Wisconsin on Tuesday became the latest state where the legislature is targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion work. And Republican legislators there are taking a different tack to do so than the one pursued by their colleagues in Florida, Texas, and more than a dozen other states: the budget.
The state’s top Republican told the Associated Press that he’d like the budget-writing committee to slash about $32 million in funding to the University of Wisconsin system over two years, which he said was equivalent to what the system would spend on DEI-related work in the same time period. “I hope we have the ability to eliminate that spending,” said Robin J. Vos, the speaker of the State Assembly. “The university should have already chosen to redirect it to something that is more productive and more-broadly supported.”
DEI programs have emerged as a legislative target in several states this year after model legislation curtailing such offices was circulated by two conservative think tanks in January. DEI can refer to a wide range of efforts, like programs to recruit and retain students and faculty of color, or policies to make campuses more hospitable to people from varying racial, ethnic, or demographic groups. Many critics view DEI officers as enforcement mechanisms for ideological orthodoxy.
While lawmakers elsewhere have proposed bills that would prohibit DEI offices and efforts, Vos and his colleagues are seeking to cut off the public-university system’s ability to bankroll them. Officials in other states, like Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Oklahoma, have required colleges to account for how much money they spend on their DEI programs, but have not yet been successful in cutting spending on them. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, did the same in late December en route to banning public institutions from spending on DEI last month.
Though targeting DEI work through a state budget may seem like a less-direct threat than writing a bill banning spending on diversity, the chilling effect it creates is the same, said Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.
“If it’s evident what work is the target of the funding reduction, it pretty much signals” to institutions that if they want to continue receiving state support, they should curb diversity work, Granberry Russell said.
Regardless of how the specifics of budget negotiation play out, she added, “I don’t anticipate that this will be the first or last time that this particular issue will be debated in Wisconsin.”
Wisconsin Republicans will also face steeper opposition than their counterparts in the South; Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, promised on Wednesday to veto any budget that contained a $32-million cut to the system, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. “To cut, at this point in time, the University of Wisconsin system when we have a $7-billion surplus is irrational,” Evers said. “I’m hopeful that will change before the budget is passed.” In a Tuesday statement, the governor linked the prospective cuts to “Republicans’ decade-long war on higher-education institutions in our state.”
As governor, Evers holds partial veto authority that allows him to strike individual words and numbers from the state’s budget. The Legislature, both houses of which are controlled by Republicans, can override that line-item veto with a two-thirds vote, though it has not done so since 1985. Republicans hold that supermajority in the Senate, but they are two votes short in the Assembly.
For now, the situation in Wisconsin has reached a stalemate. The state’s budget committee postponed its vote on funding for the system late Tuesday after nearly seven hours of deliberations, the AP reported. The committee did not say when it expects to hold the vote, but the statutory deadline for finalizing the plan is June 30. If a budget has not been passed by the Legislature and signed by Evers before then, the state will continue to operate under its current budget. (In response to a request for comment from The Chronicle, a system spokesman said, “we have to wait and see what comes before the committee.”)
Partisan sparring over the budget for higher education has spilled into other areas. GOP lawmakers in the state voted this month to deny $197 million that Evers requested on behalf of the system for its top-priority project: the construction of a new engineering building on the flagship campus in Madison.
Adding to that complicated picture: The Wisconsin system recently hired a new associate vice president for equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging, whose first day of work was Monday. Part of Monica Smith’s role is to help the system “expand” its DEI efforts to encompass “viewpoint diversity,” among other facets of difference, Jay O. Rothman, the system president, wrote in a letter to administrators, which Wisconsin Public Radio reported on.
‘Political Football’
The subject of viewpoint diversity has been a fraught one in Wisconsin. Dave Murphy, the Republican chair of Wisconsin’s State Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities, hosted this spring a series of hearings on the importance of free speech and intellectual diversity. “I firmly believe that intellectual and viewpoint diversity must be on an equal plane with all other types of diversity our university system promotes. If it is not, our students will never receive the true college experience they deserve,” Murphy wrote in a column published in local media. (Murphy’s and Vos’s offices did not return requests for comment.)
To support his argument that campuses are beset with liberal political influence, Murphy cited the results of a free-speech survey released by the system this year. Nearly 61 percent of Republican students reported having felt pressured by an instructor “to agree with a specific political or ideological view being expressed in class,” while 19.7 percent of Democratic students said the same. “I sometimes think that you hear anecdotal complaints, that maybe they’re exaggerated a bit,” Murphy told The Chronicle in February. “The survey kind of tells me now that they probably weren’t exaggerated at all.”
That survey was delayed several times, amid procedural concerns, pushback from faculty leaders, and one campus leader’s resignation. It became, as one member of the team planning it wrote, a “political football,” with critics questioning whether the results would be used by Republican lawmakers as fodder for budget cuts.
Meanwhile, other stakeholders in the state have warned that attempts to legally codify viewpoint diversity could end up undermining it instead. Kevin P. Reilly, president emeritus of the Wisconsin system, wrote that efforts like Murphy’s hearings could “lead to legislation in which politicians of one party get to define free speech and intellectual diversity for the rest of us, with legal penalties if we violate the definition.” That, Reilly warned, is a dangerous prospect, and the reason he joined nearly 200 other former higher-ed leaders in signing a statement saying threats to free speech endanger American institutions’ “reputation as bastions of intellectual freedom.” (The group, called Champions of Higher Education, was convened by PEN America.)