The public now sees what has been happening on college campuses for years and there is pushback. That’s a good thing.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
Amid National Backlash, Colleges Brace for Fresh Wave of Anti-DEI LegislationAt least 14 states this year will consider legislation that could dismantle the ways college administrators attempt to correct historical and structural gender and racial disparities and make campus climates more inclusive, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education analysis.The Chronicle has identified at least 19 bills that will be considered in the coming months that seek to ban the employment and funding of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices; the use of pledges by faculty and staff to commit to creating a more inclusive environment on campus, commonly known as diversity statements; mandatory diversity training; and identity-based preferences for hiring and admissions.While college administrators argue that they have a legal, moral, and financial obligation to more aggressively tackle forms of discrimination on campus and provide extra resources to historically marginalized employees and students — who will soon make up more than half of the nation’s population — opponents say those efforts are ineffective, illegal, and, in fact, discriminatory against white men.The move to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, as they’ve become known, has been supercharged with the resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s first Black president, over plagiarism charges, her handling of protests surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, and the belief that she unfairly benefited from discriminatory hiring practices.Gay “is the poster girl, if you will, for a lot of the complaints and critiques about higher ed in the last few years. She was dean of the faculty, she implemented DEI programs and got kudos for that, and rode that to the Harvard presidency,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute.. “She was a bureaucrat that crystallized DEI structures. … There seems to be a window, a policy-push window, against DEI that is open.”Since The Chronicle began tracking DEI legislation in early 2023, 49 bills have been introduced across 23 states. Almost two dozen of those bills last year were either tabled, failed to pass, or vetoed, while seven bills in five states were signed into law.
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