CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Senate Bill 17 is a state bill that went into effect on Jan. 1. It bans diversity, equity and inclusion offices at public universities.
The bill has now been in effect for a semester and some students at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi are seeing a negative impact from it.
“It seems like it’s very counter intuitive to the mission they had behind it,“ said Jazmeyne Evans a senior at the university.
Evans taks part in several multicultural extracurricular groups and is the former student program director for the Islander Cultural Alliance. It was also known as the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging.
She said their goal was to create a council for the multicultural and special interests student groups on campus, addressing their needs. That is until Senate Bill 17 went into effect this year.
“We wanted to provide support to diverse groups since they didn’t have as many resources compared to other ones," Evans said. "But then after these announcements, were made we realized we couldn’t provide support to just them we had to be to everyone.”
Evans said students were concerned with the changes this bill would bring. For starters, the office was changed to the Office of Community and Belonging. Because the office can’t help with diversity initiatives for campus groups, Evans said it proved to be negative for some.
“After these changes were made and we couldn’t be as involved as we were previously, some of them they either became less active or some groups you’ll see occasionally where some semesters they are active other ones aren’t. Just because they have no more members. And so, some of them they fade out of existence,” said Evans
The bill doesn’t limit student groups, but it does ban the university from taking part in anything DEI related included during their interview process.
Author of the bill, State Sen. Brandon Creighton said DEI offices force people to adopt certain political beliefs and put emphasis on social justice instead of merit.
Evans disagreed and said whatever goals were intended are not being achieved.
“I don’t think so, especially what we did here on campus was celebrating people’s culture," she said. "Especially here, we’re a Hispanic serving institution and it doesn’t really seem like we are serving our diverse communities here on campus if we’re not allowing them to celebrate their diversity, celebrate their culture.”
Evans added that she and others believe if the university can’t put on DEI events for things like Black History Month, students could feel disconnected from the university.
Universities that don’t comply with the law could be penalized by less state funding.
While Evans graduates on Saturday, she said she sees how there could be long term negative affects in how the university is able to to help students moving forward.
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