Oklahoma Lawmakers Pass Bill to Prohibit DEI in Public Higher Education
“Universities are more focused on pronouns than they are prepping for the workforce”
It’s amazing how many states have made similar moves. DEI policies are on their way out, and that’s a good thing.
Campus Reform reports:
Oklahoma Legislature easily passes bill to prohibit DEI in public higher education
Oklahoma legislators have passed a bill to ban Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives at public colleges and universities.
After the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 39-8 in March, House members gave their approval of Senate Bill 796 on May 7 in a 77-18 vote.
The legislation places various limitations on DEI, specifically banning “diversity, equity, and inclusion positions, departments, activities, procedures, or programs to the extent they grant preferential treatment based on one person’s particular race, color, ethnicity, or national origin over another’s.”
The bill also prohibits requiring diversity statements or “any person to disclose his or her pronouns.”
Supporters of the proposed law say that DEI acts as a barrier to proper education.
“We don’t want to run away from teaching difficult subjects, but what we’re seeing is students that are going into college to learn, say, to be an engineer, having a whole other topic that they’re having to study, taking out student loans, taking a longer time in college,” Representative Denise Crosswhite Hader, a bill sponsor, said in March.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt appears likely to sign the bill given his history with DEI. In December 2023, he signed an executive order requiring universities to make cuts to DEI personnel.
When The Daily Caller reported last November that the University of Oklahoma required students to take a DEI course on “white privilege,” Stitt condemned the university on X.
“Universities are more focused on pronouns than they are prepping for the workforce,” he said in the post. “And left-wing accreditation monopolies that peddle DEI curriculum hide out of sight and let liberal faculty call the shots.”
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Comments
We just went through some of this at Tulane over the last few years. There has always been a lunatic leftist fringe within the faculty who started to gain power and influence when the accreditation agencies started to demand the ascendance of social transformation over academic priorities. Suddenly these local leftists started rising in status, since they seemed to have an edge in the rat race for funding, which increased with each new program Survey. They also appeared to have gained access to unlimited travel to woke conclaves where they all traded notes on how to insinuate themselves into positions of greater influence, usually by spreading the wealth to upper management. Pretty soon they were strong enough to marginalize or eliminate the resistance from more traditional academics. That’s when the mandatory DEI really took off, and it didn’t begin to slow down until after the events of October 7th revealed how intensely intersectional the process had become. The raw fury and bloodlust of the “colonially oppressed” Palestinian faction resonated with the whole DEI canon so well that antisemitism became quite fashionable, which didn’t go over too good at a predominantly Jewish institution. Since then the zealots have lost some influence, which has continued to wane despite a local DEI name change. Next step is to reform those radicalized Accreditation agencies who appear to still be very slow learners.