President on a Tightrope
Boise State’s leader must tread carefully through the culture war. Others may soon walk the same line.
Politics on Campus
July 2, 2021
The letter from 28 Republican lawmakers arrived before the president had even moved into her new home.
Typically, when conservative politicians send early demands to public-college presidents, they focus on the rising cost of college. But in this three-page missive, that concern was secondary to another target: programming designed to support the college’s underrepresented students.
“This drive to create a diversified and inclusive culture,” the lawmakers wrote to President Marlene Tromp of Boise State University, not even two weeks into her job in July 2019, “becomes divisive and exclusionary because it separates and segregates students.” That is not, they said, “the Idaho way.”