New legislative campaigns against DEI have begun. Tell us what you know.
Last week we relaunched our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion legislation tracker. So far we’ve found that at least 16 states will consider bills this year that could dismantle the ways colleges “attempt to correct historical and structural gender and racial disparities and make campus climates more inclusive,” our J. Brian Charles reports.
From his story:
While college administrators argue that they have a legal, moral, and financial obligation to more aggressively tackle forms of discrimination on campus and provide extra resources to historically marginalized employees and students — who will soon make up more than half of the nation’s population — opponents say those efforts are ineffective, illegal, and, in fact, discriminatory.
The move to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, as they’ve become known, has been supercharged with the resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s first Black president, over plagiarism charges, her handling of protests surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, and the belief that she unfairly benefited from discriminatory hiring practices.
Journalists struggle writing about the ways race affects our society because sources are reluctant to go on the record, enemy lines aren’t always clear, and the language used to describe racist acts rapidly evolves. Reporters’ and editors’ own biases and abbreviated understanding of America’s racist past can interfere with our ability to see clearly what’s in front of us.
It’s something our newsroom is constantly thinking about.
The attack on DEI is no exception. It has been a fast-moving political campaign waged by lawmakers, technocrats, and some faculty members, at the local, state, and federal levels to rid colleges of identity-conscious hiring and admissions practices, diversity training, diversity statements, and DEI officers. Journalists still aren’t clear about what efforts labeled “DEI” encompass, whether they’re effective, and what DEI opponents’ goals are.
And it’s why I’m calling for you, our readers, to help us help you understand how this year’s campaigns will affect higher education.
Here are three ways:
Embed our map on your website: This week, we added a new tool to our tracker allowing you to embed our map on your website. We update our map weekly, adding new bills, detailing how they will affect college campuses, and following them through the legislative process.
Our embed code, which you can find below the main map on the tracker page, will allow visitors to your website to see our map and our latest bill count.
Tell us if we’ve missed a bill: Know about an anti-DEI bill in your state that you don’t see on our tracker? Or notice that the status of a bill we’re tracking is outdated? Email DEITracker@chronicle.com with the name of the bill and a link, and one of our 11 reporters working on the tracker will add it.
Send us story tips: Now that a handful of states have signed anti-DEI legislation into law, we’re on the lookout for ways these laws are changing the work of administrators, faculty members, and students. Tell us your story by filling out our Google form (there’s an option to remain anonymous) or email me directly at daarel.burnette@chronicle.com.
What I’m reading
- What can we learn from the federal government’s attempts to document the Ku Klux Klan’s violence in the decades after the Civil War? Jamelle Bouie asks in this analysis of the January 6 hearings.
- An investigation in The New York Times reveals the Claremont Institute’s concerted effort to clarify how to wage a war against DEI.
- A new book on cancel culture by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression fails to capture the long history of the cancellation of historically marginalized communities, David Cole writes in The New York Review of Books.
