Wisconsin’s top state legislative Republican continued his attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at the state’s public universities, calling the programming “the single most important issue” and claiming he was embarrassed to be a University of Wisconsin System alumnus because of it.
“This is probably to me the single most important issue that we are facing as a people, as a nation and as, really, humanity,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said in remarks Saturday at the state Republican Party convention.
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Vos, of Rochester, relabeled the DEI acronym “division, exclusion and indoctrination” and suggested the UW System, and in particular UW-Madison, the state’s flagship university, puts an outsized emphasis on diversity efforts, which he sees as a waste of taxpayer money and source of racial division.
In his remarks during a panel discussion Saturday, he contended he received correspondence from at least one professor who detailed a situation in which her performance was measured by diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
“The overt racism, the overt exclusion, the overt indoctrination is so deep inside the UW System, I am embarrassed to be an alumni.,” said Vos, who graduated from UW-Whitewater in 1991. “We have got to fix that.”