At least 14 states this year will consider legislation that could dismantle the ways college administrators attempt to correct historical and structural gender and racial disparities and make campus climates more inclusive, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education analysis.
The Chronicle has identified at least 19 bills that will be considered in the coming months that seek to ban the employment and funding of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices; the use of pledges by faculty and staff to commit to creating a more inclusive environment on campus, commonly known as diversity statements; mandatory diversity training; and identity-based preferences for hiring and admissions.
While college administrators argue that they have a legal, moral, and financial obligation to more aggressively tackle forms of discrimination on campus and provide extra resources to historically marginalized employees and students — who will soon make up more than half of the nation’s population — opponents say those efforts are ineffective, illegal, and, in fact, discriminatory.
The move to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, as they’ve become known, has been supercharged with the resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s first Black president, over plagiarism charges, her handling of protests surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, and the belief that she unfairly benefited from discriminatory hiring practices.
Gay “is the poster girl, if you will, for a lot of the complaints and critiques about higher ed in the last few years. She was dean of the faculty, she implemented DEI programs and got kudos for that, and rode that to the Harvard presidency,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. “She was a bureaucrat that crystallized DEI structures. … There seems to be a window, a policy-push window, against DEI that is open.”
Since The Chronicle began tracking DEI legislation in early 2023, 49 bills have been introduced across 23 states. Almost two dozen of those bills last year were either tabled, failed to pass, or vetoed, while seven bills in five states were signed into law.
The passage of those laws turned DEI programs and departments charged with serving minority students upside down in those states.
Texas Tech University, for example, renamed its Black Cultural Center to be the Student Enrichment Center, according to local media. And the University of Houston shuttered its LGBT resource center.
A Long March Through the Institutions
The origin of the political campaign to dismantle colleges’ DEI efforts traces back to January 2023, when the Manhattan Institute and the Goldwater Institute created a playbook for lawmakers wishing to oppose DEI. In its proposal, scholars described DEI offices and their staff as “a kind of revolutionary vanguard on campuses; their livelihood can only be justified by discovering — i.e., manufacturing — new inequities to be remedied.”
The national conversation around DEI that has emerged in the resignation of Claudine Gay will open the floodgates for more attacks on DEI.
The proposal characterized DEI offices as “divisive” and claimed they enforced critical race theory and related political orthodoxies as official campus policy. This has led, according to the authors, to a chilling of free speech and conservative viewpoints on campus, and has stoked hostility aimed at white cis gendered males.
The Manhattan and Goldwater institutes advised lawmakers to steer clear of interfering with classroom instruction or research so as not to be seen as calling for censorship. Most, if not all the language used in the Manhattan and Goldwater institutes’ playbook would appear in the legislation pushed since the beginning of 2023, The Chronicle found.
Christopher Rufo, who helped write the proposal with Shapiro and Matt Beienburg, director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute, posted to X (formerly Twitter) in January 2023 that he and other conservatives hoped to undo decades of liberal ideological dominance in the academy.
“Left-wing radicals have spent the past 50 years on a ‘long march through the institutions,’” Rufo tweeted following his appointment to the board of New College of Florida. “We are going to reverse that process, starting now.”
Advocates of DEI efforts say colleges have a long legacy of discrimination and lack of diversity in their ranks. Consider that Black students accounted for 7.4 percent of those admitted to selective higher-education institutions in 2021, despite Black Americans accounting for nearly 13 percent of the population enrolled in undergraduate education. Even when admitted, those students can feel isolated or experience racist acts while on campus.
Colleges need a collective and explicit strategy to tackle those forms of discrimination, DEI advocates say.
Last spring, the fight over diversity, equity, and inclusion offices operating in higher education intensified as state lawmakers pushed bill after bill aimed at either eliminating or curbing DEI efforts, with some limited success.
North Carolina lawmakers overrode the governor’s veto, banning diversity statements at community colleges and the University of North Carolina. North Dakota banned diversity statements and joined Tennessee in prohibiting mandatory diversity training.
And Wisconsin lawmakers held up pay raises for the entire public higher-education sector until college officials redirected DEI funding.
When the majority of legislative sessions ended just before the summer of 2023, it appeared the fever over anti-DEI legislation broke with it. But it proved to be simply a pause in what has become a second push against diversity, equity, and inclusion work in colleges.
The Israel-Gaza war became a flash point for campus protests and deepened political divisions. The rhetorical fights around the war adopted language often associated with DEI offices. Israelis were seen by student groups on the left as “colonizers,” a word commonly used in left-wing circles to describe not only the European forces that physically subjugated the Indigenous populations of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, but also white Americans who move into and gentrify Black neighborhoods. Israelis were criticized as oppressors operating an apartheid state.
These accusations were seen by conservatives as evidence of the work of DEI offices to frame conflicts along identity lines and view people as either oppressor or oppressed. And that created, conservatives believe, room for hate speech sanctioned by DEI and the left.
“Structures in DEI fomented antisemitism,” Shapiro said.
And with Gay and other college presidents on the defensive, opponents of DEI pounced. Many don’t expect this wave to cease anytime soon.
“The national conversation around DEI that has emerged in the resignation of Claudine Gay will open the floodgates for more attacks on DEI,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
New Bills and an Executive Order
As 2024 approached, lawmakers began yet another attack on DEI, The Chronicle found.
So far this year, new bills have been filed in Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and South Carolina.
And while the broadsides against DEI have percolated in state legislatures, they have also become favored talking points for some conservative governors in an election year.
In December, Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican of Oklahoma, came out strongly against DEI and signed an executive order prohibiting the state from spending money on DEI offices in state agencies; the order also prohibits mandatory diversity training and bans the use of diversity statements.
“In Oklahoma, we’re going to encourage equal opportunity, rather than promising equal outcomes,” Stitt said at a news conference. “Encouraging our work force, economy, and education systems to flourish means shifting focus away from exclusivity and discrimination, and toward opportunity and merit. We’re taking politics out of education and focusing on preparing students for the work force.”
On January 2, Rep. Tim Jimenez, a Republican of Utah, prefiled a bill prohibiting public or private employers from requiring training that compels employees or applicants to believe in or adhere to “certain concepts” related to race, color, sex, or national origin.
“What’s happened is identity politics and philosophies have infiltrated what I think were very well-meaning ideas and programs,” Gov. Spencer Cox, of Utah, said during a news conference in December. “What we’re actually seeing is the reverse. That we’re drawing battle lines and that we’re using identitarianism to force people into boxes and victimhood — and I don’t think that’s helpful.”
A Safe Haven Under Attack
For many students of color, the fight against DEI feels like an affront to their existence on campus. At Ohio State University, the Frank W. Hale, Jr. Black Cultural Center is the hub of DEI work and efforts to help students of color navigate college life. For the roughly 8 percent of the students at Ohio State who identify as African American, the center is a place where they can meet with staff members who share their cultural experience and can relate to the challenges they face on campus.
Ohio is considering a bill that would do away with most DEI efforts, though the bill has struggled to gain traction.
The idea of closing DEI offices is a slap in the face, said Brielle Shorter, a sophomore at Ohio State.
“It’s extremely hurtful. We have one building that is a safe haven,” Shorter said. “The simple things, like tutoring through our DEI office, simply giving inner-city kids from Ohio a chance to go to school, is being attacked.”
Like many students, Shorter is attuned to the rising cost of college and the criticism that student demands for a sense of belonging and inclusiveness on campus are both difficult tasks and goals that may not have held as much importance with previous generations of students.
For Shorter and many students, college is a social experiment where people from different backgrounds exchange ideas, and for the less fortunate a place to make connections that can lift them up the socioeconomic ladder.
“I think that’s another confusion on what Black students want now versus what they wanted before. The cost is driving the desire for more inclusion, and we understand that it’s not what you know but who you know. So in that way making college more inclusive and improving the sense of belonging goes a long way to helping students of color and people from disadvantaged backgrounds,” Shorter said.
Others see DEI efforts as a distraction from the structural inequalities that colleges create.
DEI offices are focused on the least impactful inequalities on campus.
“DEI offices are focused on the least impactful inequalities on campus,” said Tyler A. Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College. “DEI is a way for colleges and universities to appear progressive when they are in fact engines of inequality through student debt placed on Black and brown students who they purport to be lifting up.
Harper believes that DEI offices are not simply ignoring those bread-and-butter issues, but that they were erected to deflect attention from students’ concerns about the skyrocketing cost of college.
“After 2011, and the Occupy Wall Street movement and the rising movement against student debt, colleges knew they had a problem and they were getting all this bad press,” Harper said. “Institutions need to slap a smiley face on all that.”
Harper said that he doesn’t support the legislative efforts against DEI, because those attacks strip away parts of its mission. He would prefer that DEI be rolled into the human-resources office, where it could focus on the mission of diversifying the work force and the faculty, procurement, and diversity training.
“What has gotten lost in the smokescreen of training is that DEI offices set standards for fair hiring and human-resources functions,” Harper said. “There is value in setting those HR standards.”
As the state legislative cycle gears up, observers believe DEI could face even harsher criticism and attacks in the upcoming year. Muhammad, of Harvard Kennedy School, anticipates that lawmakers will look at procurement practices designed to purchase goods and services from minority-run firms. Shapiro thinks additional outside pressure from wealthy donors and financiers like Bill Ackman will be aimed at DEI.
“People are paying attention to what is happening in higher ed,” Shapiro said.
Jacquelyn Elias, Erin Gretzinger, Julian Roberts-Grmela, Emma Hall, Maggie Hicks, Helen Huiskes, Forest Hunt, Audrey Williams June, Adrienne Lu, Katherine Mangan, Kate Marijolovic, Zachary Schermele, Alecia Taylor, and Megan Zahneis contributed to this report.
