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The University of Texas at Dallas has followed the system’s flagship campus in shuttering its Office of Campus Resources and Support—formerly the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which was closed in response to Texas’s anti-DEI law, SB 17, the Austin American-Statesman reported. The closure will go into effect at the end of the month.
Twenty jobs will be eliminated as a result of the closure. Some of the office’s functions, such as accessibility services, will be moved elsewhere on campus.
In announcing the closure, UT Dallas president Richard Benson said that the decision arose from the university’s reevaluation of its response to SB 17 in the months since the law went into effect Jan. 1.
The announcement comes about two weeks after Brandon Creighton, the Republican state senator who was the lead sponsor of SB 17, wrote letters to Texas’s public universities warning of the penalties for failure to comply with the law. Since then, UT Austin also announced it would close the division that had replaced its DEI division. Similarly, UT San Antonio, which announced in December that it would reformulate its DEI office, backtracked at the beginning of January and said the office wouldn’t open after all.
