After Texas acted last year to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public colleges statewide, students like Kaitie Tolman were eager to offer the programming their institutions no longer could.
The path to doing so seemed clear: Senate Bill 17, which took effect January 1, exempted student groups from its provisions, which included the banning of DEI offices and employees. But Tolman, a fifth-year student at the University of Houston and former president of the LGBTQ student organization GLOBAL, quickly learned that students’ hopes to take up the defunct programs wouldn’t be so simple.
When Tolman and her peers tried to determine what exactly was being eliminated on their campus, they were met with vague email responses from administrators and a couple of confusing meetings. Everyone they talked to reassured the students that they would help in any way they could. But when Tolman asked for specific details, like how to organize an LGBTQ graduation ceremony, many said they weren’t able to help out of fear of legal repercussions, she said.
To Tolman, administrators appeared to “err on the side of caution” in talking with students about DEI programming at all. As a result, students were being told they could supplement programs being lost, while simultaneously being blocked from any information about what those programs were. “We very much felt the solution they came up with was, ‘Well, y’all figure it out,’” Tolman said. “‘We were happy to help you, as long as we don’t have to actually do anything.’”
Tolman and her peers aren’t the only ones left in the dark about the consequences of anti-DEI legislation. Since last year, eight states have passed laws curtailing the type of diversity initiatives state-funded colleges can offer. Yet public knowledge of the laws’ on-the-ground effects has largely been limited to sporadic local news coverage, and sometimes filtered through politically distorted channels.
To assess how colleges have changed in response to these new laws, The Chronicle surveyed public colleges in two states that have enacted them: Texas and Florida. Of the 137 colleges surveyed, about 40 percent answered, many of which offered detailed accounting of changes they have made to comply with the laws. (Several other colleges answered, but failed to address The Chronicle’s specific questions or declined to participate.)
The result is the most comprehensive portrait yet of how colleges are reshaping themselves in response to legislation targeting DEI. And it reveals that campuses are reacting inconsistently — some dramatically and others not at all.
Nearly four dozen campuses in the two states offered substantive responses to The Chronicle: Over all, 24 colleges made changes to an office or department; 23 cut or reassigned jobs; seven ended DEI training for admission or employment; two axed funding for DEI activities; and 15 eliminated other DEI-related programming. Interestingly, 19 said they were already in compliance with the law and didn’t have to alter anything.
Florida and Texas are the vanguard.
The responses yielded a familiar aura of uncertainty as administrators grapple with what is permissible under the legislation. The changes campuses did make varied greatly. While one Texas college eliminated its multicultural center, another opened one to replace its DEI office. While some colleges in Florida have simply reassigned their DEI employees, the University of Florida recently terminated 13 of its full-time staff. Experts previously told The Chronicle that the vague, sweeping laws leave large room for interpretation. The immediate effects, spelled out here, prove just how vast that gulf is in practice.
Activists and students like Tolman said The Chronicle’s findings illustrate a loss of community on campus. Programming offered to students, like social gatherings or counseling services, could dwindle. Some also worry that while some organizations are still running, they’ll lose funding and support. Students and faculty said they received little information about how administrators came to these decisions in the first place and worry colleges could be overreacting when so much is left up for interpretation.
“These DEI bills are new terrain. There’s not all this precedent that we have in other areas of the law. Florida and Texas are the vanguard,” said Antonio L. Ingram II, a civil-rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “They’re using these overly conservative hermeneutics to really render many of these exemptions not actionable, and students and faculty are suffering as a result.”
For the laws’ advocates, questions remain about how colleges are complying — if at all. As some colleges have simply changed an office’s name or reassigned programs, they worry there is still more to be done to eliminate DEI altogether. And with some campuses opening activities to “everyone” that were traditionally catered to one group, they’re concerned administrators are creating workarounds rather than eradicating DEI completely.
“I understand why some admins are engaging in massive resistance to the idea of the colorblind merit-based system that the legislature has required and that’s because it goes against their ideological priors,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, where he co-authored model legislation that many states have used in writing anti-DEI bills. “My answer to that is: tough. You have to follow the law.”
To some extent, the rollout of these laws has left no one satisfied. And with fresh legislation being proposed each month, what’s unfolding in Florida and Texas may provide a glimpse into a messy and chaotic future.
In early 2023, conservative lawmakers began pushing to abolish DEI practices, which advocates argue help to mitigate discrimination on campus and provide support to historically marginalized communities. Among the most common targets were standalone diversity offices, mandatory diversity training, and the use of diversity statements in hiring — practices that critics called ineffective and discriminatory in their own way.
“We must ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth, not the imposition of trendy ideology,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said in a January 2023 speech that effectively kicked off his campaign to reshape public higher education in the state.
What followed was a bonanza of legislative activity taking aim at colleges’ DEI practices. Since The Chronicle started tracking the legislation last year, at least 81 bills have been introduced — including 37 this year alone — in 28 states. The bills are often modeled after proposed legislation from the Goldwater and Manhattan Institutes, two conservative think tanks.
In Texas, Senate Bill 17 banned state funding of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Following months of debate and amendments to the bill, the final version prohibited colleges from establishing a diversity, equity, and inclusion office, which it defines as a “unit of an institution” that influences hiring practices or promotes differential treatment of people based on race, color, or ethnicity. It also refers to an office that conducts training and programs on race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
The law, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June, also bans colleges from hiring a person to perform the duties of a DEI office, requiring diversity statements, or mandating training that refers to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation, while exempting course instruction, research, and student organizations. (Section 59 of the state’s appropriations bill also banned spending on “unconstitutional” DEI programs.)
DEI has absolutely, abysmally failed at meeting those goals, and universities need a new strategy.
In Florida, House Bill 931 and Senate Bill 266 prohibited “political loyalty tests” as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in hiring or promotion, and banned colleges from spending state or federal money on programs that “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism.”
The Senate bill also carved out exemptions for student organizations, stating they can still receive funding through student fees and may use college-owned facilities, as well as programs that are required to comply with federal law, necessary to obtain accreditation, or those approved by the State Board of Education or the Board of Governors. After a series of amendments, DeSantis signed both bills into law in May. In January the Board of Governors banned Florida’s 12 public campuses from using state or federal dollars toward diversity programs or activities, aligning with the law.
Now that the laws have gone into effect, the impacts have emerged piecemeal through scattered news stories, general-counsel guidance documents, and reports from political actors watching the changes take shape on the ground. The resulting landscape — and the reasoning behind campuses’ responses — has been anything but clear.
To try to establish a clear picture of how campuses have responded to the legislation, The Chronicle contacted the two states’ public colleges between late January through the beginning of March. We asked for information on any updates the colleges had made to offices, programs, jobs, training, courses, and funding efforts in order to comply. While local media reports have captured a number of the individual changes that have transpired since the laws passed, this analysis focuses solely on the responses we collected.
Some campuses took sweeping action. The University of Houston told The Chronicle it nixed more than 40 student-affairs activities along with its LGBTQ Resource Center. The university also closed its Center for Diversity and Inclusion, opening up the Center for Student Advocacy and Community in its place and moving five employees into new roles.
That exemplified what The Chronicle found across other Texas colleges: Ten institutions created a new office after eliminating one, and four colleges changed the name of an old office. Names that included the words diversity, equity, or inclusion were out, replaced by terms like “engagement,” “community,” and “belonging.” For example, the University of North Texas and Texas Woman‘s University both created new centers — the Center for Belonging and Engagement and the Center for Belonging and First-Generation Students, respectively — to replace their shuttered DEI offices.
In Florida, colleges took an even more sweeping approach, often cutting programs and offices without any mention of a replacement. Florida State University and the Universities of Florida, South Florida, and North Florida reported to The Chronicle that they had eliminated their DEI offices, and reassigned or changed the roles of any DEI staff. Florida State and the University of Florida were the only colleges across both states that reported changes to funding practices. Florida State terminated a DEI mini-grant program, memberships to DEI organizations, and subscriptions to DEI-related publications, while the University of Florida re-routed $5 million in DEI funds to a faculty-recruitment fund.
The University of Florida was the only campus that said it had fired staff as a result of new laws. Others reassigned employees or changed their roles, and a handful said they let vacant posts remain unfilled. Florida State told The Chronicle it “repurposed” two human-resources positions that focused on DEI, while another position’s DEI-related responsibilities were replaced with other tasks. At Seminole State College, the former chief DEI officer became the “Associate Vice President for Organizational Culture and Strategy/Title IX Coordinator.”
It wasn’t always clear how new offices or titles represent different missions. Some colleges specified to The Chronicle that their newly created departments would support all students, or pointed to certain services for pregnant, first-generation, and veteran students within revamped offices.
Such changes have elicited suspicion from conservative lawmakers and accusations from some DEI opponents that colleges are attempting to subvert the legislation. “The idea that these changes are cosmetic, and that the administrators at these universities have not examined their goals with DEI, is disheartening and problematic because it clearly states that improving outcomes for Texas students is not a priority for them,” said Sherry Sylvester, a fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Austin.
But DEI proponents argue that name changes are far from superficial and make it more difficult for students to find services that meet their needs. “The lack of transparency about how to find a resource that used to be obviously available, that’s a harm to students, and that’s a harm that’s due to compliance with a bill that erases DEI institutions,” said Ingram, the Legal Defense Fund attorney.
Whether these new offices, job titles, or other changes will stick remains to be seen. Already at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the college told The Chronicle that it had walked back its plans to launch a new center, the Office of Campus and Community Belonging, in place of its shuttered Office of Inclusive Excellence. It cited an “evolving understanding of SB 17 as well as continuing voluntary changes in staffing and personnel reappointments from that office.”
As colleges have taken steps to comply with the law, some campus community members say how they have gone about it has been shrouded in secrecy.
After Tolman, the University of Houston student, struggled to find information about what was being cut, she and other students filed a public-records request to get a precise answer. The list they received, which the university shared with The Chronicle, enumerated eliminations across identity-based hubs, as well as other departments such as student housing and residential life, counseling and psychological services, and university career services. A note next to nearly every program suggested that student groups could take it over — which struck Tolman as frustratingly ironic, given the resistance she had encountered in trying to do just that.
In response to The Chronicle’s inquiry, the university recognized its student-organization exemption but said it “did not go about assigning tasks/events to students,” and each student group “would need to make the decision on whether it wants to pursue any of the programming or events.” Texas A&M University had a similar response, saying that some student organizations had taken over programs that were previously organized by the Pride Center. Dallas College also pointed to its student-organization exemption in its response, noting that student groups may host a multicultural event or program, “even one that may include DEI elements.”
Faculty across the state feel like there’s administrative overreach.
For Tolman, the saga exemplifies the difficulties students face navigating changes while administrators fret over what they can and can’t do or say. Even after the students got the list of cuts, exactly what each program did wasn’t clear. So they turned to the Wayback Machine, a site that allows users to see web pages that have since been taken down, for more details.
Some staff Tolman spoke with felt bound by a “gag order,” she said, and worried that if they helped, they could lose their jobs. She said she understood employees’ hands may be tied, but felt frustrated by how difficult it’s been to find information that the university should seemingly still be able to provide.
In a statement to The Chronicle, a spokesperson for the University of Houston said it seriously considers concerns about “perceived constraints placed on staff members in discussing these issues,” while acknowledging that some students are frustrated with changes made in response to SB 17. “We are dedicated to upholding an open and respectful dialogue within our university community, and we encourage constructive feedback,” the university said.
Texas faculty members also feel left out of the loop. Pat Heintzelman, president of the Texas Faculty Association, said many colleagues have reported receiving little written guidance from their colleges, even as their administrations seem “comfortable” in their understanding of the law. The implementation of the law surrounding student groups feels especially opaque, she said.
“Faculty across the state feel like there’s administrative overreach because they don’t want to make a mistake, so they’re going overboard to make sure that they don’t let something get by that they could be held accountable for,” Heintzelman said.
Like Tolman, some Florida students are also unsure what’s allowed under the new regulations. Tazara Weilhammer, a second-year law student at Florida State, said students have avoided hosting “politically charged” events on campus or using university-provided funds unless their programming is “neutral.” She said she worries that since Florida colleges aren’t able to allocate any money toward DEI efforts, the students in an organization could risk losing their status as an official club if they host certain types of events.
For instance, Weilhammer, who is also vice president of OUTLaw, an LGBTQ organization on campus, has been planning an identity-affirmation clinic, which aims to help people navigate the legal roadblocks of changing their gender. While the group could have requested funding for the event and found a space on campus, they worried it could get them in trouble, she said. Instead, a local gay bar agreed to host the clinic for free.
Still, Weilhammer said operating with so much uncertainty can be scary, and she worries even if students host similar events off campus, it could lead to more restrictions for the whole university.
“I don’t want to create a target on the back of my school from the government because we’re trying to fulfill the mission of our organization,” Weilhammer said.
Administrators may risk going further in their interpretations of the laws than the legislators did in writing them. Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE), said officials need to be more transparent about their decisions and the reasoning behind them. That way the campus community can push back on cuts to programs that might still comply with the law.
“To the extent that we can encourage more close scrutiny of the law and its application to an institution’s programs and practices,” Granberry Russell said, “we may find that indeed, the programs that are being implemented do not require mandatory diversity statements [and] very little if any mandatory diversity training [and] that the so-called DEI bureaucracies are not functioning in ways that are in violation of the law.”
Sylvester, of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, disagrees with those who say the bills are vague, and to her, the exemptions are clearly carved out. Such excuses from administrators and faculty, in her view, are a smokescreen for campuses’ refusal to implement the law and move away from DEI as an “ideology.”
“We want every Texas kid to be qualified and able to attend university and to succeed and to provide what is needed to succeed. We want the faculty of Texas universities to reflect Texas,” she said. “DEI has absolutely, abysmally failed at meeting those goals, and universities need a new strategy — not to eliminate the goals, but to create a strategy to achieve them.”
Despite the climate of uncertainty that prevails, the consequences of the laws shouldn’t be overstated. Almost one-third of the colleges that responded to The Chronicle’s request said they did not make changes at all.
Nine colleges in Florida and 10 in Texas reported that they did not make any changes to comply with the laws. All but one of those were community colleges. Their reasoning was largely the same: The colleges never had DEI programming or offices that targeted specific groups, so they did not need to adjust to the laws. North Florida Community College, for example, did not have a DEI office to eliminate, a spokesperson said. And St. Petersburg College already complies with Florida’s bans on diversity statements and preferential hiring or admissions.
In Texas, some colleges expanded on their reasoning, placing an emphasis on how they meet the needs of students of diverse backgrounds without a dedicated DEI office.
Paris Junior College told The Chronicle that as a small, rural institution with a diverse student body, its focus has “historically approached our students’ individual needs from an inclusive and equitable perspective.” Coastal Bend College, a Hispanic-serving institution located in Beeville, Tex., said it is “particularly attuned to the needs of our diverse student body, without defining or labeling any particular effort.”
Not all colleges, however, leaned on institutional mission and approach as their justification. Texas State Technical College told The Chronicle that any policy favoring students based on their identity is “illegal on its face, even if done in the name of diversity, equity or inclusion.”
“The rebranding of a discriminatory practice does not make that practice legal. Initiatives that advance and proactively encourage such discrimination in the workplace are illegal,” the college wrote in a statement. “As an agency of the state of Texas, TSTC and its employees have a duty to follow the law, and we do so.”
The fact that a number of colleges have not made changes surprised some who spoke with The Chronicle. Heintzelman, for one, wondered how the colleges, and especially minority-serving institutions, could avert the restrictions on funding and programs.
You can’t rely on the bureaucracy when you’re in these times, when the bureaucracy is taking away all your institutional support.
In other ways, their inaction may align with community colleges’ longstanding functions. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion is built into their DNA given that historically, and even to this day, they are very much a place where a lot of children of immigrants and first-generation students of color and working-class students start their educational careers,” said Ingram, the Legal Defense Fund attorney.
Still, these community colleges’ responses could signal a markedly different interpretation of the law than their four-year counterparts. Some community colleges have identity-based student organizations with funding and advisers for those groups, and yet, some four-year colleges have responded to the new legislation by cutting off support for those groups. For example, after the closure of the University of Texas at Austin’s Multicultural Engagement Center, some university-sponsored student groups that were housed there now have to operate using their own funds and programming.
It seems unlikely that “these super-diverse institutions in the two-year junior-college world do not have similar programs,” Ingram said. Yet those programs “have been left unscathed, while the more aggressive advice from general counsels at the four-year institutions of public higher education in Texas are making overtures to curtail some of the students’ rights.”
Sylvester said she wasn’t surprised to hear that two-year colleges had taken little action in response to the law. And she saw no problem with the defense that they had never had offices that targeted specific groups — as long as “they’re being honest” that any such programs are designed to help students succeed in college.
“If the programs are there to inculcate students with an ideology, then that’s not the purpose of university … if they’re doing that, they should be closed down,” she said.
Institutional size and location may play a role. In Florida, for example, many smaller colleges have stayed out of the spotlight, said Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University, a private institution in DeLand, Fla. Where a university like Florida State is likely under constant watch from lawmakers, community colleges tend to remain outside of the legislature’s crosshairs, he said.
“It’s not a uniform world, and I think people are approaching it with this ‘this will pass’” attitude, Lake said. “They’ll just sort of tough it out. Others are hopping to it, and probably need to because they’re directly in the line of fire if they’re not careful.”
Even as the laws’ impacts come into focus, the chilling effect set by their vague and differing interpretations have left DEI advocates unclear as to what they can do next.
Some students and advocates, however, are poised to push back. Matt Hartley, former director of the University of North Florida’s now-defunct Interfaith Center, left his job shortly after Florida’s laws went into effect. He then joined a local interfaith organization that split from the University of North Florida last year and is planning to replicate DEI programs and resources off campus. The goal, he said, is to “take the lemons and make lemonade out of it.”
At Florida International University, which eliminated its DEI office in January, the Pride Student Union has also started working with external organizations to help with advocacy and fill in the gaps. Kaily LaChapelle, a junior who leads the student group, said its members have connected with almost every nonprofit in South Florida and have organized a number of rallies and protests in opposition to the state’s education laws. (FIU did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
“You can’t rely on the bureaucracy when you’re in these times, when the bureaucracy is taking away all your institutional support,” LaChapelle said. “So what do we have to do? Go to the community.”
But DEI advocates worry leaving the work up to students is unfair and unsustainable. It shouldn’t be a student’s job to support themselves and the community without any assistance from administrators, staff, or faculty, said Granberry Russell, the NADOHE president.
“Why place a burden on students to be responsible for teaching other students about their history?” she said. “Why place the burden on those students to address, among each other, what happens in a classroom?”
Replicating the work that many people spend years training for is also especially difficult. Lake, the Stetson professor, said he’s noticed many of those who were dedicated to DEI work have disappeared. “When they disappear,” he said, “that institutional commitment and memory tends to leave with them, and to the extent that people start outsourcing activities or just not replacing that, I think the students feel a real loss.”
DEI is not a problem. It never has been a problem.
Advocates see a need to pinpoint what is lost when these programs disappear. Tolman, the University of Houston student, said students can’t go to the space that was formerly the LGBTQ Resource Center and feel the same sense of safety now that it is open to everyone.
Tolman transferred to Houston from Collin College, a two-year institution where she had to seek out LGBTQ resources for herself and build out her own “binder” of services and programs. At Houston, she said the dedicated LGBTQ center meant all those resources were already compiled in one place — one “binder” — for her to easily access.
“A lot of students are going to give up” looking for resources, Tolman said, “because they’re so overwhelmed to begin with.”
Other advocates pointed to a need to look beyond the effects and instead spotlight what they see as the real motivations behind the laws. “DEI is not a problem. It never has been a problem,” Ingram said. “This is about a certain political class in Texas, looking at certain communities that they find to be flourishing too much … and trying to create restrictions, trying to create closets even, again, for people to feel shame, for people to feel like they don’t belong.”
Ingram and others see hope in the efforts to push back. “I’ve seen so many powerful students and professors stand up and say, ‘We’re not going anywhere,’” he said. “‘We belong. You cannot take that from us.’”
It’s “hugely concerning” to Shapiro, of the Manhattan Institute, that colleges may try to evade the DEI laws with cosmetic changes, but still try to continue the same work. “I think there is going to be ongoing litigation over all of this,” he told The Chronicle.
Sylvester sees the laws targeting colleges as just one piece of ending “the tyranny of DEI” everywhere, from businesses to government agencies. “The universities will be the hardest because it’s where it started,” she said. “The tentacles are deep in the university systems.”
She’s not exactly sure when the vision will come to fruition. But she is confident about the trajectory: “We’re at the beginning of the end.”
