More Bans on DEI Policies are Coming in 2025

“Lawmakers now focus less on white students’ comfort, preferring to stress the tax dollars being spent on programs they describe as frivolous at best and discriminatory at worst.”

Posted by Mike LaChance Monday, December 16, 2024 at 02:00pm 0 Comments

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This article also gets into the attempts to ban Critical Race Theory, which we have been told isn’t even really a thing.

Inside Higher Ed reports:

DEI Bans Flourished in 2024. Politicians Aren’t Finished.

In 2024, three states—Alabama, Iowa and Utah—banned diversity, equity and inclusion offices at public universities, continuing a trend that kicked off in 2023 with Florida and Texas. Three more states prohibited colleges from requiring diversity statements in hiring and admissions: Idaho, Indiana and Kansas. And lawmakers in at least 10 other states proposed legislation related to DEI in higher education that didn’t make it into law.

Those bills represented a shift in focus from a few years ago, when critics of DEI primarily took aim at classroom concepts like critical race theory, a decades-old framework that asserts that racism is structural. Conservative politicians and pundits claimed that lessons employing CRT unnecessarily vilified white people—and discomfited white students—while framing nonwhite people as victims.

But attempts to ban CRT in college classrooms were broadly unsuccessful—at least in comparison to K-12-level efforts—and Republicans shifted their focus to DEI trainings, hiring practices and offices. The rhetoric around the issue, too, has changed. Lawmakers now focus less on white students’ comfort, preferring to stress the tax dollars being spent on programs they describe as frivolous at best and discriminatory at worst.

“We’re seeing state legislatures … go after the infrastructure, the offices, the hiring practices, the sort of organizational makeup of this work,” said Alex C. Lange, an assistant professor of higher education at Colorado State University. “This specter of DEI is sort of a much easier target” than CRT was.

And so it became one of the defining and politically divisive issues of 2024 for higher education, with crackdowns and proposals drawing the ire and frustration of students, faculty and DEI professionals. They argue that conservative backlash to DEI is based on mischaracterizations of what DEI is: a set of resources and programs aimed at making college more accessible to those who have been historically locked out of higher education, without disenfranchising any other populations.