On Thursday, Feb. 8, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., the Southern Utah University Student Association and the Student Involvement and Leadership office held a Community Conversation to discuss House Bills 261 and 257, recent pieces of legislation that will affect inclusion efforts on campus.
Arianna Marroquin, the SUUSAs vice president of DEI, helped organize this event so that students could hear from their peers and discuss the future of inclusion efforts on campus.
Many students expressed distress over these changes and shared worries regarding their future safety and security. Faculty also attended the event, offering support and sharing alternate resources available to students.
No members of higher administration were in attendance. In Dec. 2023, Gov. Spencer Cox issued a directive to university presidents in Utah to remain neutral on political topics. “We don’t need our institutions to take a position on those things,” Cox said, regarding issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
HB 261 Equal Opportunity Initiatives bans government entities and publicly funded institutions like SUU from asking prospective employees for belief statements or diversity statements during the hiring process. It also bans mandatory diversity training for employees among a list of other things that it calls “prohibited discriminatory practices.” Most notably, it will overhaul current offices and initiatives aimed at supporting diversity, equity and inclusion on campus, replacing these offices with “student success offices” that are not geared toward any specific subgroup.
Hector Cedillo-Tellez is the president of the LSA and a member of the DEI council. He shared his own feelings about the bill during the conversation.
“I think the goal tonight was just to allow students to cry, to feel, to express any frustration, confusion or anger that they felt towards the bill,” Cedillo-Tellez said. “We had a couple of students come up today — they’ve just been spending their time in their room reading the news and not knowing anybody else to go to or to talk to about it. So, I think this was this environment to allow people to actually grieve, to feel a sense of community and to hopefully get some change and some hope and courage out of all of this.”
HB 257 Sex-Based Designations for Privacy, Anti-Bullying, and Women’s Opportunities requires that bathrooms in publicly owned institutions be used by people according to their assigned sex at birth. This means that transgender students on SUU’s campus cannot use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity.
One student shared an experience they had, looking for a gender-neutral bathroom on campus that wasn’t occupied. They spent 30 minutes searching before they could find one.
These bills have been signed by Cox as of Jan. 30 of this year and will go into effect before the 2024-25 academic year begins. It is not yet clear exactly how SUU will respond and what changes are set in stone, but Cedillo-Tellez and his fellow council members hope to continue to support students with marginalized identities as long as they can.
Author: Lily Brunson
Photographer: Chloe Copeland
Editor: Nick Stein
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