OMG. How are we going to get along without overpriced douchebags telling us how to act?
BTW, I support douchebags no matter what their color, orientation or species.
Dropping DEI in Texas Schools
A new law would end the ‘equity’ bureaucracy at public universities.
By The Editorial Board, WSJ
June 4, 2023 4:57 pm ET
Bureaucracies pushing the political DEI agenda—diversity, equity and inclusion—have proliferated in higher education, becoming speech censors and racial hiring enforcers. The bullying has courted a needed backlash, and the latest comes from Texas.
The state Legislature last week passed a bill to terminate DEI offices at public universities and end the use of diversity statements in hiring. The bill will also cancel DEI training requirements that have become a form of indoctrination for employees and students.
Texas’s campus DEI bureaucracy is huge. Texas A&M alone has 46 DEI personnel and the University of Texas has 45, according to a Heritage Foundation report. As John Sailer has chronicled in these pages, Texas Tech was putting job applicants through ideological screening to ensure that their views on race and gender matched the preferred progressive orthodoxy. Texas Tech ended the screening after Mr. Sailer’s report.
The new bill says an institution of higher education may not “compel” or “solicit” any student, employee or applicant to “endorse an ideology that promotes the differential treatment of an individual or group of individuals based on race, color, or ethnicity.” Nor may they require anyone to state their views on such issues as “antiracism, social justice, intersectionality, or related concepts.”
The law places no restrictions on the ability of students, faculty or candidates to speak openly about their views on those topics. Free speech isn’t in jeopardy, despite the claims from the left. Texas specifically exempts academic course instruction and content from any restrictions to ensure that universities remain a place for open inquiry and debate.
But as an institution the university may not engage in viewpoint discrimination to enforce the DEI agenda. As the University of Chicago’s Kalven Committee has described this principle, “The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”
The DEI bureaucracy has burrowed deep into U.S. institutions, especially higher education, so eliminating it will take time and attention. The Texas bill provides that an auditor periodically ensure that a university remains in compliance. Any student or faculty member who is subject to mandatory diversity training can “bring an action against the institution for injunctive or declaratory relief.”
The law follows a reform model from the Manhattan Institute’s Ilya Shapiro and Christopher Rufo and the Goldwater Institute. The goal is to help states end racial tests and restore free speech on campus without infringing on academic freedom. The law would apply only to the Lone Star State’s public universities, which owe their budgets to Texas taxpayers. Good for Texas and the cause of racial equality under the Constitution.
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