Cal Poly’s DEI office to be renamed following Trump’s executive order

January 24, 2025

By KAREN VELIE

Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo is renaming its Office of University Diversity and Inclusion under the umbrella of the University Personnel Division following an executive order from President Donald Trump, Cal Poly President Jeffrey D. Armstrong announced Friday.

On Tuesday, Trump issued an executive order against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at colleges and universities. The purpose of the order is to eliminate “illegal preferences and discrimination.”

“Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex,” Trump said in his order. “The American people have witnessed first-hand the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”

Cal Poly administrators plan to announce the new name for the Office of University Diversity and Inclusion at a later date, according to Armstrong’s announcement.

A former professor at Cal Poly, Al Liddicoat, will serve as the vice president for the division upon his return to Cal Poly. Liddicoat is currently serving as interim vice chancellor for the California State University System.

“This integration will enable us to better serve our students, faculty and staff, while driving meaningful progress in fostering an inclusive and welcoming environment for all,” Armstrong said.

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I was hired under a quota system at a bank in 1976 in Atascadero. At the time my family was one of two families of east Asian descent in Atascadero. I was 20 years old and needed a job. I walked into every single business on El Camino Real in eight hours. I was hired to be a bank teller the next day. I was later told by the branch manager that he had received a phone call that very day saying he had to hire a minority for the open position and he was so happy that I walked through those doors and asked for an application because he knew I would be great at the job because “Asians are good at math and money”. I was the only non-white person at that branch for several years. Knowing I was hired because of a quota had to be met made me want to prove my worth even more. I didn’t call in sick for 3 years, I stayed late off the clock if there was work to be finished and carried 30 lb. bags of quarters into my 8th month of pregnancy causing me to go into premature labor and my baby being born 4 weeks early. In my early 20’s I felt a need to prove I was a ‘model minority’. This whole experience taught me… I don’t want any favors from anybody because of my race, ethnicity or sex. I would rather have been hired because I had the qualifications for the job! Anyone with any self respect would NOT want to be a DEI hire nor hired to meet a quota. I think that the only people who are for DEI are those who don’t have confidence in their abilities and are basically whiners.


It’s worse than you think. The Cal Poly admin uses demographics as a measure of success: the less white males there are, the more successful the campus is. “Improving” metrics based on race and gender is much easier and a whole lot less expensive than taking the steps to improve the overall quality of education. The truth is that, for better or worse, Cal Poly got its great reputation based on the quality of instructors, which have historically been mostly white males. I’m not sure why there is such a rush to change that formula.


President Biden warned about a “Tech Oligarchy” taking over, well how about the “Bureaucratic Oligarchy” operating right before our very eyes!

It’s a game of three card monte and the public is the “mark” trying to find a card that’s been removed from the table by a corrupt dealer.

You have mediocre government administrators paid ridiculous salaries to facilitate and further agendas that are counterproductive to developing a healthy meritocracy.

And we wonder why we have to bring in H1B visa holders for science and technology jobs; it’s because our school administrators are too worried about inclusivity instead of telling someone, “I don’t think you’re college material.”


My hope would be that the door opens for citizens and close for foreign students. Yes, I know the foreign students pay higher tuition, but our citizens need better access to higher education if we really want to upgrade our country’s place in the technology race.


Any discrimination is wrong. Call it affirmative action, or DEI. It’s unfair to base any decision on race or sex.


This is proof that otherwise intelligent folks do really dumb things at times. The “re-naming” of policy, which is ethically challenged and truly racist in nature, only diminished the true cause of racial justice. We have been traveling towards a true race-blind country until the DEI folks used racial discrimination to combat racial discrimination. Dumb.


I would like to see the budget for the Diversity and Inclusion programs at Cal Poly. I have seen a partial list of the VPs, DEI Department heads, and their administrative assistants for each of them – it is insane. The salaries are $200,000 to $300,000 for the many DEI heads of each department, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.


Hey Karen Velie; can you research and share just how many people have been employed under the DEI administration at Cal Poly and what the total annual spend is for this program? I guarantee you will be completely floored.


Yes, that would be interesting to know the facts.


The DEI initiatives at Cal Poly are a sham and a failure. As for DEI in hiring, I’ve read every DEI document I can find; DEI policies are included in hiring policies as “guidelines”. This means the admin can say any DEI policy is not a rule but a guideline, which allows the admin to get away with unfair policies. What this means is that if departments don’t follow the guidelines, then they risk getting their funding cut by the college and/or university. Not once in any DEI document I’ve read did it say to hire the best person for the job. Let’s face it, hiring good professors is a tough problem with the low pay at Cal Poly for instructors and high local cost of living; it’s simply much easier to base success on demographics rather that actual quality of instruction. As for students, generally speaking, the non-white students come from area with lower quality K-12 based on school funding from those areas. The overall quality of education is going to suffer if you start letting in more students who are unprepared for college, particularly when the admin remains focused basing success on graduation rates and time to graduation. If you want more non-white students to succeed in college, you better put your effort into bumping up k-12 educational quality for underrepresented students. Hiring and/or paying bean counters at the college level won’t solve any problem.


This sounds like a repeat of “teach children in English” fiasco. Go through the motions and make it appear like you’re complying, however, when it comes to actions, nothing has changed, except for some labels.