What’s New
A sweeping bill that targets public colleges’ diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in Utah is likely to be approved by the state’s Senate this week. But ahead of that vote, the state’s top higher-education official is warning that the bill is “untested” and would be “difficult to implement” — a rare critique from an official in the more than 20 states that are considering similar legislation.
Last week, the bill, HB 261, passed along party lines in the House, with support from majority Republicans and Gov. Spencer Cox, and is expected to be put to a vote in the Senate this week, approximately two weeks after its introduction, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. But on Monday, Geoffrey Landward, Utah’s interim commissioner of higher education, warned the state Senate Education Committee that that pace would “inevitably” require him to return to the legislature for “clarification, revision and guidance.”
“This is not a light switch that we can flip on and off,” Landward told lawmakers.
The Details
The bill, proposed by State Rep. Katy Hall, a Republican, would prohibit public colleges from having DEI offices or staff, holding mandatory diversity training, using diversity statements in hiring and promotion, and considering race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions or employment; all four of those provisions follow model state legislation proposed last year by the Goldwater Institute and the Manhattan Institute.
Hall’s is one of at least four bills introduced in this year’s legislative sessions across the nation that would enact similar sweeping bans, joining proposals in Arizona, South Carolina, and West Virginia, according to The Chronicle’s tracker of bills targeting DEI efforts. Thus far, five states have adopted anti-DEI measures, but some higher-ed leaders have struggled to interpret and implement the new laws, in part because their language doesn’t explicitly define what constitutes a DEI effort. That decision has largely been left to colleges’ general counsels.
Some colleges have gone about making changes such as shuttering identity-based campus centers, removing the word “diversity” from office and job titles, and removing optional online training on implicit bias.
“It’s impossible to know the challenges complying with this law will present until we start doing that work,” Landward said on Monday, in a nod to those difficulties.
Thus far, none of the leaders of Utah’s colleges have weighed in on the bill, reflecting new rules passed by the Utah Board of Higher Education that bar them from doing so. Those measures require public colleges to “refrain from taking public positions on political, social or unsettled issues that do not directly relate to the institution’s mission, role or pedagogical objectives.” Some community members, though, made their opposition to HB 261 known on Monday, in rallies at the University of Utah and outside of the Senate Education Committee’s meeting room at the Utah Capitol, according to the Tribune.
During Monday’s hearing, the committee’s sole Democrat asked to table the bill, a motion that was defeated 8-1. The bill’s Senate sponsor, Keith Grover, a Republican, pushed back on that request and Landward’s remarks, saying the bill “has been a priority. It hasn’t been rushed through.” The committee members approved the bill by the same 8-1 margin, sending it to the Senate floor.
The Backdrop
In passing the Senate committee, Hall’s bill has made it further than a pair of DEI-related proposals that surfaced in the Utah Legislature last year, including another of Hall’s own bills, which would have prohibited public colleges from requiring diversity statements for hiring, promotion, or admissions purposes. That measure passed the House but failed in a Senate committee.
Meanwhile, Sen. John D. Johnson, a Republican, withdrew within a week a bill he’d introduced to block public institutions from funding or promoting DEI offices. The measure, he concluded in February 2023, had been “way too harsh,” the Tribune reported.
The movement against DEI efforts has gained new fuel in recent months: Observing campus reactions to the Israel-Hamas war, members of Congress accused colleges’ DEI offices of ignoring antisemitic behavior, and some conservative critics suggested that Claudine Gay had been selected as president of Harvard University because she is a Black woman. (Gay resigned this month after intense scrutiny of her congressional testimony on antisemitism and charges of plagiarism in her own scholarship.)
This month, Taylor R. Randall, the president of the University of Utah, announced that his institution would stop using diversity statements in its hiring process, a move that came after Cox, the governor, called the practice “very political” and “bordering on evil” in December, according to the Deseret News. The state’s Board of Higher Education said in response to Cox’s comments that it “continues to collaborate with all Utah colleges and universities to wind down the use of such statements.”
What to Watch For
Floor time for the Utah Senate is scheduled each day this week, allowing ample time for Hall’s bill to come to a vote and potentially setting up more friction between its proponents and Landward, who said on Monday that DEI programs help the state’s education system accomplish its twin goals of increasing college attendance and completion. “Barriers to higher education exist. The data are unambiguous on this,” he said, adding that “interventions in these barriers work. We know they work.”