the time.
During the May 9 meeting, VCU Rector Todd Haymore told the board it was “one of the handful of times we were reacting to things,” because he said the university was still getting advice and guidance from state officials — including Attorney General Jason Miyares’ office — the morning of the vote on March 21.
“I won’t apologize, but I would say that because of the way information is coming in, … I think we did the best we could do given the circumstances,” Haymore said. “I'm not going to say everything is perfect, but we were relying on information that was coming in, literally, until the last moment.”
Haymore was not made available to speak with VPM News by deadline, but said in a statement that “after detailed discussions at the March board meeting, no one asked for the vote about the resolution to be postponed. As has been said before, VCU can both welcome and support ALL people in our community and comply with state and federal directives and laws. That compliance was the impetus for the vote.”
