The anti-DEI landscape is changing
We’re now in the second year of the movement against diversity, equity, and inclusion, which got fully underway in January 2023, when the Manhattan Institute and the Goldwater Institute published model legislation encouraging states to rid campuses of DEI initiatives that the think tanks said “stifle intellectual diversity, prevent equal opportunity, and exclude anyone who dissents from a rigid orthodoxy.”
As the editor of our anti-DEI tracker, I’m fascinated by how the legislation has matured in a variety of ways. Here are some things I’m noticing:
Less-noticed bills could have an outsize effect
The mainstream news media has paid plenty of attention to the shutting down of DEI offices and inclusion programs. That story line has clear, visible victims (mostly students) whom journalists can see and talk to, and it’s what lobbyists focus their attention on during hearings. But, from my observations, it’s the other elements of this movement that will have a much more lasting effect.
As of this week, 28 bills would ban diversity training, and 42 would ban diversity statements. Meanwhile, 30 states have seen bills to ban DEI offices.
The ranks of higher-education administrators and faculty members have remained stubbornly white and male, despite a wide range of controversial experimentation with who sits on search committees, who qualifies for what job, and what counts as merit. Many hiring and retention practices are likely to be drastically altered if any of those bills become law.
Legislation is becoming more and more specific
Legislators last year used amorphous language in the first wave of bills to ban DEI practices. That created all sorts of headaches last summer for colleges’ general counsels, who had to wade through a glut of titles, activities, and policies to make sure employees weren’t doing anything to “promote diversity.”
In Florida and Texas, legislators and conservative activists are aboil over how administrators renamed and repackaged DEI efforts. College leaders said they had complied with the law. Conservatives say they aren’t following its spirit.
In order to avoid that sort of confusion, the newest legislation has very specific language spelling out what you can and can’t do. The bills are also dozens of pages long, in contrast to the one-page bills we saw last year.
In Nebraska, legislators are considering a bill that would bar administrators from promoting “any theory of unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation, allyship, transgenderism, microaggressions, microinvalidation, group marginalization, anti-racism, systemic oppression, ethnocentrism, structural racism or inequity, social justice, intersectionality, neopronouns, inclusive language, heteronormativity, disparate impact, gender identity or theory, racial or sexual privilege, or any related theory.”
And in Wisconsin, after the UW system did away with diversity statements and compromised away its DEI offices, a legislator now wants to ban “loyalty pledges” and diversity training. As part of the bill, every college would have to post and make publicly available on its website all training materials used for students, faculty, and staff on all matters of nondiscrimination, diversity, equity, inclusion, race, ethnicity, sex, or bias. Violators of the proposed law would face unpaid leave for one year and automatic firing after a repeat infraction.
Far more bills are getting a lot more traction
The Chronicle drew criticism on X last June when we said in a headline that the year’s anti-DEI efforts had “fizzled.” Florida’s and Texas’ laws were so ambitious and received so much attention, and were such a shock to the higher-ed system, that it really did seem as if DEI had met its fate. But of the 21 states where lawmakers offered bills, only five enacted laws.
We’re less than two months into most states’ legislative sessions, and the bills this year are moving through statehouses much more quickly. That is probably because the national debate over free speech and antisemitism has brought negative attention to colleges’ DEI efforts.
Utah, which last year gave up on an effort to pass an anti-DEI bill after hearing from college leaders, was the first state this year to enact one, even though its top higher-education leader said the legislation would be difficult to enact and was “untested.” And an anti-DEI bill in Kentucky has already passed the state Senate.
Now we’re up to 73 introduced bills, with 25 of them having failed to pass or been shelved.
In my previous job as an editor at Education Week, I helped design and manage a tracker of legislation against critical race theory. I learned then to drop my assumptions about politics, education, and race. Both the anti-CRT and anti-DEI movements are unpredictable, involve often-surprising characters, and have outsize effects on how educators serve students of color.
Browse our map, which we update weekly, here. Read our coverage here.
What I’m reading
- Accuracy in Media dispatched undercover staffers to public-college campuses in Texas to record DEI officers saying they’ll change the name of their programs without changing the activities, The Dallas Morning News reported.
- HBCU graduates owe more debt and earn less than their peers at non-HBCUs, according to a recent study by the Institute for College Access and Success.
- Enrollment gains by Black students outpaced those of white students, according to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education’s analysis of data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
