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    York Theater Artistic Director Out After ‘Hurtful’ Diversity Comments

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    James Morgan, who has been with the small New York theater company for 50 years, blamed the effects of a stroke for his behavior.The longtime leader of the York Theater Company, a small New York nonprofit known for its emphasis on musical theater, is acknowledging making “hurtful” comments about diversity that he says prompted his abrupt departure from the organization.James Morgan, who has served as producing artistic director of the York since 1979, and who has been with the company for 50 years, issued a letter on Monday saying that he had suffered a stroke in 2022, and attributed his behavior to that medical incident.“During a recent staff meeting, I responded to a colleague’s concerns about the diversity of our audiences in a way that was inappropriate and hurtful,” Morgan wrote in the letter. “The words came out — at a raised volume that has been one of the side effects of the stroke — differently than I intended them.”The York is a niche company, founded in 1969, that operates out of a church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. During fiscal 2023, it had an annual budget of $2.2 million, according to a filing with the Internal Revenue Service; Morgan was paid a salary of $95,000.On Friday at 5 p.m., the company issued a news release saying that Morgan had “resigned from his duties, effective immediately.” Jim Kierstead, the board’s president, raised the diversity issue in his statement in the news release, saying, “We will soon be announcing plans for a future filled with diversity, talent, and musical theater in order to continue our long legacy of supporting artists of all backgrounds.”It quickly became clear that Morgan’s departure had been preceded by the resignation of Gerry McIntyre, the theater’s associate artistic director.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Women Entrepreneurs Are Hitting a Funding Wall

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      For women starting new businesses, early funding from venture capital firms led by other women is vital. But few are large enough to lead subsequent rounds of financing.When Oriana Papin-Zoghbi was looking for venture capital funding to develop a new type of test for ovarian cancer, she found her pitch did best with women investors. “They were able to resonate with the problem we are trying to solve,” she said.Avestria Ventures, a fund focused on women-founded start-ups, led an early investment of $5 million in Ms. Papin-Zoghbi’s company, AOA Dx. And two years later, Good Growth Capital, a firm founded by women, led an additional $17 million investment.Ms. Papin-Zoghbi expects raising the next round of funding to be more difficult. Medical devices are expensive to develop, and AOA Dx is looking for an additional $30 million to bring its first product to market. “Most women-led funds cannot lead a round that size,” she said.More than 100 women-led venture capital funds, many specifically focused on investing in companies started by women, have been founded in the last decade, a trend that has contributed to a gain in fund-raising by women who are just starting their businesses. Female-founded start-ups received 7 percent of pre-seed and seed funding, the earliest funding a start-up raises, in 2023, up from 5 percent in 2015, according to the data platform Crunchbase.But women-led funds tend to be small, limiting their influence to early funding rounds. More mature companies led by women have not seen the same increase in funding. For women-founded businesses seeking investments past a Series B round, typically the third funding round, the share of venture capital dollars contracted to 1 percent from 2 percent over the same period, according to Crunchbase.Founders like Ms. Papin-Zoghbi are hitting — or fear hitting — a funding wall, an obstacle they say has been heightened by a rollback in diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and a general downturn in start-up investing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      D.E.I. in College, Attacked and Defended

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      More from our inbox:Why Trump Doesn’t Want Another DebateTrump’s Mental FitnessCancel the Sentinel Missile ProgramA Walker in Manhattan Eli DurstTo the Editor:Re “D.E.I. Is Not Working in Colleges. We Need a New Approach,” by Paul Brest and Emily J. Levine (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 5):Mr. Brest and Dr. Levine underscore the importance of inclusion for all students’ academic success. I agree: For students to succeed, they must have access to a rigorous learning environment in which they also feel they matter.But I disagree with the professors on the history and roles of diversity offices that are responsible for fostering such a sense of belonging. Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in higher education are mission-driven, evidence-backed, research-informed and tailored to meet the particular needs of each campus.These practices seek to bring people together and collaboratively eliminate barriers to success, and they have evolved with legislative and judicial efforts to address decades of discrimination against protected categories under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Given the complexities of differing institutional types, historical legacies and current contexts, the solution includes acknowledging that we live in a pluralist society, that we can value differences as a community of learners, and that doing so is not contrary to academic freedom and critical thinking.There is work ahead to ensure we can continue to meet the needs of our ever-evolving communities. There always will be work ahead; the pursuit of progress is, by definition, unending.Paulette Granberry RussellWashingtonThe writer is the president and C.E.O. of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      If Kamala Harris Is a D.E.I. Candidate, So Is JD Vance

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      Ever since speculation began that Vice President Kamala Harris might replace President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, there has been a steady, ugly chorus on the right. The New York Post published a column that declared that Harris would be a “D.E.I. president,” and quickly the phrase ricocheted across the conservative media ecosystem.The invocation of diversity, equity and inclusion programs meant to bring people from underrepresented backgrounds into institutions of power and influence clearly implied that a Black woman got power because of racial preferences. Black achievement, in this narrative, is always unearned and conferred without regard to merit.Listening to JD Vance’s speech at the Republican convention on Wednesday night, as he laid out his remarkable biography — a young man with roots in an economically devastated backwater who scaled the heights of the American elite — I couldn’t help thinking to myself: If Harris is a D.E.I. candidate, so is Vance. It just depends on what kind of diversity you mean. It depends, indeed, on how you understand the role of identity in shaping the opportunities that define anyone’s life.All politics is, at some level, identity politics — the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country. For modern presidential and vice-presidential candidates, one of their most valuable assets is their life story. Some elements of that story are bequeathed at birth, but what makes politicians successful is their talent at narrating that story in a manner that allows voters to see some version of themselves and their own aspirations in the candidate. This kind of storytelling, embedded in American archetypes and ideals, has shaped our politics.Vance’s entire business and political career has flowed from his life story, which is embedded in identities he did not choose: Born a “hillbilly,” of Scotch-Irish descent, he grew up in poverty, son of a single mother who was addicted to drugs. Overcoming this adversity, these disadvantages, lies at the core of his personal narrative. His ascent would hardly be so remarkable if he started from a life of middle-class comfort. But no one is portraying Vance’s elevation to the Republican ticket as the outcome of some kind of illegitimate identity politics, nor is Vance perceived as having benefited from a political form of affirmative action.And yet he almost certainly did. Race is not the only kind of diversity that gets noticed and embraced. Elite institutions love up-by-your-bootstraps Americans, and that archetype is all over Vance’s life story. A promising white candidate from a county that sends few students to an elite college like Yale would get a strong look, even if that person’s grades and test scores were less impressive than other applicants’. (To be clear, I have no idea what kind of grades or scores Vance had.) Regardless of race, applicants from working-class backgrounds, especially if they were the first in their family to attend college, are deemed to add class diversity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is This the End for Mandatory D.E.I. Statements?

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      Harvard and M.I.T. no longer require applicants for teaching jobs to explain how they would serve underrepresented groups. Other schools may follow.For years, conservatives condemned the use of diversity statements by universities, which ask job applicants to detail their commitment to improving opportunities for marginalized and underrepresented groups.Critics called such statements dogmatic, coercive and, in one lawsuit seeking to end the practice in California, “a modern day loyalty oath” that recalled when professors were required to denounce the Communist Party.But the use of diversity statements continued to grow, and eventually became a requisite when applying for a teaching job at many of the country’s most selective universities. That seems to be changing.Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each recently announced that they will no longer require diversity statements as a part of their hiring process for faculty posts.The decisions by two of the nation’s leading institutions of higher learning could influence others to follow suit.“The switch has flipped as of now,” said Jeffrey S. Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School. Many professors on hiring committees, he said, may have been reluctant to voice their concerns about mandatory diversity statements before now. “But I think the large, silent majority of faculty who question the implementation of these programs and, in particular, these diversity statements — these people are being heard.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Museum Revolution Gains Momentum

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      Faced with dwindling attendance and changing demographics, museum directors are shifting their approach, with an eye toward “radical hospitality.”When Melissa Chiu began her tenure as the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 10 years ago, she had a stray thought about the institution’s location, on the National Mall, and its appearance, a doughnut-shaped concrete structure by the architect Gordon Bunshaft with a certain resemblance to a spaceship.“Maybe some of our visitors thought it was the Air and Space Museum,” she said of the popular institution next door, which, like the Hirshhorn, is part of the Smithsonian and which was getting more than six million visitors a year at the time. “So, OK,” she said, “that’s not a bad thing.”Chiu — who is appearing this week at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Venice with the artist and writer John Akomfrah to discuss how artists and museums can work together to address social, political and ecological issues — did not wait around for confusion to boost attendance at her museum. (The annual conference was founded by The New York Times, and is convened by the Democracy & Culture Foundation, with panels moderated by Times journalists.)Melissa Chiu, the director of the Hirshhorn, in front of Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #04” at the museum. Her mantra for the museum? “Radical accessibility.”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesThe number of people visiting the Hirshhorn has increased dramatically since she started in 2014, when the museum received 552,000 visitors. In 2018 and 2019 that figure was up more than 50 percent, and even in the post-lockdown phase of the pandemic, a time when many museums have faced a slump in visitors, the numbers are still well above that decade-old baseline.The issue of attendance has been a focus of museums large and small across the country lately, as tourism has shifted, interest on the part of younger people has waned in some places and regional demographics have changed. Museums have taken various steps to manage the challenge: featuring newer and sometimes lesser-known artists, catering more to local audiences, and adding technological enhancements to attract nontraditional visitors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Virgil Abloh’s Legacy Reaches a New Stage

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      Shannon Abloh and the Fashion Scholarship Fund unveil a new plan.Many companies, including fashion companies, may be going silent about their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the face of political change. The last round of major designer appointments may not have included a single creative director of color. But at least one group is doubling down on its commitment to broadening the style-talent pipeline.At its annual gala on April 8, Peter Arnold, the executive director of the Fashion Scholarship Fund, the nonprofit that is dedicated to expanding access to the industry for underprivileged students, and Shannon Abloh, the widow of Virgil Abloh, will unveil a new strategic plan for the Virgil Abloh “Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund. The new initiative will double the number of recipients and expand the way the fund defines support.As such, it marks the next step in Ms. Abloh’s efforts to consolidate her husband’s legacy.Mr. Abloh, the pioneering Black designer who founded the brand Off-White, collaborated with Nike and became the first Black creative director of Louis Vuitton men’s wear, died in late 2021 of a rare form of cancer.“When he became successful, Virgil was the first Black face that many kids saw in a room they didn’t know they could enter,” Ms. Abloh said via Zoom from Chicago just be fore getting on a plane to fly to New York for the Fashion Scholarship Fund event. “He and I talked about, How can we turn this into something that really means something over time?” The Virgil Abloh “Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund was part of the answer.Shannon Abloh with the designer Aurora James at the CFDA awards ceremony in November 2022.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesNow, she said of the D.E.I. reversals, “it’s really nerve-racking, seeing the changes that are happening. But for me, all it means is that the work needs to continue to be louder. It just makes me double down and say, ‘OK, then we need to fight harder.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Indiana Law Requires Professors to Promote ‘Intellectual Diversity’ or Face Penalties

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      Faculty members in public universities could be disciplined or fired, even those with tenure, if they are found to fall short of the new requirements.A new law in Indiana requires professors in public universities to foster a culture of “intellectual diversity” or face disciplinary actions, including termination for even those with tenure, the latest in an effort by Republicans to assert more control over what is taught in classrooms.The law connects the job status of faculty members, regardless of whether they are tenured, to whether, in the eyes of a university’s board of trustees, they promote “free inquiry” and “free expression.” State Senator Spencer Deery, who sponsored the bill, made clear in a statement that this would entail the inclusion of more conservative viewpoints on campus.The backlash to the legislation, which Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, signed March 13, has been substantial. Hundreds wrote letters or testified at hearings, and faculty senates at multiple institutions had urged the legislature to reject the bill, condemning it as government overreach and a blow to academic free speech.“The whole point of tenure is to protect academic freedom,” said Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Professors, who described the law as “thought policing.”Colleges nationwide have been buffeted by debates about academic freedom in recent years. Several states, including Florida, Texas and Nebraska, have proposed bills limiting tenure, some of which have passed. More broadly, Republican-led states have targeted diversity programs in universities; those bills, which have restricted or eliminated those programs, have had more success becoming law, with such measures in place in at least a half-dozen states.Under the Indiana law, which goes into effect in July, university trustees may not grant tenure or a promotion to faculty members who are deemed “unlikely” to promote “intellectual diversity” or to expose students to works from a range of political views. Trustees also may withhold tenure or promotion from those who are found “likely” to bring unrelated political views into the courses they are teaching.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      University of Florida Eliminates All D.E.I.-Related Positions

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      The move complies with a state law that barred public universities from using government funds for initiatives that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.The University of Florida has terminated all positions associated with diversity, equity and inclusion at the school in compliance with new state regulations, according to a university memo released on Friday. The move comes almost a year after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bill that largely banned the state’s public universities and colleges from spending federal or state money on D.E.I. initiatives. In accordance with that law, Florida’s Board of Governors, which oversees the State University System of Florida, also voted to prohibit state spending on such programs at public universities. The University of Florida’s terminations included closing the office of the chief diversity officer and halting all D.E.I. contracts with outside vendors, according to the announcement on Friday. Thirteen full-time positions were eliminated, along with administrative appointments for 15 faculty members, a spokeswoman for the university said in an email. The university is just the latest school in the state to eliminate D.E.I. programs. Both the University of North Florida and Florida International University have already removed or started to phase out such programs. Last year, Florida became one of the first states to enact laws restricting or eliminating D.E.I. initiatives. That prompted other Republican-led states to follow suit, including Texas, where a ban on D.E.I. initiatives and offices at publicly funded universities and colleges took effect on Jan. 1. In Utah, the governor last month signed a bill paring back D.E.I. programs at state universities and in state government. And the Alabama Legislature is considering similar legislation. Universities across the country have vastly expanded diversity programs in recent decades amid concerns over underrepresentation on campus. Supporters of D.E.I. have said that the initiatives are a good way to foster inclusion and that they help students from all backgrounds succeed on campus.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More