University of Kansas Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little said Monday that she plans to take further action this semester to improve the climate of diversity, equity and inclusion on campus.

But she offered no additional details about how KU plans to absorb a $10.7 million budget cut that Gov. Sam Brownback ordered in May.

In an email message to faculty and staff at the university marking the start of a new academic year, Gray-Little described KU as being in a state of “transformation” that will present both opportunities and challenges on campus.

Last fall, student protests broke out on campus over what some have called a pattern of racial bias and discrimination at the university.

Those protests coincided with the growing Black Lives Matter movement that erupted in the wake of a series of police shootings of unarmed black men around the country. They also came in the wake of new allegations about female students being victims of sexual assault on campus.

In November, a student organization calling itself Rock Chalk Invisible Hawk issued a list of demands, calling on the university to, among other things, beef up enforcement of antidiscrimination policies, to hire more staff in the Office of Institutional Opportunity and Access, and engage in more diversity training.

In response to those protests, Gray-Little and then-interim Provost Sara Rosen established a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion advisory group to review cases of discrimination and intolerance on campus and to make recommendations about how the university could improve its campus climate.

That group issued a report in April that called for a number of reforms in university policies and practices to provide more support for minority and international students, and to improve the university’s hiring practices to attract more diverse faculty and staff.

“I also expect us to continue our conversations about diversity and inclusion, and you can expect to learn about next steps related to the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion advisory group report later this semester,” Gray-Little said in her message Monday.

Gray-Little also said the $10.7 million allotment cut that Brownback ordered last spring “has forced us to make difficult choices regarding the current fiscal year budget,” but she offered no specific information about what choices have been made or what impact they will have.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman in the office of Provost Neeli Bendapudi said Monday that decisions haven’t been finalized about how those cuts would be applied, saying it may be the end of this week or early next week before any announcements are made.

That cut includes $7 million to the Lawrence campus and $3.7 million to the KU Medical Center campus in Kansas City, Kan.

The allotment cuts amounted to an average of 4 percent for most state agencies and programs other than K-12 education and public safety functions. But within the Regents university system, KU and K-State took proportionately larger cuts, around 5 percent, in order to spare the smaller regional universities that are more reliant on state general fund money for their overall operations.