Dear Gregory Crawford:
In 2017, you announced that you had joined CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion as part of their President’s Circle. This meant that you joined other university leaders in pledging to make the institution you lead a place “to have complex, and sometimes difficult, conversations about diversity and inclusion” and to “implement and expand unconscious bias education.”
Commenting to the newsmagazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education on your decision to join CEO Action, you said, “Diversity has always been at the heart of Miami’s identity, enshrined in our Code of Love and Honor … ”
In 2018, you wrote an essay for HuffPost in which you said, “I believe to my core that inclusive excellence is indispensable for fulfilling our educational mission to prepare our students to flourish in the 21st century … As public universities, that responsibility has huge consequences for our shared future.”
In 2020, in the wake of the national outcry to George Floyd’s death, you created the President’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Task Force. When that task force submitted its proposals three months later, you publicly promised to “move aggressively” to implement their proposals to “enhance the diversity that is part of our core values at Miami.”
Now, Mike DeWine, Ohio governor and Miami alumnus, has signed into law the controversial Senate Bill 1 (S.B. 1) – formally called the “Enact Advance Ohio Higher Education Act,” a name that makes no grammatical sense, though that’s the least of its problems. The new law bans DEI initiatives on our campus – initiatives that, since 2017, you have been pledging to “aggressively” pursue, because, you said, you believe in them “to [your] core” in addition to their being “part of our core values at Miami.”
You were quite public, quite vocal, in professing those convictions. Yet when S.B. 1 was being debated in our state legislature, you made no public comment expressing opposition, or even concern, about a law that will now dismantle initiatives you have said are core to our university and to your own values.
Why were you silent about something you spent several years claiming was so important to you?
Obviously, you’re going to comply with the new law. I say “obviously,” because I can’t imagine that anyone in the Miami community mistakes you for someone who is likely to engage in civil disobedience or who is likely to resign rather than follow an order. You’re not John Lewis or Elliot Richardson. We get that.
But, how are you going to comply? Will your compliance be meek and silent? Or will you, perhaps, comply with your legal obligations while also stating publicly that you believe this is a bad law which threatens part of Miami’s core mission and hurts Miami students, and therefore ought to be repealed? Will you pledge Miami resources to fight the new law in court as “aggressively” as you once pledged to implement DEI initiatives on campus?
Or, is it possible that you’re actually fine with implementing the new law because all those pro-DEI public statements you started making in 2017 were really just administrative bull---? Is this just you jumping on the latest bandwagon, saying what were then the right things to say, doing what prevailing opinion then said were the right things to do, raising your national profile a little in the process?
Shortly after you formed your President’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force in 2020, several of the students you had appointed to it resigned. One of them told The Miami Student that he “felt the task force was performative.” Would it be fair to interpret your silence about S.B. 1 as evidence that there was truth to that allegation?
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I’ll be transparent: I’m hoping that this open letter will provoke from you an indignant public response. I would most like to see you express indignation about the new law, but I would be content even if your indignation were directed more at me because you feel that I’ve unfairly characterized you. Either way, I would prefer transparent indignation to the cheerful, curated corporate-speak that’s usually issued to us over your signature.
So – is there anything you’d like to say?
John-Charles Duffy
Associate Teaching Professor
At The Student, we are committed to engaging with our audience and listening to feedback. This includes publishing a diverse array of guest editorials. For more information on guidelines and processes, email Taylor Powers, The Student's opinion editor, at powerstj@miamioh.edu.
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