Cheek's Checking Into Campus Diversity and Inclusion

By Lorena Roberts on December 11, 2015

Diversity and inclusion is something every college campus claims to hold close to their heart, but more and more frequently our nation is experiencing the backlashes of what happens when universities do not do just that.

But is it because the universities don’t want to, or because the supporters aren’t in favor of change?

Chancellor Jimmy Cheek is under fire by the students of The University of Tennessee because of what has been volleyed between legislators, supporters, and the students of the university.

At The University of Tennessee, diversity and inclusion is something that has been under a microscope consistently over the past few weeks. Once the Missouri uproar took place, college campuses across the nation started turning their attention towards their own efforts at keeping a diverse family of students on campus.

As a part of a leadership course at The University of Tennessee, diversity and inclusion is a topic we frequented — beginning with our attempt to include “gender neutral pronouns” on our campus back in August 2015. Once Fox News got a hold of the website update, articles were written, media attention was grabbed, and students at The University of Tennessee started taking sides.

This all went down at the end of August into the beginning of September. After lawmakers in Nashville got wind of the negative attention we were drawing to the state, they wanted to silence us, brush our pronouns under the rug, and move on.

The conversation only continued as it snowballed into something bigger — bolder. The Office for Diversity and Inclusion’s suggestion to refer to office parties as “Holiday Parties,” making sure to be as inclusive as possible, were snatched by the media once again (the Tennesseean), causing an uproar across campus about the efforts we make to be a diverse campus.

This began a “domino effect” that quickly turned into students either 1) asking for the resignation of Chancellor Cheek, or 2) signing a petition to keep him on campus. Hashtags were trending, personal letters were being written, and campus erupted into some of the most convicted actions I’ve seen of these college students since the beginning of the semester.

When students saw that Chancellor Jimmy Cheek had the opportunity to stand up for the students, and for a cause that was important to us, he backed down, re-writing the website update to read that we should approach holiday party situations with sensitivity.

What’s most interesting about the timing of all of this, is that the entire country has seen where college campuses who do not embrace diversity end up: Missouri being an example of what The University of Tennessee does not want to become.

I heard a student once use the analogy of trying to put a band-aid on a cut and forgetting about it. It quickly becomes infected, and then before you know it, that simple cut becomes a much bigger issue and takes a lot more time and care than it would have if it would have been thoroughly cleaned and medicated in the beginning.

The University of Tennessee struggles with being a southern SEC University and having many supporters that are opposed to change (that frankly only care about what our football ranking is), while many of the members of campus want to evolve and change with time. The sooner our supporters can realize that things don’t always stay the same, the faster we can actually become a campus that is “welcoming to all, hostile to none.”