By Lawrence A. Clayton

When I was teaching, and for a few years chairing the Dept. of History, I had no idea, nor did I particularly care, about what was going at the top levels of administration that ran the University. No one stuck their political finger in my job, how we hired faculty, how we managed our affairs, etc. etc.

Now hiring practices at UA resemble check lists for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) rules or orders. I retired in 2013 when we were doing our thing, quite well thank you. Then it all went downhill.

I did a bit of research and discovered that the office of DEI only came into being along about 2015 or 2016. The year before the Faculty Senate pushed the President to do something about how sororities voted in new members and how some UA students perhaps illegally voted in the last local election. The result was the creation of the Division of DEI, an astounding leap from solving a few local issues to buying in to the emerging national standard of DEI.

DEI evolved from a way of dealing with the problems of the nation in the 1950s and 1960s (Critical Theory), and it later evolved into Critical Race Theory to explain the problems of the nation as basically issues of race, privilege, and power. As race, sex, ethnicity, minorities, LGBTQs, victimization were all elevated to what Universities were devoted to solving, the old standards of excellence were dropped, and DEI principles and rules substituted. This was not just our problem here in River City.

A bill before the Legislature in 2022, the Oliver-Crawford Equality Act, is a huge step forward, defining and banning the worst aspects of DEI in higher education. The Legislature is asking some tough questions on how UA is, for example, spending huge amounts of income produced by a student population that is now over 60% from out of state, to ballooning salaries of high administrators, ridiculous perks for the Board of Trustees, and other questions related to UA in national academic polls: for example, there is almost a direct relationship to the decline of UA in the polls as DEI increases. Is this what the public with a direct interest in higher education expects?

Why does the administration push on, creating more than twenty new administrative posts devoted entirely to DEI in the past five years? And, as an old faculty member, I’m really curious as to why the administrative staff has doubled in the past twenty to thirty years, as opposed to the faculty, now less than half the number compared to administrators. What are our priorities? The logo at the entrance to the University read “Teaching, Research, Service.” It might better read today “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

 UA had to come a long way to meet the challenges of civil rights, segregation, and integration from the 1950s forward, like all of the South. New England, the northern Atlantic coast states, the Midwest, California, and the West, they did not have to deal with segregation and its end like we did. They have their own set of racial and ethnic prejudices but that’s another story.

 The people who ran the University—the ones who I responded to, from David Mathews to Joab Thomas and others in the administration—Doug Jones as Dean of Arts & Sciences—did a great job of accommodating to being a university for truly all Alabamians. Dr. Earl Tilford has written about it in his books and articles on the history of UA and it wasn’t an easy move, but we did it.

We made civil rights come to pass right here in the center of the Old South. By 2008-2009 (and I have read some of the court findings and admonitions) we were integrated, maybe still with white fraternities and sororities and the new Black ones, but some folks didn’t WANT to join a sorority or fraternity that didn’t reflect their interests, and often their color.

And then DEI came on campus and said we have it all wrong. Sorry, but we have come a long way, fought for the rights of ALL Alabamians to enjoy the challenges and freedoms, and learning available to them at UA, and I don’t want to see us lose that. Cleo Thomas, the first Black president of the SGA, was an old student of mine and I remember him well, a young man growing up in the new world of justice and freedom for all.

I know we have not achieved the perfect university, or the perfect world obviously. No one has.

There are problems, flaws, challenges, people we disagree with, and some who are just dead wrong.

But a university should be a place of freedom, freedom to talk, freedom of speech, freedom to exchange and argue the principles and issues that surround us, and, not secondarily, but right up there with freedom, a place to put your mind and will and soul and spirit to work to realize your dreams, and if they include others like in the Christian message, even better.

Nick Saban has made a great life stressing, demanding, and encouraging his guys to be the very best. I think his model is far better than one coming out of DEI which stresses victimization and race as the keys to a university education.

Lawrence A. Clayton was born October 5, 1942, in Summit, New Jersey. He lived in Peru for seven years. He attended Duke University (B.A., 1964), and earned his M.A. (1969) and Ph.D. (1972) at Tulane University in Latin American History.  From 1964-1966 he served as an officer in the U.S. Navy on the USS Donner (LSD-20), cruising both in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean with the 6^th Fleet.

He was on the faculty of the University of Alabama from 1972-2013. He directed the Latin American Studies Program from 1980 to 1992. He was Chair of Department of History 2000-2007 and was Interim Chair, 2009-2010. His specialties focused on Latin American history and the history of the Christian church. He is now Professor Emeritus of History. He retired in 2013.

He held two Senior Fulbright Lecturing Awards, one in 1983 to Costa Rica and one in 1988 to Peru. In 1983 he served as President of the South Eastern Council on Latin American Studies. In 1999 he held a year-long Pew Evangelical Scholars Fellowship.

Some of his publications include

• The De Soto Chronicles (Tuscaloosa, 1993). Prize winning.
• A History of Modern Latin America (3^rd. ed. published as A New History of Modern Latin America ,University of California Press, 2017).
• Peru and the United States: The Condor and the Eagle (Athens, Georgia, 1999).
• Cleared for Landing: On Living a Christian Life (2008).
• Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas (New York, 2011)
• Bartolomé de las Casas: A Biography (New York, 2012).
• Work and Wealth in Scripture (Eugene, Oregon, 2015)
• The Andean Cross: A Novel (Los Angeles, Ca., 2019)
• My Christian Prism or at the Port Rail (Bloomington, In., 2019)
• Three of his books have been translated and published in Peru and Ecuador.

He is working on the script to a new movie on the Doolittle Raid of 1942; and on several book projects, including his Memoirs. The best of his OpEds published in The Tuscaloosa News and elsewhere was published in 2019, as was his first novel, The Andean Cross,

He and his wife Louise have two daughters and a son, Carlton, who is a pilot with Elite Air, Tampa. Oldest daughter Amy Alderman, M.D. (UAB) is a plastic surgeon in Alpharetta, Georgia, and Stephanie Clayton Richmond, next oldest, is Executive Vice President for Papa Murphy’s Pizza in Portland, Oregon. Both daughters have two children.

Clayton has participated since 2000 in a Christian jail ministry program at the Tuscaloosa County Jail on a weekly basis, and his wife Louise is a licensed and ordained minister who teaches a Monday evening course on Christianity and the Bible to female inmates. They attend Victorious Life Church, Fosters, Al. Clayton also writes a weekly column, The Port Rail for The Tuscaloosa News that appears on Sundays in the Op-ed section.

In November, 2015 he was inducted as a Knight Commander of the Imperial Order of Charles V, in the Alcazar Palace, Segovia, Spain. In 2018, he was inducted into the Royal Hispanic American Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters in Cadiz, Spain

Photo by William Fortunato from Pexels