Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott speaks at the gubernatorial debate at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, Friday evening, Sept. 28, 2018, LBJ Library photo by Jay Godwin 09/28/2018
In The New York Sun, Maggie Hroncich discusses efforts by states like Texas to push back on the radical DEI movement. She writes:
Three weeks after Texas’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ban at public universities went into effect, a growing number of states are passing or considering similar legislation. Yet, as the tide turns against the initiatives, opponents of DEI see the next step as a critical one: ensuring that bans are written in a way that will force colleges to comply.
The Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision banning race-based admissions and the recent resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, have put national attention on DEI initiatives in recent months.
Texas’s ban was modeled after legislation developed by the Goldwater Institute and the Manhattan Institute. It defunds DEI offices and goes beyond only regulating admissions by ensuring that there is no identity or race-based discrimination in hiring, instruction, and operations of the universities.
Florida, Arizona, Iowa, and Oklahoma have implemented various forms of pushback, and several states, including West Virginia, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, have introduced portions of the model policy. Yet universities — both in states with DEI bans and without — are finding ways to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling and other bans against race-based policies.
“Now part of what is so important about the issue, at present, is to make sure that the reforms, the legislation that is put in place to protect against DEI is not something that administrators can simply try to find a loophole to get around,” a director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute and one of the writers of the model legislation, Matt Beienburg, tells the Sun.
Texas’s ban was crafted to not just blatantly ban DEI but to “describe the substance of what is prohibited” so that administrators can’t just change the names of the initiatives and keep pursuing them. While no plan will be 100 percent effective, he says, many of the DEI offices and programs there are already being shut down. A key part of future legislation and bans will be ensuring that it “robustly describes” the prohibited activities, he adds.
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