Legislation Fighting DEI Policies in Multiple States Could be Legal Nightmare for Higher Education
“In effect, the series of bills would deputize regular citizens in the fight against DEI.”
What is the downside here? It’s about time that people started waking up to this issue.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
Colleges Could Be Flooded With Citizen Lawsuits Under Proposed DEI Legislation
As the assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at hundreds of colleges across the country continues, conservative forces trying to stamp out the programs in at least four states have proposed turning to higher-education employees and the general public to act as regulators of race- and sex-conscious efforts to root out discrimination on campus.
Of the 17 states that have so far introduced bills to ban or limit diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI programs, according to a Chronicle analysis, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, and Texas have gone as far as allowing people to sue schools that they think deploy a variety of efforts to tamp down on perceived racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia on campus.
Arizona’s bill, SB 1694, would ban universities from adopting policies “to influence the composition of its work force based on race, sex or color,” and prohibit the adoption or promotion of unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation, allyship, structural racism, and disparate impact among other prohibited stances. It also allows employees to sue the university for making DEI training mandatory.
Arkansas’ bill would end explicit efforts to recruit employees of color in public colleges and allow those who believe they have been denied employment because of their identity to sue the college.
In Iowa, SF 81 prohibits training related to “racism/scapegoating” and allows students’ parents and faculty members to sue institutions that offer such training.
A similar bill moved out of the State Senate education committee in Texas on Wednesday. The Lone Star state’s bill allows anyone to seek an injunction against a public university that supports or sponsors diversity, equity, and inclusion activities beyond what is required by the 14th Amendment or statements by the university endorsing lifestyle, racial, or religious identification.
In effect, the series of bills would deputize regular citizens in the fight against DEI.
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Comments
Wow. Chronicle of Higher Education spun that one as hard as Ronnie O’Sullivan. Not nearly as on=point, tho.
I would love to see a scholarly debate on the subject of whether these types of laws are a dangerous aberration, or actually a return to the founders’ original concept of the powers of the citizen militia they envisioned.
So, the citizens who have commissioned and provisioned an education system get to say: “We explicitly excluded that thing you’re doing right there.”
Perhaps the population is in fact backward and besotted, unwilling to sacrifice their substance for a good they don’t understand. Perhaps not so much that. If the message is so good, spin up something without them. For bog’s sake, televangelists get their outreach funded — our moral and intellectual betters can’t do better than that?
It’s almost like the point is extracting from unwilling people to support something they disagree with. Of course educrats don’t expect that. They’re used to dealing with children — unformed individuals, enmeshed in the educrats’ systems, with the trajectory of their futures at stake. Folk with their own opinions, lives, and resources must necessarily confuse the hell out of folks steeped in professionally abusing captive children.
“It’s almost like the point is extracting from unwilling people to support something they disagree with.”
“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”
–Thomas Jefferson, Statute of Religious Freedom, 1779.
Nice. Jefferson’s papers are on my backlog.
But of course, for The Educrats and their cabal, “sinful and tyrannical” are features, not bugs.
Also, looks like lawfare for everybody on this one.
They don’t like it, maybe shouldn’t have made that part of the game.