The tension in Idaho over whether universities are “indoctrinating” students with a leftist agenda was codified into law on Wednesday. Gov. Brad Little signed a bill that bars public schools and institutions of higher education from directing or compelling students to “affirm, adopt, or adhere” to what the state legislature views as the principles of critical race theory.
“The claim that there is widespread, systemic indoctrination occurring in Idaho’s classrooms is a serious allegation,” the Republican governor wrote in a letter to the Speaker of the state’s House of Representatives. “Most worryingly, it undermines popular support for public education in Idaho.”
The Idaho State Board of Education did not take a position on the bill, but Matt Freeman, the board’s executive director, said in an emailed statement that “the Board has not received any documented evidence of systematic ‘indoctrination’ occurring in Idaho’s public schools or our public higher-education institutions.”
The new law outlines what the legislature believes are “tenets” found in critical race theory and says that they “exacerbate and inflame divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation and the well-being of the state of Idaho.”
These tenets, according to the legislature, include the idea that people “are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or nation of origin.” The law states that students cannot be distinguished or classified based on their race — while also saying the legislation would not interfere with requirements to collect students’ demographic data. And it outlaws teaching the idea that “any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin” is superior to any other or can be used to justify treating people adversely.
The Idaho Press reported that the lawmakers who objected to the bill say that it will detract from classroom conversations and that antidiscrimination protections aren’t needed because Idaho already has them. But the newspaper reported that conservative lawmakers in the state are afraid that white students are being taught that they should be ashamed of “past wrongs carried out by earlier generations, such as slavery.”
Carl Crabtree, the Republican senator who sponsored the bill signed by the governor, did not respond before The Chronicle’s publication deadline to emailed questions about whether the law was meant to target any specific university programs, classes, or events. This week, he called the bill “a preventative measure,” the Idaho Press reported.
“It does not indicate that we have a rampant problem in Idaho,” he said on the Senate floor. “But we don’t want to get one.”
A Broader Campaign
Higher education has been under fire in Idaho. Last month, the state legislature cut $409,000 from Boise State University’s appropriation — the amount the institution said it spent on social-justice programs. The same week, a group of mandatory diversity classes were temporarily suspended at the university so that it could investigate an incident that officials believed took place in one of the classes. Officials said they had heard about the incident only second- and third-hand.
Recently, the advocacy arm of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which calls itself a free-market think tank, has been peppering the state’s residents with robocalls and radio ads that say public colleges are teaching students “to hate America,” The Chronicle reported. In 2019, the foundation’s director took issue with a letter from Boise State’s president that mentioned, among other things, the university’s graduation ceremonies for Black and LGBTQIA students. The director said the state’s colleges and universities “have joined the legion of left-leaning institutions that are using their campuses as state-sponsored platforms for intolerance, division, and victimhood.”
In a statement responding to the new law, a Boise State spokesman said the university supports “academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas on our campus.” He quoted the board’s policy, which states that Boise State is committed to its mission to “foster and defend intellectual honesty, freedom of inquiry and instruction, and free expression.”
Critical race theory has also been attacked by Republicans on the national level. In September, President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning funding for diversity and inclusion training. The order included critical race theory as one of the “divisive concepts” that should not be taught with federal dollars.
But critical race theory is not diversity-and-inclusion training. Its founding is closely intertwined with the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia University and the University of California at Los Angeles, who studies issues of race, racism, and the legal system. The American Bar Association called it “a practice of integrating race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship.” This practice, ”critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers.” It does not teach that any one race or ethnicity is superior or inferior to another, as the Idaho law suggests.
President Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order on the new president’s first day in office, but the Idaho law indicates that issues of diversity and inclusion may still be legislated at the state level.
Freeman, the executive director of the state’s Board of Education, said the board took the legislature’s concerns seriously and “will soon begin a comprehensive review of its governing policies related to academic freedom and responsibility for both faculty and students.” The board will also conduct campus-climate surveys of students.
