Texas Colleges Rolled Over for Anti-DEI Bill. Now They Face a Broader Attack.
Schools that overcomplied with state bills targeting DEI initiatives are now vulnerable to attacks on curriculum, too.
By Marisol Cortez , Truthout/Deceleration
Published February 10, 2025
Students rally together during a pro-Palestine protest at the the University of Texas at Austin on April 24, 2024, in Austin, Texas.
In 2022, I had the strange fortune to take a job teaching decolonial literature courses at a public university in Texas just as our state legislators were gunning to ban critical race theory (CRT) and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs from higher education, buoyed by their earlier success in limiting discussions of race and slavery in K-12 classrooms. At our new faculty orientation, I watched with alarm as the university president gave deft nonanswers to questions about how the university planned to protect instructors teaching within targeted fields, especially those in nontenure track positions. Even then, the message from university administration seemed to be: Keep your head down, don’t fight back or speak up, and maybe you’ll be spared direct attack.
Senate Bill 16’s efforts to restrict classroom discussions on the systemic nature of racial and gender inequality and restrict curriculum on penalty of termination ultimately failed. But the 2023 legislative session would see the passage of another vaguely worded bill, SB17, which legislators would come to use as a proxy for restricting the freedom of scholars to research and teach in fields ideologically opposed by the state — despite the bill’s explicit exemptions for classroom teaching and academic research.
SB17 prohibits DEI initiatives and offices within Texas public universities, as well as DEI considerations in hiring and employment practices. Since its passage, the bill has been used to purge university employees even after their reassignment, close vital student support services, pull university funding from student groups and bar faculty committees and mentorship networks. Eventually, some universities have interpreted SB17 to mean changing course titles and syllabi to remove references to “race,” “gender,” “class” and “equity.”
As SB17 came into effect on January 1, 2024, I watched as universities across Texas became case studies in the strategic failures of rolling over: A hope that by complying in advance or overcomplying with state repression, they might stave off its worst excesses. Task forces formed to audit all university offices, events and committees, identifying which ones would need to be closed or altered. Lists of verboten words were drawn up for monitoring website content. This caution on the part of administrators was understandable, given the state’s threat to withhold funding from any university that allows anything that Texas legislators consider “DEI.” But as universities have complied, the goalpost has shifted. While teaching and research are explicitly exempted from SB17, a Senate Higher Education Subcommittee interim report to the 89th Legislature claims that though “curriculum and course content related to [DEI] … does not explicitly violate the letter of the law, it contradicts its spirit” and that “ensuring compliance with SB17 is not enough.”
https://truthout.org/articles/texas-colleges-rolled-over-for-anti-dei-bill-now-they-face-a-broader-attack/
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