Teaching social work in Tuscaloosa, Ala., Cassandra E. Simon often assigns readings that describe how the families her students might one day serve have been impacted by more than a century of housing, employment, and education discrimination. The associate professor has encouraged her students to engage in spirited discussions about race, even assigning a project in which they advocate for or against a social-justice issue.

Doing any of those things today, she argues in a federal lawsuit, could get her fired from the state flagship, where she’s taught for 25 years. Last year, the state’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, signed into law a sweeping bill that restricts what professors can teach about race. If any of their lessons veer into what conservative politicians have deemed “divisive concepts,” faculty members risk being reported, investigated, and potentially fired.

That kind of incursion into the curriculum is growing and prompting a flurry of First Amendment challenges from Simon and other plaintiffs. It’s a line state lawmakers did not cross early on in their push to dismantle DEI efforts, even as universities shuttered offices, laid off employees, canceled scholarships, and called off diversity training. But over the past two years, more than a dozen laws have been enacted that either limit which classes can be taught or imposed restrictions on what professors can say in the classroom, according to a Chronicle analysis of state legislation and a compilation of what PEN America calls “educational gag orders.”

This year especially “has been a banner year for censorship at a state level across the country,” said Amy B. Reid, senior manager at PEN America’s Freedom to Learn program. “The point of a lot of these restrictions is to put people on guard, worried that anything or everything could be prohibited so you really have to watch what you say.”

Some of the chief architects of the DEI-dismantling playbook have insisted that they’re not trying to silence anyone. In a January 26 letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal by Ilya Shapiro and Jesse Arm of the Manhattan Institute, the institute declared that “Conservatives Have No Interest In Censorship.”

“By ending practices such as identity-based discrimination and compulsory, politically coercive diversity statements,” these laws “protect the rights of professors and students to engage freely on all topics, including race,” they wrote.

Despite such reassurances, recent bills seeking to eliminate diversity efforts are encroaching on curricula in a variety of ways. Some states, like Texas, Florida, and Utah, are giving boards more control over what goes into the core curriculum, as well as the ability to shut down programs with low enrollments or questionable work-force advantages. Others, like Alabama and Mississippi, have erected guardrails on topics that can be discussed in the classroom.

Supporters say these laws are needed to prevent liberal professors from veering off into lessons that amount to activism. Some conservative lawmakers argue that it’s their responsibility, as stewards of taxpayer dollars, to ensure public universities are offering degrees that will help students be successful and land jobs.

Critics see these incursions as infringements on free speech and academic freedom.

The laws are, in some cases, the result of months of contentious hearings and negotiations that have softened some of their hardest edges. Tennessee’s “Divisive Concepts Act” stipulates, for instance, that delving into such content is OK if it’s done in an objective manner. It also says it’s not meant to interfere with academic freedom.

Much, though, is left up to interpretation. “These mandates are inherently subjective and will get professors thinking, ‘Can I advocate for this position vociferously or do I have to censor myself so I don’t run afoul of this law?’” said Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Conservatives have legitimate concerns that faculty members are overwhelmingly left-leaning and that conservative viewpoints might be given short shrift, he said. “I understand that frustration. They’re asking ‘What are the levers we can pull?’ But when you start pulling those levers,” by telling faculty what views they can and can’t espouse in the classroom, “they raise important First Amendment concerns.”

In January, Simon joined in a lawsuit filed on behalf of students and faculty members at the University of Alabama, arguing the state’s “divisive concepts” law is discriminatory, vaguely worded, and violates free-speech rights.

The concepts professors are told to avoid include the idea that any race, nationality, sex, or religion is inferior or superior, or that anyone is responsible for actions committed in the past by people with the same characteristics. They’re defined vaguely enough that a few Alabama professors have reported canceling class projects, changing curricula, and rethinking whether they can even offer certain courses.

“This has put a cloud over both faculty and students,” Simon told The Chronicle. “We’re all wondering what topics we can still talk about.”

Simon said she was threatened with disciplinary measures last fall over a student-led advocacy project in her class on “Anti-Oppression and Social Justice,” a required course for the social-work major. Each semester, she asks her students to choose a social issue and plan a protest or other way to advocate for it. Last fall, after she stepped out of the room, she said, the students came up with an idea of staging a sit-in to protest the state’s recently passed anti-DEI law, SB 129.

Shortly before the sit-in was to take place, Simon received an email from a dean asking her to call off the protest immediately and threatening disciplinary measures. The email said that despite Simon’s assurances it was the students’ idea, the assignment appeared to “create a situation where students are being forced to assert a position and/or unwillingly take part in political activity.” Thus, it was in violation of the law the students were planning to protest against. They could proceed with a protest on their own, independent of the class, if they registered in advance. The protest was called off as a class project and Simon wasn’t disciplined.

Simon, who is still teaching the course, foresaw other potential land mines. She regularly shows her students Eyes on the Prize, an award-winning PBS documentary that covers major events of the civil rights movement. In the past, the lawsuit states, “her students have expressed experiencing feelings of anger, guilt, complicity, and shame, which may run afoul of SB 129.” (Under the law, faculty are to steer clear of “divisive concepts” that cause students to feel guilty because of their race, sex, ethnicity or religion.)

Simon said the discomfort her students — both Black and white — have felt after watching historical footage of children being heckled on their way to school or protesters being chased down by police dogs has led to productive and healthy discussions.

“We’re seeing an encroachment into the classroom that’s troubling, but also part and parcel with today’s broader attack on DEI,” said Antonio L. Ingram II, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund and a lead lawyer in a lawsuit challenging the Alabama law.

Ingram said that many underestimate the full impact of the Alabama law. “Some people say this means we won’t be able to teach Black history, but it’s so much more serious than that,” he said. Generations of social workers, teachers, and other professionals will be denied important historical context that would make them more effective and empathetic professionals, he said.

“Our plaintiffs work in the cradle of the civil rights movement,” Ingram said, but are being denied the opportunity to “teach these communities about the impacts of racism and sexism and homophobia.”

The ACLU of Mississippi has filed a similar lawsuit against a new Mississippi law, HB 1193, which also takes a broad swipe at colleges’ diversity efforts. The law bans public colleges from having any academic programs or courses “that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, endorse divisive concepts or concepts promoting transgender ideology, gender-neutral pronouns, deconstruction of heteronormativity, gender theory, sexual privilege, or any related formulation of these concepts.”

Under the law, the lawsuit states, “history teachers will be banned from discussing slavery, the Civil War, discrimination in the past and present, the civil rights movement, the women’s suffrage and women’s rights movements, the LGBTQ rights movement, and many other aspects of American life and life throughout the world.”

The law also sets up a new complaint process for students, parents, and employees to report alleged violations. The bill’s Republican sponsor, Rep. Joey Hood, did not respond to a request for comment.

Lawmakers in Ohio took a different tack in their efforts to assert greater control over curricula and stamp out any evidence of DEI. A law that takes effect this month requires faculty members to post their syllabi online for students, parents, and the public to view. It also requires all students to take a course on American civics literacy that would cover capitalism and documents like the U.S. Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation.

The law, which conservatives say is intended to thwart liberal bias in academe, also gives trustees, who are appointed by the governor, more authority to cut majors or programs, especially those with low enrollments or inadequate “workforce needs.” In response to the new enrollment thresholds, the University of Toledo announced in April that it was suspending nine undergraduate majors including Africana studies, Asian studies, disability studies, Middle East studies, and women and gender studies.

Under the law, professors must allow “intellectual diversity” in the classroom and colleges must investigate all complaints suggesting divergent opinions aren’t being accommodated. Students should be allowed and encouraged “to reach their own conclusions about all controversial beliefs or policies,” it states.

Colleges will have to submit annual reports listing those complaints and any disciplinary action taken in response.

David. J. Jackson, president of the Bowling Green Faculty Association, said that might sound innocuous. “But what if I teach a course on voting behaviors and a student brings up the following assertion — that Elon Musk stole the election for Trump. That’s false, and normally I could say that’s false and move on. But now the student has a right to complain that we denied them the right to come to their own conclusion and require an investigation that complicates a faculty member’s life,” he said. “It just crystalizes how problematic and poorly written and difficult to enforce the bill is.”

The laws are often written in the kind of vague language that the U.S. Supreme Court has cautioned doesn’t give a person of ordinary intelligence reasonable notice of what is banned, said Nadine Strossen, a professor of law emerita at New York Law School and past president of the American Civil Liberties Union. Faculty members fearing that anything they say about such topics could get them in trouble avoid important topics altogether. That deprives students of the right to learn about and engage in discussions about those subjects, she said.

These laws give the enforcer “unfettered discretion to pick and choose which particular ideas, information, etc., they will deem to violate the law,” she said, which leads to the danger of viewpoint discrimination. Faculty members might ask whether a class on the Holocaust has to include Holocaust denial and question whether it’s even worth bringing up. Mandatory diversity requirements “violate the academic freedom to choose what to teach and how to teach it,” Strossen said.

Florida was the first state to pass a law taking control over general-education courses, a list of classes students can choose from to meet graduation requirements. The state’s sweeping 2023 law, which is being challenged in federal court, bans general-education courses that teach “identity politics” or those “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.”

It prohibits core general-education courses that “distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics” or are “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States … ”

Since Florida’s law was enacted, states like Texas have followed suit.

A bill that the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, recently signed into law, SB 37, will give politically appointed university governing boards more control over what courses to include in the general-education curriculum. Courses that are booted out can be taken as electives, but enrollments typically drop when courses can’t be used to fulfill degree requirements.

Karma R. Chávez, a professor of Mexican American and Latino/a studies at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Austin Chronicle that if, as she expects, ethnic studies is left out of the core curriculum, enrollment and funding will drop. “It’ll be death by a thousand cuts,” she said. Similar concerns have been raised in other states where burgeoning gender- and ethnic-studies programs have been excluded.

Governing boards can also decide which minors or certificates should be eliminated.

The bill also calls for setting up a new office, led by an ombudsman appointed by the governor, to investigate complaints of noncompliance with the state’s DEI bans.

Every five years, college governing boards in Texas will be required to examine general-education curricula to make sure the courses are “foundational and fundamental to a sound postsecondary education,” are “necessary to prepare students for civic and professional life,” and equip them for jobs “and in the betterment of society.”

Colleges will have to regularly update boards on any changes in their core curricula, and the governing board can overrule them if it wishes.

Sen. Brandon Creighton, a Republican who authored SB 37, said the bill “takes on politically charged academic programs and ensures students graduate with degrees of value, not degrees rooted in activism and political indoctrination.”

Neetu Arnold, a policy analyst at the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote in an April opinion piece that “modern course rosters have become Cheesecake Factory menus — bloated and overwhelming to navigate, with a confusing mixture of legitimate and corrupted options. Right now, we simply hope students stumble upon the courses that will set them up for success and avoid the ideological landmines.”

Arnold cited “Numbering Race,” a general-education course offered this spring at UT Austin, as being skewed toward a liberal perspective. The course description states it teaches “quantitative methodology and statistics through the lens of race.”

According to Arnold, math is being used in the course “to forward activist agendas.”

“You can’t pursue objectivity and truth when there are also expectations to align with certain beliefs,” she wrote. “Students need a broader overview of different perspectives in general education, not a specialized focus on one way of viewing things.”

Arnold pointed out one picture, from a 2019 course syllabus, that showed the discrepancy between the proportion of Black and Hispanic students, at 40 percent, and teachers, at 15 percent. That kind of example, she said, encourages students to approach statistics through “the unsupported assumption that racial disparities must be corrected, rather than considering other possibilities.”

In a follow-up email, Arnold suggested “other possibilities” could account for the shortage of Black teachers, like different academic interests and differences in preparation. Another factor, which she didn’t mention, was that after segregated schools were declared unconstitutional in 1954, state certification boards decertified large numbers of Black teachers. Black schools closed and many white schools refused to hire Black teachers. Retention became a growing problem as their numbers dwindled.

A UT Austin spokesman said the “Numbering Race” course is one of dozens students can take to meet math requirements.

Texas lawmakers are also flexing their authority over curricula by choosing which minors and certificates can stay and which should be cut — either because too few students signed up or because they’re less likely to lead to lucrative jobs. When enrollments and starting salaries for graduates drop, “It’s going to be interesting to see, will they cut Black studies but not European studies, or gender studies but not philosophy?” said Ingram, of the Legal Defense Fund.

The law “will put what we teach in the hands of political appointees rather than in the hands of faculty who have studied these subjects and understand their nuances,” said Brian L. Evans, president of the Texas conference of the American Association of University Professors. State lawmakers could remove certain topics in nursing or environmental-engineering courses, for instance, to satisfy the demands of political leaders.

“American faculty members already foster a diversity of viewpoints in their courses,” Evans added in an email. “The idea that the 80,000 faculty at 125 Texas public institutions march in lockstep is ludicrous. Under SB 37, faculty members fear that they must now march in lockstep with the opinions of the politicians or face reprisals. Ironically, this is the political indoctrination from the very people who are making these laws.”

According to the Texas AAUP, at least 40 faculty members have left the state because of the legislative changes. Stella M. Flores, a professor of higher education and public policy and a leading national expert in education-equity issues, said that it’s unclear that she’d be able to continue her work given the curriculum restrictions.

“At UT-Austin, I taught courses related to equity and inequality in education, the economics of education, and diversity and equity policies in higher education,” she said. “I can’t imagine the scholar I would be now had my own instructors across my various degree pathways been restricted in their ability to teach and research about the role of educational opportunity in U.S. society.”

She’s accepted an endowed chair at Boston College, and will be leaving this summer.