Texas Battles Campus DEI Offices

Written by Ken Meekins

What's happening: A new Texas law is ending lots of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at its public universities. Texas A&M University has already felt the effects, closing its campus diversity office, eliminating a top-level diversity position, ending a faculty recruitment focused on DEI, and cutting mandatory DEI material from curriculum.

Why it matters: DEI has shifted the focus of universities from free inquiry and knowledge-seeking to activism and social change.

• Zoom in: DEI Bureaucrats within universities have the power to alter curricula, often incorporating more radical progressive elements. They openly advocate for transforming colleges into platforms for promoting social justice.

• Also, they set hiring and tenure standards that promote and hire those who align with their ideology, encourage students to report peers for conservative viewpoints and require students to undergo progressive training.

It runs deep: Universities lean so far to the left that over a quarter of Texas professors want to leave the state because of the new restrictions. The same sentiment was also recorded in Florida after DEI was cut there. The Sunshine State, along with North Carolina, South Dakota, and Tennessee have successfully passed restrictions on DEI, while several other states have considered similar bills.