After KU announced it would comply with an order from the Kansas Board of Regents calling for the removal of pronouns from state employee email signatures, KU students and faculty spoke out against the decision, citing the need to protect students and staff.
The directive, which originated with a provision in the Kansas Legislature’s budget bill, also raised concerns with First Amendment advocates because of its vague language.
As some students have called on KU to reverse its decision and ignore the directive, it is unclear what the penalty might be if the university were to snub the order.
State legislators originally tied $4 million in state funding for universities to the provision. The final version of the bill did away with this financial penalty and only mandated the secretary of administration to certify that all state agencies had complied via a letter to the state finance council.
Don’t miss a beat … Click here to sign up for our email newsletters
Click here to learn more about our newsletters first
The Legislature has held funding hostage from universities over similar issues in the past. Last year, a bill removed $35 million in funding for universities and instead appropriated the money to the state finance council. The funds were distributed to universities only after they certified removal of DEI requirements in admissions, hiring, tenure and more.
KU spokesperson Erinn Barcomb-Peterson said the directive was from the Kansas Board of Regents and not at the discretion of university leaders. She directed questions on the specifics of the budget provision and order to the Kansas Board of Regents.
A spokesperson for the Kansas Board of Regents did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Utterly pathetic’
Meghan Arias, a KU senior, said she was disappointed but not shocked by the announcement. She acknowledged KU’s obligation to follow legislative directives but said university leaders had not shown enough support for LGBTQ+ students and faculty.
“My loved ones that are also student employees are devastated to see yet another attack on the rights of our friends,” she said. “Our state has much larger issues than pronouns in email signatures. I think the Kansas Legislature should be focusing on things like affordable housing and lowering living expenses, not wasting time on email content.”
KU student Maxwell Rocco said KU has a responsibility to protect its students and staff from orders that harm marginalized communities. Rocco is a junior studying secondary history and government education. He argued KU should reverse its decision to comply with the order.
“This isn’t the first time KU has acted in compliance with bigoted or harmful legislation or fear of it,” Rocco said. “… It’s utterly pathetic to pretend that pronouns or gender inclusivity would be a harm to anyone.”
Rocco referenced KU’s decision to remove gender-inclusive housing from Grace Pearson scholarship hall, a decision that sparked protests on campus. KU fired a student worker at Grace Pearson who had been involved with the protests, and the student had since filed a lawsuit alleging KU violated his First Amendment rights.
“It would be amazing to see KU step up to be the university they claimed to be when I toured as a junior in high school: a university dedicated to its diverse population of students and staff,” Rocco said.
United Academics of KU, the university’s faculty union, said they were concerned that KU was siding with “harmful policies aimed at rolling back civil rights and eroding higher education across the state and the country.”
“This decision affects everyone at KU, making us less safe. KU administration should honor their commitment to academic freedom and allow us to make our own decisions about our identity,” they said in a statement. “We will continue to stand with our students and colleagues who are most impacted by these disastrous choices.”
The executive board of the Graduate Teaching Assistants Coalition put out a statement decrying KU’s announcement. They encouraged members to sign an online Change.org petition, “Oppose KU’s Anti-Pronoun Directive,” which was close to 200 signatures as of the time of publication.
“As we witness the university leadership cower to state and federal forces that seek to erase members from the Jayhawk community, GTAC’s leadership expresses — again — our ever-diminishing confidence in university leadership,” they wrote. “We encourage our fellow GTAs to research this policy and track the trajectory of these recent measures.”
In a Letter to the Times published Wednesday, KU law professor Amii Castle highlighted deep concerns with the directive, calling it uniquely harmful to LGBTQ+ and nonbinary students. She said including pronouns signals support and safety to marginalized students and serves as a model of inclusion for others.
“Over my eight years at KU, I have taught thousands of KU students, many of whom are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or questioning), and I likely have had students who are asexual or intersexual,” Castle wrote. “I know these students, and they exist on campus — the Kansas Legislature cannot erase them away with their budget provisions.”
Esmie Tang, communications director for the ACLU of Kansas, said the organization “certainly see it as part of an ongoing onslaught of attacks on DEI by our legislature and other politicians.”
‘Significant First Amendment concerns’
Ross Marchand, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a national free speech nonprofit, said the organization had been closely monitoring the issue and was planning to contact the Kansas Board of Regents to call for alternative guidance.
Marchand said there were “significant First Amendment concerns” with the state budget provision.
He said there was a difference between official and unofficial speech. KU has the right to outline what can be included in email signatures or other official university communications, he said, but the state provision also includes the outlawing of gender ideology from “any other form of university communications,” which he said was vague and unclear.
“A wide variety of protected speech here is implicated by this broad language,” he said.
The text of the provision leaves room for confusion. It says state agencies must remove “gender identifying pronouns or gender ideology from email signature blocks on state employee’s email accounts and any other form of communication.” But it is unclear whether someone could provide their pronouns outside of the email signature, like in the subject or body of the email.
The KU policy enacted to comply with the state law prohibits university employee email signatures from including gender-identifying pronouns or references to gender ideology. The policy only mentions employee email signatures and does not specify what “gender ideology” includes. Barcomb-Peterson did not clarify how KU interprets gender ideology.
KU’s policy also outlines that the policy does not limit the academic freedom of faculty in their teaching, researching or writing about diversity, equity, inclusion, or other topics, including gender ideology.
But Marchand said it is still unclear how the vague language of the directive and the exemptions outlined by KU would be reconciled.
KU senior and pre-law student Luke Audus said his initial reaction to the announcement was embarrassment. He said it was “a reminder of how truly pathetic the people Kansas voters put into power are.”
“The idea that the government would spy on us to the point of analyzing email signatures is pretty terrifying,” he said.
He recognized that KU doesn’t have much leverage and said he worried ignoring the directive could result in state funding being pulled from the university. He said the responsibility falls on voters to stop electing people he deemed hostile to freedom of speech.
“The Republican Party of Kansas has shown a willingness to do whatever it takes to implement their government overreach policies,” Audus said. “I think KU should absolutely speak out against this policy aggressively.”
If local news matters to you, please help us keep doing this work.
Don’t miss a beat — get the latest news from the Times delivered to your inbox:
Click here to learn more about our newsletters first
Cuyler Dunn (he/him), a contributor to The Lawrence Times since April 2022, is a student at the University of Kansas School of Journalism. He is a graduate of Lawrence High School where he was the editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper, The Budget, and was named the 2022 Kansas High School Journalist of the Year. Read his complete bio here. Read more of his work for the Times here.
Latest Lawrence news:
Molly Adams / Lawrence Times
