UNK Continues ‘DEI’ Hiring as Faculty Say It Targets Conservatives

by John Gage

(Photo credit from the University of Nebraska at Kearney’s Twitter account)

The University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK) is facing criticism as the university continues to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” while it seeks to silence conservatives on campus, according to critics.

On Monday, Governor Jim Pillen slammed the university for “nonsense” that he said was “completely irrelevant and destructive to the University of Nebraska’s teaching mission.” The comments were in response to news that UNK wants faculty to attend a 20-minute learning session about “trans-spectrum Students.”

“When students feel welcome and included, they have a better chance for academic success. Yet LGBT students, especially transgender students, can unfortunately feel unwelcome or alienated in the classroom,” the flyer said. “This 20-Minute Mentor provides strategies and tools to help create a more inclusive classroom for transgender students.”

Pillen called the seminar “out of touch” with Nebraska values. “University leaders must immediately root out this and all other similar programming across the entire system,” he said. “If the University cannot police its own ranks and rid itself of the woke disease that has degraded so many ‘elite’ higher education institutions, it risks investigations, cuts to its funding, and, most importantly, the loss of the confidence of the people it serves.”

UNK responded to Pillen, saying the university had “removed” the module he had referenced. “The module referenced has been removed. The content was from an external professional development series and was not developed internally by UNK,” a spokesperson for UNK said. “We have addressed the issue and corrected our review process moving forward.”

University Looks to Hire More ‘DEI’ Positions

The flyer for the transgender event and the dustup with the governor is not a one-off incident in the fight over alleged “wokeness” at UNK. This week, the university announced it was hiring two more positions that critics have called “DEI hires.”

The positions were announced by Dr. Maha Younes, who is the associate vice chancellor for institutional engagement. Younes’s previous title with the university was “chief diversity officer,” where her role was to “lead a university wide effort to make UNK a more diverse, equitable and inclusive institution.”

Younes will now oversee two additional positions, which will be “central to advancing our shared commitment to student engagement, persistence, and success. The Associate Dean will collaborate with me and serve as part of a talented ADER [Associate Dean for Engagement and Retention] team to advance a campus culture of care and strengthen support for all students, faculty, and staff across their UNK journey.”

Sources at the university told The Plains Sentinel that Younes’s job title had changed, but her role in pushing “DEI” at UNK had not.

Reagan Dugan, the director of higher education initiatives at Defending Education, said the move by UNK is part of a continuing “pattern” in trying to disguise DEI.

“The former DEI chief at UNK has gone through a three-title pivot since 2021,” he said. “Now this same official is recruiting Associate Deans for Engagement and Retention in two colleges, with the formal job description listing collaboration with her office as its first core responsibility—and directing all applications to her directly—embedding the DEI function into college-level administration where it is even harder to track and holds no DEI-coded title whatsoever.”

Dugan added that the University of Nebraska system “has already drawn scrutiny for its reticence to remove DEI.” Last year, federal education officials announced an investigation into the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) for scholarship programs that officials alleged benefited foreign-born students.

Trump DEI Crackdown

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” The order instructs federal agencies to use civil rights law to target DEI programming at universities and in the private sector. The order directed the U.S. Attorney General and Secretary of Education that to receive federal funding, they would need to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which banned racial hiring preferences by colleges and universities.

The University of Nebraska regents responded last April by amending the bylaws to require “equal opportunity” in the university system and end DEI programming. In August, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL) and the UNO closed their diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, and this month, UNL announced it was closing its Gender and Sexuality Center.

Many of these changes have resulted in the universities shifting programs and positions to other departments. The Plains Sentinel was made aware of an incident where UNK faculty planned a meeting in February to discuss how to change DEI programming and put it under a new name to avoid detection – the meeting was eventually canceled.

While most formal DEI labeling has been eliminated across the university system, the UNK Faculty Senate meeting minutes from this month show the group still has a diversity, equity, and inclusion leadership council in addition to their “Racism, Privilege and Inequity” statement on their homepage.

UNK Targets Conservatives

Multiple UNK faculty members have reached out to The Plains Sentinel to describe an environment of intimidation and ostracization of faculty willing to speak publicly about being a conservative or a Christian.

None of the current professors who reached out were willing to go fully on the record over fear of retaliation from the administration. “They have ways of coming after people even if they are tenured full professors,” one current faculty member said.

While no current professors would go on the record, recently retired professor, Dr. Thomas Martin, said he has personally experienced the hostile environment the university has towards Christian professors. Martin, who taught philosophy at the university for over 30 years, said the university administration was “completely anti-Christian.”

“They never say it explicitly, but implicitly everything they do is that way,” he said.

One incident cited by multiple faculty members was a 2023 directive from UNK administration requiring faculty members to put a “diversity and inclusion” statement in their syllabuses.

“UNK stands in solidarity and unity with our students of color, our LatinX and international students, our LGBTQIA+ students and students from other marginalized groups in opposition to racism and prejudice in any form, wherever it may exist,” the statement read.

The university told faculty that they had a “moral and legal obligation” to include the statement in their syllabuses. Some faculty pushed back and successful got the university to allow them to include a modified statement that included respect for all students, not just “marginalized groups.”

Martin said the university had eliminated professors, who affirmed the classical western tradition, by prioritizing “DEI hires,” who would affirm the administration’s left-wing drift. “It’s DEI hires, one after another,” he said. Martin pointed to the English faculty, which he said went from 24 faculty, 16 of whom were men and eight were women, to now, where it is 12 women and three men.

Despite changes in the make up of the faculty at UNK to include more women and minorities, certain members of the university want UNK to diversify even more. A draft resolution from the UNK Faculty Senate published this month urges the UNK leadership to “broaden the pool of qualified candidates” as well as “enhance diversity and equity” in its administrative searches.

“The Department of Justice should be looking into this,” a current faculty member said about the university’s hiring and firing decisions. “The DOJ was investigating UNL for illegal activity. They need to come down Interstate 80 because what is happening here makes that look like a Boy Scouts camp.”

Martin’s department of philosophy was targeted for cuts beginning in 2022 after he and members of the department began to speak out against the intellectual drift at the university. UNK denies that it targeted any of its cuts because of ideological preferences.

The cuts to the department are part of broader cuts going on at UNK and the wider system as the universities feel the strain of smaller budgets. Last week, the Board of Regents voted to cut three more undergraduate majors as well as a master’s degree program.

Current professors said that UNK has been able to strategically target conservatives in their cuts when needed because of the complicated rubric they are able to hide behind and justify which programs and professors stay or go.

The Plains Sentinel is aware of at least one professor considering a lawsuit against UNK over discrimination, stemming, in part, from their conservative political beliefs.

Students Speak Out

Changes at the university have not gone unnoticed by students. Several students have reached out to The Plains Sentinel to speak about the UNK’s learning environment and concerns they had about the direction the school was going.

Keya Knaus, a sophomore at UNK, said she was upset because the university was pushing out her favorite professor because of her political beliefs. “I think they don’t like what she has to say,” Knaus said, adding that it “seems like” professors with views that align more with the administration are allowed to speak more freely.

Knaus said that as a student she has felt the need to silence her personal views in class.

“In some of my other classes because of my political views, I’m not able to say what I want to say,” Knaus said, describing herself as “more Republican” than most of her professors at UNK.

“It isn’t right,” she added. “Especially at a college level. It takes away our freedom of speech.”

After this year, Knaus is transferring to another college. She said UNK’s free speech environment was not the motivating factor for her to leave, but she believed that she “learned more” from classes at a previous school she attended.

One of the examples students and faculty pointed to as an illustration of UNK’s ideological drift is changes to its human sexuality course.

Multiple students reached out to The Plains Sentinel with concerns over a human sexuality class they said contained “defiling and disgusting” images. Students and faculty aware of the class and its textbook labeled the images in the textbook “pornographic.”

“Makes me really sad that some of the things are going on and students aren’t aware or consulted,” Mady Kramer, a Board of Regents Scholarship recipient and current UNK student, said. Kramer noted the human sexuality class as an example of how the university had changed and was ignoring students’ concerns and beliefs.

Kramer, who is in the pre-nursing program, is required to take the class, and she said she will opt to take it online because, in part, the professor would pass out sex toys during class – a move she felt was both obscene and unnecessary.

Kramer referred to images in the textbook she described as “horrendous” and “disgusting.” The textbook showed photographic images of male and female genitalia, explicit images of transgender individuals following gender reassignment surgery, and a BDSM sex scene. The textbook illustrates for readers various heterosexual and homosexual sexual positions, and teaches students how to use sex toys.

The Plains Sentinel has reviewed images from the textbook and will not publish them as they are in direct violation of the terms of agreement on pornographic images for several of the distribution platforms our organization uses.

In a text that includes descriptions of bestiality, necrophilia, prostitution, and the production of pornography, the only sexual restraint the book advises students against is “consensual sexual choking.”

“The consent might be extenuating factor, but a person cannot legally consent to being injured or killed,” the text states. In its commentary on necrophilia, the text adds, “not all states criminalize sex with corpses, and in those that do, the interpretation of the law is often murky.”

In another section of the book, readers are encouraged to consider group sex as being natural, with the textbook stating it is “commonly observed among non-human animals.” In another section, students are told to ignore sex education that teaches abstinence.

When discussing bestiality, the textbook makes the claim that 50% of men raised on farms had sexual contact with animals – a remark that one faculty member said they believed was included to demean and humiliate the rural students UNK is supposed to be attracting.

The class is taught by Dr. Heather Kennedy, an associate professor in the department of counseling, school psychology and family science.

Photos and reports shared with The Plains Sentinel from her class show Kennedy regularly wears shirts with political messaging while teaching her human sexuality class, including calls for “liberation,” pro-LGBTQ+ shirts, and messages against “anti-blackness” and “police brutality.”

The Plains Sentinel has reached out for Kennedy for comment on the story but has not heard back at time of publication.

Kramer shared a letter with The Plains Sentinel that students are signing with concerns they have with the learning environment on campus that will get sent to the UNK chancellor, the Board of Regents, and Governor Pillen.

The letter contains complaints about the human sexuality class, stating in part, “While it is understood that a course on human sexual behavior will include sensitive material, these specific elements do not appear to be clearly reflected in or aligned with the official course description… Nowhere in this description does it mention having explicit sexual content that many would consider pornography in a required textbook.”

The letter also accuses UNK of showing pornography to a minor and potentially violating Nebraska’s obscenity laws.

The University Responds

The Plains Sentinel reached out to UNK to ask whether the university had ever discriminated against Christians and conservatives in its hiring and programming. The university said claims of discrimination are “not true” and it remains “committed” to treating students and staff fairly.

“These claims are simply not true and mischaracterize how UNK makes decisions,” a spokesperson for the university said. “UNK does not discriminate in its education programs, activities, admissions or employment, including based on race, ethnicity, religion or political affiliation. We are committed to treating students, faculty and staff fairly, and we provide multiple ways to raise concerns, both confidentially and in person, so they can be reviewed and addressed appropriately.”

Pillen responded to the news that UNK had removed its transgender module by saying it was “good news” but that he was still looking to hold the university “accountable.”

“I — and others in Nebraska and around the country — will continue to hold our higher education institutions accountable, keeping them true to the law and the values of the people they serve,” he said. “The mission of education in America is not the advancement of woke indoctrination — it’s to grow critical learners and thinkers, prepared to become the next generation of leaders and business builders.”

John Gage is the executive editor of The Plains Sentinel.

Editor’s Note: The Plains Sentinel has opened a tip line for current and former students and faculty of the University of Nebraska to discuss their experiences and the learning environment across the university system. Send confidential tips to — plainssentinel@protonmail.com