Is there such a thing as a college campus that is too diverse? That’s the question posed recently by Steve Sviggum, a former Republican state legislator and speaker of Minnesota’s House of Representatives and vice chair of the Board of Regents for the University of Minnesota.
Following widespread outcry over his comments, Sviggum resigned October 25, though he will continue serving in his role until spring 2023, when his term ends.
The University of Minnesota’s flagship campus is in the Twin Cities, and it has several regional hubs, including campuses in Duluth and Rochester. As a member of the Board of Regents, Sviggum has helped guide policy and important fiscal and human resources decisions for the entire university system.
One of the campuses is in Morris, a small city in western Minnesota. Nearly 1,400 students attend the University of Minnesota, Morris, and close to 60 percent are white. In Sviggum’s view, that may not be enough.
At a regents meeting on October 13, where system-wide enrollment numbers were discussed, Sviggum wondered aloud whether the growing diversity on the Morris campus may be a deterrent—presumably for white students and their families.
At the meeting, Sviggum posed the following questions to Janet Schrunk Ericksen, who is the acting chancellor at Morris: “Is it possible that at Morris, we’ve become too diverse? Is that possible, at all from a marketing standpoint?”
Sviggum then claimed that his questions were in response to recent letters he’d received from a couple of friends, who told him their kids would not be attending Morris because it was too diverse, and thus they “didn’t feel comfortable there.”
Consider this the moment Sviggum ripped the band-aid off, in terms of any perception that “Minnesota Nice” is a universally genuine, inclusive way of treating others like ourselves here in the land of 10,000 lakes.
Consider this the moment Sviggum ripped the band-aid off, in terms of any perception that “Minnesota Nice” is a universally genuine, inclusive way of treating others like ourselves here in the land of 10,000 lakes.
We don’t know which of Sviggum’s friends clutched their pearls and then dashed a note off to their buddy, expressing their dismay over how uncomfortably diverse the Morris campus has become. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Anyone could have written the letter, appealing to Sviggum in his role as the second highest-ranking member of the Board of Regents.
What is most revealing here is that Sviggum gave validation to this line of thinking not only through his questioning of Schrunk Ericksen, but also through his initial refusal to apologize or perhaps even grasp his error.
Asking whether or not Morris’s increasing diversity was becoming a problem—purely from a marketing and enrollment standpoint, of course—was “certainly not racist,” Sviggum told local CBS reporter Vineeta Sawkar.
“I just simply asked the question,” he told her.
We should thank Sviggum, I suppose, for sharing with the public, including the taxpayers who fund the University of Minnesota, what passes for an acceptable, simple question in his mind. We do not need to wonder whether or not racism and ignorance are represented on the university’s governing board.
As calls began to grow for Sviggum to resign, he quickly became contrite.
On October 18, the University of Minnesota’s public relations office released a statement from Sviggum, in which he said he was “truly sorry” for causing offense, noting that “he’s willing to learn and must do better.”
According to a report from the Star Tribune, Sviggum’s statement still included the idea that he had simply been trying to get to the bottom of why enrollment at Morris has dropped by as much as 50 percent in recent years.
Rather than openly suggest that non-white students are to blame for this decline simply by daring to show up on campus, Sviggum might want to instead apply an economic and political lens to this situation. He was speaker of the Minnesota House in the early 2000s, after all, when Republican Tim Pawlenty was governor.
During Pawlenty’s tenure, funding for public education from early childhood through college declined precipitously. This was in response to fiscal deficits in the state, particularly in the years 2002 to 2005, when Pawlenty sought to balance the budget while adhering to a no-new-taxes pledge.
In 2008, the nonprofit Minnesota Budget Project published a report called the Lost Decade. This report documents the dramatic drop in funding for public education in Minnesota while Pawlenty was in office, including the jaw-dropping realization that tuition at the University of Minnesota rose by 68 percent from 2000 to 2007.
Putting more of the burden on individual students rather than taxpayers as a whole is a national problem, of course, when it comes to understanding why college tuition costs have ballooned in the past few decades. Budgets reflect values, which is likely why Ellen Shreker argued in a recent essay that the war on higher education has been ongoing since at least the 1960s, as a backlash against that era’s protest movements.
Sviggum clearly needs to go back to class to better understand why college enrollment is declining in Minnesota and across the country. The longstanding exclusion of students of color, paired with more recent drops in political and financial support for colleges and universities, is the real culprit here, not the discomfort of Sviggum and his friends.