September 8, 2023 - 7:00am
Texas A&M University has found itself in the midst of a complex cultural and legal battle over Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. In June, Texas legislators restricted university DEI activities, banning DEI offices, training, diversity statements, and identity-based preferences in hiring. Officials at Texas colleges responded by conducting audits of their initiatives, quickly dropping high-level DEI positions and recruitment initiatives.
Texas A&M then rekindled the controversy thanks to its botched hiring of a journalism director who was recruited by university officials prior to the state’s adoption of anti-DEI laws. But after the state restricted DEI activities, her hiring terms came under question and eventually fell through.
To both proponents and opponents of DEI, this was a sign that the new anti-DEI legislation, which stipulated that institutions did not have to require diversity statements or have a DEI office, might actually have some teeth. The era of the DEI monopoly in American higher education may be ending. But this will also depend on the level of commitment from state lawmakers to end such initiatives.
Texas is one of just a handful of states that have successfully banned at least some types of DEI programmes, along with Florida, Tennessee, and North Dakota. Lawmakers have introduced bills in more than 20 states, but most have either failed or been tabled. In states where bills have not yet been passed, public pressure against DEI has still resulted in some action by universities. For instance, all Arizona public universities eliminated diversity statements even though the state legislature failed to pass any anti-DEI laws.
Not all universities are so compliant with public demands, though — even in conservative states. The University of Arkansas, for instance, dissolved its DEI division. But it did not fire all of the staff. Instead, the University reshuffled these employees throughout other departments and rebranded their duties as part of “improving student success”. This was clearly an attempt to pre-empt possible legal restrictions against DEI while ingraining the practices into the University’s operations.
Other universities have taken similar measures to keep DEI around while making it harder for lawmakers to dismantle it legally. The University of Texas at Austin has renamed job titles to avoid detection; for instance, “Outreach and Inclusion” director became “Outreach and Scholarships” director. And it’s no surprise that these tactics keep appearing across the country; there are even organisations dedicated to crafting strategies for universities to work around legal restrictions, such as the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. Its director, Adrianna Kezar, told Inside Higher Ed in June:
The political process can influence public universities, but private universities remain difficult to crack. Cornell University president Martha Pollack has doubled down, claiming that DEI and free speech can “coexist”. This comes in the wake of Cornell’s adoption of a free expression initiative, showing that the university has no intention of confronting the well-established contradiction in values between free speech and DEI.
It’s heartening to see legislative wins shortly after the anti-DEI craze of the past year, but dismantling this ideological bureaucracy will be a marathon, not a sprint. There will be legal challenges, in addition to universities engaging in evasive tactics. Lawmakers need to be willing to revisit these issues as the circumstances evolve and address as many loopholes as possible.
Neetu Arnold is a Research Fellow at the National Association of Scholars and a Young Voices contributor.
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SubscribeTo both proponents and opponents of DEI, this was a sign that the new anti-DEI legislation, which stipulated that institutions did not have to require diversity statements or have a DEI office, might actually have some teeth.
Striking how something that merely forbids compulsion is interpreted as “anti”.
Indeed.
One senses some progress if only because reality is catching up (King’s hospital, Mayor Adams outburst). Certainly in the UK DEI training is increasingly greeted with open eyeball rolling and occasional pushback (my personal favouite was a colleague who asked whether nouns, adjectives, or adverbs might be prescribed as well as pronouns. Since this was done with the straightest and most earnwst of expressions the trainer attempted to answer the question).
heh
What is going to do in DEI is not just legislation, but a growing social rejection of it.
Yes, there are still a bunch of activists etc. out there, but there is only so long that institutions can stand up to the growing discontent with the whole thing.
DEI is becoming socially unacceptable across a broader and broader swath of the general populace. At some point even the ivory towered elite will feel that pressure.
Never mind that there are likely going to be more and more successful lawsuits against DEI both the structures and the practices. At some point the juice will not be worth the squeeze.
But is this stuff merely hiding the symptoms, not addressing the causes? The fact that universities are trying to push it underground and make it pervasive via “secret agents” shows what we already knew, a near fanatical devotion to the cause.
Instead of just passing laws that say “don’t do that”, maybe the better solution is for governments to just shut down the academic pipeline by defunding them, taxing student fees and so on. After all do we really need these institutions. I work in a high tech field and am not sure we do.
I work in a UK university, and have done for over 20 years. What I can tell you is that over that time, these institutions have declined dramatically in their core mission of seeking and propagating truth. They no longer even believe that such a propisition is possible, let alone desirable. They have been thoroughly infected by Critical Social Justice theories and practices of various kinds, to the point of disfunction through the creation of an utterly toxic work and learning environment. It will not be long before they become so sclerotic that they simply fail to deliver anything worthwhile at all. Then most will slowly slip down the international league tables as the university sectors in places like China and India whizz past them. After this Asian students will stop coming (because why would they), those in the UK able to will send their children abroad for higher ed, and the doors will be quietly closed and bolted, and buildings demolished (if they haven’t already because of RAAC) or repurposed. The UK university sector will be effectively dead – or, in the famous words of Habermas, merely ‘moving within the thicket of what once was’. Whether commonsense will then prevail, and a phoenix rise from the ashes, remains to be seen.
Well said. Universities are charging increasing fees for a product that is worth less in the marketplace every year. DEI is making the humanities literally a waste of time. Technical and community colleges are providing technical degrees such as engineering for less cost, with more focus on the marketplace, and without the DEI hoo hoo. But of course universities are in as deep a bubble as ever and are oblivious to all of this.
Since DIE is not based on truth it will eat itself and expire.
DEI is a cover for Marxism and the cultural promulgation if far left Group Think.
Universities are a bastion of and hence a breeding ground of far left socialist and communist staff and academics.
These people will fight tooth and claw to obscure and preserve their activities , whilst infecting the minds of young students .
That’s the whole point of their movement in education .
I expect the many universities will try to use dispersion and renaming of activities and other deceptive practices in order to maintain these activities. I think the answer to this may have to be individual lawsuits targeting specific instances of DEI-fostered censorship of speech or discrimination. In other words, these practices may have to be addressed piecemeal through court cases rather than through a single grand legislative blow. Anti-DEI legislation lurking in the background may, however, provoke court cases and encourage judges to rule accordingly.
small piece of evidence that things are changing (back to sanity) – a friend recently had an inducation with a UK university’s head of DEI, in respect of mental health/neurodiversity. Alongside the exploration of ADD, Dyslexias etc, much attention was given to ODD – Operational Defiant Disorder: ‘a pattern of negative, defiant, disobedient, and hostile behavior, and it is one of the most prevalent disorders from preschool age to adulthood. This can include frequent temper tantrums, excessive arguing with adults, refusing to follow rules, purposefully upsetting others, getting easily irked, having an angry attitude, and vindictive acts”.
I’m afraid I don’t see how this is ‘evidence that things are changing (back to sanity)’. ODD – basically another name for scumbag behaviour, probably by badly brought-up kids – is an example of the ridiculous attempts to medicalise, and hence excuse, bad and anti-social behaviour. It is of a piece with other DEI nonsense. I was hoping you were going to report that your friend and his colleagues were having nothing to do with it. What am I missing here?
My reply to this appears to have been censored by Unherd. Let’s try again. I don’t see how what you report amounts to ‘evidence that things are changing (back to sanity)’. The concept of ODD appears to be in line with DEI thinking. In this case, simple bad behaviour is ‘medicalised’, and the perpetrators become victims whose anti-social acts have to be excused. I was expecting you to report that your friend and his/her colleagues pushed back against this line of thinking, but no…. What did I miss?
ODD is being used in this case as a ‘scientific’ name for brattish behaviour – for which discipline/boundaries, not indulgence or coddling, is the right response.
Yes, that’s exactly my view. So the promotion of ODD at your friend’s university induction is hardly evidence of a change back to sanity!
I think Jonathan Haidt, ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ would disagree. In what way does a move away from coddling students who act up – endlessly excusing their behaviour with ‘lamb-like’ diagnoses of innocence (dyslexia, neurodiversity etc) – and moving back to calling it bad behaviour, then demanding better from the student…..in what way is that not evidence of a change back to sanity? You’ve missed the point – ODD label is not being used to excuse the student, but to support the teaching staff in discipline. It is calling a spade a spade (ODD = a cycle of bad behaviour), albeit in psychological language. The new language is necessary – for similar reasons why educators can’t call dyslexic, ‘stupid’, or understand them that way; you can’t call kids with behavioural problems, ‘bad’, or understand them that way. So now teachers have a way of differentiating students who need annd deserve sympathy and extra support (ADD, Dyslexia) from those who need a kick up the but – ODD. BTW – the overdiagnosis annd/or abuses of ADD/Dyslexia are another issue.