A member of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents has asked if the university system’s Morris campus has become “too diverse.”
Steve Sviggum, a former GOP Speaker of the House, asked the school’s acting Chancellor Janet Schrunk if the school, which had 58% white enrollment pre-pandemic and 54% now, had become too diverse “from a marketing standpoint.”
Sviggum told Schrunk that he’d gotten letters from friends whose children chose not to go to the Morris campus because they found it “too diverse … they just didn’t feel comfortable there.”
The predominant non-white ethnic group at the campus is Native Americans, who make up roughly a third of the student population. The campus includes buildings that were once part of a Native American boarding school and qualified Native American students attend tuition free.
Black, Hispanic and Asian-American students combined make up roughly 10% of the school’s population.
