Public colleges in Oklahoma are hurrying this week to compile details on “every dollar” spent over the past decade on diversity, a response to a prompt from a state education leader. It’s another example of heightened interest by a Republican state official in documenting, and potentially curbing, colleges’ efforts to promote equity and inclusion.
The request came in a letter from Ryan Walters, state superintendent of public instruction, to Allison D. Garrett, chancellor of the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education. The system represents 25 public colleges and universities.
“Universities across the country have violated academic standards by telling students that they are inferior and shamed because of their race,” Walters said, in a statement provided by an Oklahoma State Department of Education spokesperson. “These programs have pushed a radical agenda and I am calling for transparency. The far left has infiltrated higher education and we will not tolerate it any longer.”
Walters’s letter mirrors requests made over the past month to Florida’s public colleges by the office of Gov. Ron DeSantis and House Speaker Paul Renner, both Republicans.
In response to DeSantis’s memo, Florida’s public colleges submitted reports describing all required courses, programs, and activities related to diversity or critical race theory, as well as listing the names and titles of employees who worked on those efforts. Renner’s request, with a deadline of February 13, seeks two years’ worth of communications sent by campus diversity officials related to curriculum, faculty hiring, and faculty discipline, among other things.
The Oklahoma superintendent’s ask is even more substantial than DeSantis’s. In the letter, first obtained by the Tulsa World, Walters asked Garrett to account for “every dollar” spent over a 10-year period on diversity, equity, and inclusion; on related programs and materials; and on staff members who contribute to diversity work. Colleges have until Wednesday to put together their reports.
Walters, a Republican who was elected to his post in November, described the request as part of routine legislative efforts to review “expenditures and oversight in your spending practices.”
Walters campaigned last year on targeting what he described as widespread liberal indoctrination in public education. He announced this month that the state Department of Education is investigating two K-12 teachers for allegedly trying to “indoctrinate” students and “actively violated state law.” In a video posted on Twitter, he said he would not “allow our kids to be indoctrinated by far-left radicals.”
According to Chronicle reporting, Florida’s public universities reported spending 1 percent or less of their budgets on diversity and critical race theory. The amounts ranged from $8,400 at Florida Polytechnic University to $8.7 million at the University of South Florida. The state’s public colleges, meanwhile, wrote in a statement that they would identify and eliminate any academic requirement or program “that compels believe in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality.” In an email obtained by The Chronicle through a public-records request, one campus president praised DeSantis for “investigating how higher education institutions spend their state appropriations.”
Angela Caddell, a spokesperson for the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education, told The Oklahoman that colleges were working to comply with Walters’s request. She didn’t immediately reply to a request for additional comment from The Chronicle.
In 2021, Oklahoma passed a law barring public colleges from requiring any kind of diversity education for students, faculty, or staff. The measure was part of a wave of state laws that imposed restrictions on how colleges teach about race and sex. The diversity-education law made optional a previously mandatory orientation session for new students at the University of Oklahoma, and also altered a planned diversity course that student activists had called for in 2020.
