(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Lassonde Beach Volleyball Courts at the University of Utah, on Tuesday, May 27, 2025.
Mr. Jefferson, I notice that you used the word “equal” — as in, “All men are created equal” — in your so-called Declaration of Independence. Can you explain to the Utah Senate Education Confirmation Committee why you felt compelled to use this forbidden concept in your statement?
Mr. Lincoln, it says here in a transcript of your brief remarks — What was it called? Gettysburg Address? — that you described the United States as “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Do you really expect the Utah Legislature to stand by and allow this radical idea to go unchallenged?
Mr. Chief Justice Hughes, it was at your direction, I believe, that the phrase “Equal justice under law” was inscribed above the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court building. Do you really expect the court to do its job properly with this carved-in-stone admonition so blatantly staring everyone in the face?
Mr. Pericles, in your classic Funeral Oration from the Peloponnesian War, you pay honor to your home city of Athens by describing it as a rare example of a place where, “If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences.” What the heck, dude?
And who was the joker who put this stuff about promising “equal protection of the laws” into the 14th Amendment to the Constitution?
So, of course, when Maria Garciaz last month appeared before the Utah Senate committee charged with reviewing nominations to the boards of trustees of various state universities, some members of the panel took issue with her support for equity and inclusion efforts at the University of Utah.
Because these lawmakers, like so many others in legislative bodies across the contemporary United States, hold doctoral degrees in not getting it.
Garciaz has been a member of the University of Utah Board of Trustees for one four-year term and had been duly nominated for another by Gov. Spencer Cox. Sixteen other nominees for trustee posts at the U. and other schools sailed through the committee, but the panel voted to not recommend Garciaz to the full Senate solely because she is brave enough to declare that efforts to get more people from all backgrounds into college are important.
The nomination might have come before the full Senate Wednesday but, for reasons not publicly disclosed, didn’t appear on the agenda. It remains in limbo.
In the committee hearing, Utah was treated to Sen. Mike McKell and Sen. Chris Wilson counting the number of times Garciaz let drop words like “equity” or “inclusion” in her remarks.
It mimicked nothing so much as sniggering 14-year-old boys going through a book and circling all the dirty words. Without making any effort to understand any of the other words in the book and, taken together, what they might mean.
The Legislature’s ban on all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts in all state schools, from Pre-K to post-doc, willfully misunderstands what public education is for. It is to include as many people as possible in the great leveler that America, for a long time, claimed to believe in — though we generally fell short of.
It is true, at least in theory, that the same goal can be reached without mentioning ethnicity or gender. Schools can make special efforts to reach out to anyone not among the cohort likely to assume that, because their parents — their mothers — went to college, they will, too.
Schools can, as some Utah schools are, take pains to find and assist first-generation students and those from less affluent backgrounds by demystifying the whole experience and making it all more affordable. Done aggressively enough, that would benefit young people of color and women, without anyone having to argue about it.
But the Trumpian hangup Republicans in Utah and elsewhere have about DEI, affirmative action, critical race theory, or any other effort to fight back against the centuries of Uniformity, Inequality and Exclusion that have been baked into our national character is no more than another generation of white supremacy.
Without the hoods or the burning crosses.
George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, would not exist had his father not been the first in his family to go to college thanks to a scholarship offered only to physically handicapped people.