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Officials cite Board of Regents directive targeting DEI
The University of Kansas staff is now required to remove gender pronouns from their email signatures to comply with a new Board of Regents directive, the school announced Tuesday.
All staff must remove “gender-identifying pronouns and personal pronoun series from their KU email signature blocks, webpages, Zoom/Teams screen IDs and any other form of university communications,” the announcement from KU Chancellor Douglas Girod states.
KU staff have until July 31 to comply.
Further, Girod told the university community that “KU Information Technology will remove the gender pronoun field from the ‘people’ pages on websites.”
The announcement cites the Kansas Board of Regents’ recently issued directive to state universities, which comes in the wake of a state legislative budget provision targeting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives across state agencies.
The regents mandated that state universities dismantle DEI programs, “including pronoun labels,” the University Daily Kansan reported.
Girod’s announcement also lists four other provisions that the university has already addressed in response to the new directive.
The school has eliminated all positions, “mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities” that relate to DEI. It has also canceled related state grants or contracts and abolished DEI training requirements.
Some of these changes are already apparent.
KU’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging no longer appears on the school’s website. The school has also scrubbed its webpage for the Toni Johnson Center for Racial and Social Justice, The Lawrence Times reported.
In addition, KU’s Office of Civil Rights & Title IX webpage states the page’s content “is being reviewed in light of recent changes to federal guidance.”
Lastly, the school has “removed an online campus map that previously provided locations of all-gender restrooms, lactation rooms and reflection rooms,” according to The Lawrence Times.
Last school year, KU launched a new “Trans Studies Initiative” to “study questions of trans life” and host events for LGBTQ students, The College Fix previously reported.
The initiative’s website states it will create a “network of interdisciplinary engagement” through “coursework, a lecture series, a fellowship program, community grants, and the publication of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.”
MORE: Nearly 90 universities rebranded their DEI offices, College Fix survey finds
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Rainbow flag with notes that read ‘hie, e, ne, xe, ze, tey’; Yanishevska/Shutterstock
