The University of Kansas staff is now required to remove gender pronouns from their email signatures to comply with a new Kansas Board of Regents directive, the school announced Tuesday.
All staff must remove “gender-identifying pronouns and personal pronoun series from their KU email signature blocks, webpages, Zoom/Teams screen IDs and any other form of university communications,” the announcement from KU Chancellor Douglas Girod states.
KU staff have until July 31 to comply.
Further, Girod told the university community that “KU Information Technology will remove the gender pronoun field from the ‘people’ pages on websites.”
The announcement cites the Kansas Board of Regents’ recently issued directive to state universities, which comes in the wake of a state legislative budget provision targeting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives across state agencies.
The regents mandated that state universities dismantle DEI programs, “including pronoun labels,” the University Daily Kansan reported.
Girod’s announcement also lists four other provisions that the university has already addressed in response to the new directive.
The school has eliminated all positions, “mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities” that relate to DEI. It has also canceled related state grants or contracts and abolished DEI training requirements.
Some of these changes are already apparent.
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