Will a Texas law — SB 17, passed last year, which prohibits various kinds of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — effectively gut academic-freedom protections in research and teaching? As our Megan Zahneis reports, that’s what the University of North Texas has concluded. As written, the law doesn’t apply to core academic functions. But UNT’s general counsel decided there was enough vagueness in the law to worry. “We’re trying to take a very stringent read of the law,” is how Clay Simmons, UNT’s chief integrity officer, put it.
The result? UNT’s compliance office claims to think that SB 17 requires, say, sociologists studying demographic disparities to justify their research decisions to the state. “So if you’re doing research on homelessness,” Simmons told the Faculty Senate, “you have to be very careful if you’re going to focus on a certain identity within homelessness. So if you’re looking at LGBTQ homeless individuals, then you’ll have to make sure that that is narrowly tailored within the scope of work.”
There’s stringency and then there’s paranoia. It’s notable that, apparently, no other public institution in Texas has taken similar steps. “Making up provisions in SB 17 that do not exist is the hallmark of a higher-education system that has gone totally rogue,” is how Jeremy Young, an official with PEN America, put it.
Some faculty members at UNT see the college’s apparent overcompliance as “precisely what the Texas Legislature wanted,” as philosophy professor Adam Briggle told Zahneis — “to scare people so much that they will be hesitant to do the sorts of things, or talk about the sorts of ideas, that the legislature doesn’t like.” And it’s true that a related bill, SB 16, might have more directly impinged on academic freedom. But that bill failed.
Indeed, when it comes to the wave of anti-DEI legislation of the last couple of years, the bills that have passed have, as a rule, targeted DEI offices and policies but left research and teaching alone. (The exception is Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, although the portions most restrictive to academic freedom were overturned by the courts.) Whatever the legislators intended — and intentions surely vary — the laws as written have largely preserved academic freedom. SB 17 is no exception.
If you’re inclined to think that the net effect of these bills on academic-freedom proper will be pretty minimal, the situation at UNT might look like an aberration. There’s another possibility, of course. It could instead be the canary in the coal mine. We’ll know soon.
