(Radio Iowa) – The Board of Regents has voted to adopt ten recommendations proposed by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion study group. One of the recommendations is that the three state universities cut D-E-I programs that aren’t necessary for research contracts or accreditation. Study group member David Barker says another asks the three universities to explore strategies for advancing diversity of intellectual perspectives among job applicants. “Simply asking the universities to think about their hiring practices in a way that might bring in an area of diversity that may have been neglected in the past and that’s diversity of philosophical perspective,” Barker says. “And, you know, we’ll see what universities do with that and what ideas they come up with.” Regent Abby Crow says that seems to contradict cutting other D-E-I initiatives.

“I don’t think we can pick and choose which aspects of diversity that we want to encourage more at the universities. I think that if want these hiring practices to be broadly universal equal, I don’t understand how uplifting one and reducing others is fair,” Crow says. Crow offered and amendment that would change the language to simply issue a reminder to universities on hiring practices. Regent Barker did not favor the amendment.

“Some of the feedback that we got from the universities when we asked about increasing philosophical diversity was that they didn’t know how to do that,” he says. “And so that’s kind of why this is worded the way it is that we’d like them to explore possibilities for how to do that. Now, their answer might be that they can’t. But we’d like them to explore possible methods for doing that.” Crow’s amendment to change the language failed. The D-E-I study was part of a requirement by the Iowa Legislature. Barker isn’t sure if the recommendations will be the end of the issue.

“I have no idea whether the legislature will, you know add to this, will take additional action on D-E-I,” Barker says. “We, we looked at this ourselves and decided what recommendations we wanted and the legislature might decide to move to not deal with the issue anymore or they might decide to do more.”

The recommendations were approved at the Board of Regents’ meeting Thursday. The schools are expected to submit their plans for implementing these changes in the spring.