Every spring, the NCAA’s March Madness tournament draws enormous public attention, with women’s college basketball now commanding a larger share of viewership than it once did.
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Every spring, the NCAA’s March Madness tournament draws enormous public attention, with women’s college basketball now commanding a larger share of viewership than it once did.
What followed this year’s Final Four was a public confrontation between South Carolina’s Dawn Staley and UConn’s Geno Auriemma, two of the most accomplished coaches in women’s college basketball history.
This is not just a sports story. It is a public test of whether an institution’s decisions reflect the values and standards it claims to uphold.
In the aftermath, every college and university leader should be asking a simple yet uncomfortable question: Is my institution prepared to respond when an incident like this becomes public in a way we could defend to stakeholders across campus, surrounding communities, and the broader public?
That question has a concrete starting point, and for many institutions, it is closer than they think.
Despite sustained state and federal efforts to weaken or dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in higher education, many of the mechanisms for recognizing and responding to concerns, conduct, and inequitable outcomes remain in place. Federal and state laws, campus policies, conduct processes, reporting structures, and civil-rights obligations still exist, even as some have been deliberately weakened or selectively dismantled. What matters now is the purpose those remaining tools actually serve: mitigating harm or merely managing optics.
Institutional response is often triggered by notice: a report, a referral, a visible incident, or some other clear basis for action. But notice is not the same as action. Since this incident unfolded on national television in real time, no formal complaint needed to be filed for the incident to be known to the NCAA, the respective institutions, and the public. Historically, institutional response in cases like this has ranged from a public apology, temporary scrutiny, and perhaps a committee review after the tournament concludes. This latest example illustrates the persistent disconnect between the visibility of a confrontation and the level of accountability that follows.
Even before the current anti-DEI backlash, colleges and universities often struggled to close the gap between what their policies promised and what their practices delivered. As NADOHE’s recent resource, Rooted In Mission and Values: A Guide for Advancing Access, Opportunities, and Outcomes in Higher Education suggests, this work has always depended on more than symbolic language or siloed offices; it requires institutions to treat fairness and accountability as whole-system responsibilities rather than one-off episodes.
The current environment of legal uncertainty, political pressure, and institutional caution has intensified those weaknesses by adding anticipatory compliance, institutional overcorrection, and risk-driven retreat. As the Phillip J. Bowman Center for Scholarship to Practice’s April 2025 report “Critical leadership for civil rights in higher education: Experiences of chief diversity officers navigating anti-DEI action” shows, institutions are responding to anti-DEI action through strategic inaction, proaction, and reaction while navigating pressure from policymakers, donors, governing boards, and executive leadership.
Together, these patterns carry a cost that extends beyond any single incident. Every delayed response, every selectively applied process, every statement that substitutes for action teaches those within and beyond the institution what they can expect when something goes wrong. Those lessons have operational consequences.
To be sure, not every incident is clear-cut, not every concern is formally reported, and not every interaction that warrants attention rises to the level of formal review. The starting point for institutions serious about accountability is neither complicated nor unfamiliar: respond to what is already visible. Before the formal complaint. Before the press inquiry. Before the social media narrative takes hold as public understanding. Before the enrollment data registers the costs of institutional silence.
That begins with auditing the mechanisms you still have and using them in a timely, appropriate, and fair manner. It means including diversity strategists and practitioners as functional instead of ornamental thought and action partners. It means communicating clearly with campus communities about how to raise concerns before they escalate. Belonging and community are not built only in championship seasons, welcome-week promises, or commencement speeches. They are built and tested in how institutions respond when harm occurs.
The confrontation between Staley and Auriemma may remain, for some, a sports story. It also rerouted public attention away from South Carolina’s win: a reminder of how quickly a visible exchange can become the story an institution must reckon with.
An institution’s credibility is not guaranteed. It is earned and re-earned through consistent, principled responses to what occurs within and beyond our campuses. In the end, institutions teach trust the same way they teach anything else: by what they repeatedly practice in public.
Dr. Tamara N. Stevenson is vice president, diversity, equity, and inclusion/chief diversity officer at Westminster University in Salt Lake City, Utah.
