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Tag: model legislation

  • Republican Blitz to ‘Banish’ College DEI Efforts Fizzles in Most States

    Republican Blitz to ‘Banish’ College DEI Efforts Fizzles in Most States

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    A tidal wave of state legislation to diminish diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts intended to help recruit and retain underrepresented students in higher education has resulted in only a handful of laws to date, according to a Chronicle analysis.

    Of the 38 bills in 21 states that The Chronicle is tracking, five have been signed into law and one awaits the governor’s signature. With many state legislative sessions done for the year, 26 bills have so far failed somewhere along the legislative process, although they could return in future sessions.

    But critics of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, who argue that such programs are costly to taxpayers, discriminatory, and infringe on academic freedom, claimed major victories in Florida and Texas, where DEI offices at public colleges could soon close.

    Many of the anti-DEI bills around the country took their cues from model state legislation proposed in January by the conservative Goldwater and Manhattan Institutes, which argued in favor of dismantling what they call the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy at public colleges by banning DEI offices, staff, and programs, diversity statements, mandatory diversity training, and preferences in hiring or admission based on characteristics such as race and gender. The authors of the model legislation said that typical DEI training “rejects the basic American premise that everyone should be treated equally” and that DEI “has morphed into a state-subsidized ideology of grievance, racial division, and anti-Americanism.”

    Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and one of the authors of the model legislation, expressed wonder at how quickly state legislators have taken up the legislation to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education. “Going from zero to that in less than a half a year, I think it can’t be understated how important it is,” Shapiro said.

    Defenders of DEI programs crowded into state capitols across the country over the past several months — including as recently as this week in Ohio — to protest the bills. Some waited hours to testify that DEI offices provide vital support to underrepresented students, including students of color, first-generation college students, and students with disabilities. They warned that states that eliminate DEI activities will lose students, employees, and grants, even as many colleges are struggling to recruit and retain students.

    Politicians have turned DEI into a buzzword, said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. “They mischaracterize what DEI does in order to rile up a base that is fueled by fear,” Mulvey said. It is a cynical effort, she said, “to create a boogeyman for political purposes.”

    The bills to restrict DEI vary across states. In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, declared in January that it’s where “woke goes to die,” public colleges will be forbidden, as of July 1, from spending federal or state funds on programs or activities that advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, this week signed into law Senate Bill 17, effective next year, which will ban diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff, diversity statements, mandatory diversity training, and giving preference to candidates based on characteristics including race and sex. In North Dakota, a law banning diversity statements and certain kinds of mandatory diversity training will take effect on August 1, while in Tennessee a law banning mandatory implicit bias training took effect in May.

    In at least two other states, battles over DEI in higher ed are still raging. In Ohio, state senators voted Thursday to approve a state budget bill that included provisions from Senate Bill 83, which targets diversity efforts. In Wisconsin, Robin J. Vos, speaker of the State Assembly, threatened to cut $32 million in funding to the University of Wisconsin system over two years, about what the system would spend on diversity, equity, and inclusion measures.

    “I hope we have the ability to eliminate that spending,” Vos told the Associated Press. “The university should have already chosen to redirect it to something that is more productive and more-broadly supported.”

    On Wednesday, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said he would refuse to sign a budget with such a cut to the university system, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

    Even states that haven’t adopted legislation to restrict DEI have felt the impact of the rhetoric. This week, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville announced it would close its diversity, equity, and inclusion division and reallocate those staff and resources to other offices.

    Charles F. Robinson, the university’s chancellor, said in an email to the campus that the goal of the “realignment” of university resources was for the departments to work together to “expand programs around access, opportunity, and developing a culture of belonging for all students and employees.”

    Public colleges in Florida, Oklahoma, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Mississippi have all been asked to provide an accounting of their spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

    And several state universities and university systems stopped the use of diversity statements even without legislation in place, including those in Idaho, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin. Diversity statements, which ask job applicants and employees seeking promotions to describe how they have contributed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in their research, teaching, or service, are controversial even within academe, with critics arguing that they serve as political or ideological litmus tests or that they violate the First Amendment.

    Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, expects the challenges to diversity officers’ work to continue. “We don’t anticipate that the attacks are going to slow down,” Russell said. She urges those who support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, including those in the corporate and nonprofit sectors, to come forward and join the fight. “We know that they care about this work, and now is not the time to sit on the sidelines.”

    Politicians have turned DEI into a buzzword. “They mischaracterize what DEI does in order to rile up a base that is fueled by fear.”

    Critics of the legislation expect legal challenges to be filed. Many argue that the new laws are intentionally vaguely worded so as to create a chilling effect.

    In Florida, for example, Senate Bill 266, effective July 1, says that public colleges “may not expend any state or federal funds to promote, support, or maintain any programs or campus activities that … advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

    And in some states, the anti-DEI legislation has come alongside measures to weaken tenure, contributing to an atmosphere where faculty members feel that their jobs are vulnerable, no matter their status.

    Professors in Florida, Texas, and even states without new laws, have said they are thinking twice about what they will teach because they fear drawing unwanted attention to themselves or their institutions.

    While Florida’s Senate Bill 266 states that general-education core courses “may not distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics … or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities,” Texas’ Senate Bill 17 specifies that its restrictions do not apply to classroom instruction, research, or creative work.

    Still, Pat Heintzelman, president of the Texas Faculty Association, has decided to scratch William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor from her syllabus because she is worried that a student or a student’s parent might object to how the authors write about race. “I don’t know anybody that’s trying to indoctrinate students,” Heintzelman said. “We’re trying to teach students how to think for themselves, how to think critically.”

    Anna L. Peterson, a religion professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville, refuses to change what she’s teaching but also recognizes that some of her colleagues — including many without tenure — don’t feel that they have that luxury. “That’s how authoritarianism works, in part through the creation of fear and anticipatory obedience,” said Peterson. As a result, she said, “you win a lot of your goals without having to legally enforce them.”

    Many college leaders have been notably quiet — at least in public — in the face of anti-DEI legislation, to the great frustration of some faculty members, although some leaders may have lobbied behind the scenes. Ohio State University’s Board of Trustees’ statement against Senate Bill 83 was a notable exception, and in Utah the sponsor of a bill that would have eliminated DEI offices and staff at public colleges replaced it with a study bill after criticism, including from higher-ed leaders in the state. Some college leaders in states that have not seen anti-DEI legislation have also spoken up.

    On college campuses in Texas and Florida, faculty members said administrators have given little to no direction on how the laws will be carried out. Peterson, for example, said she receives emails all the time with guidance and resources on how to deal with artificial intelligence. But on Florida’s new laws, she is still waiting.

    Alice Min, a student at the University of Texas at Austin’s Law School, has been working with Texas Students for DEI because she found her school’s work on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging valuable. When she first arrived at the law school last year, she didn’t understand a lot of things that were second nature to her many classmates who had parents or other family members who were lawyers, such as how to study for a law-school exam and how to network.

    While the law school offered large workshops on such topics for everyone, the DEI office provided smaller workshops for underrepresented students, Min said. “It’s not preferential treatment,” she said. “It’s a chance for people who don’t have this general knowledge and wealth and connections, who don’t have nepotism, to potentially be on an even playing field.”

    She appreciated having a place where students of color can talk to others who can relate to their struggles. “It’s also just nice to know that people do care and want you to feel like you belong,” Min said.

    Now that she expects the office to close, Min said she wishes she had used it more often when she had the chance.

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    Adrienne Lu

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  • What Winning Did to the Anti-abortion Movement

    What Winning Did to the Anti-abortion Movement

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    In a normal year, the March for Life would begin somewhere along the National Mall. The cavalcade of anti-abortion activists in Washington, D.C., would wind around museums and past monuments, concluding at the foot of the Supreme Court, a physical representation of the movement’s objective: to overturn Roe v. Wade. The march happens in January of each year to coincide with the anniversary of the Roe decision.

    But this is not a normal year. Tomorrow’s march will be the first without Roe on the books.

    Read: The anti-abortion movement’s Gen-Z victors

    In recognition of that fact, the march has a new route. It will finish somewhere on First Street, between the Capitol and the Court building, an acknowledgment of the enormous and somewhat nebulous task ahead: banning or restricting abortion in all 50 states. That task will involve not only Congress, the courts, and the president but also 50 individual state legislatures, thousands of lawmakers, and all of the American communities they represent.

    At the march, activists and other attendees will be jubilant. Speakers will congratulate their fellow marchers on a job well done. Yet at the same time, a current of uncertainty ripples beneath the surface of the anti-abortion movement. Advocates are technically closer than ever to ending abortion in America, but in some ways, the path forward is more treacherous now than it was before. The movement is not in disarray, exactly, but its energy is newly decentralized, diffused throughout the country.

    “There’s a much more choose-your-own-adventure feel” to the movement now, Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis School of Law professor who has written about abortion for The Atlantic, told me.

    Overturning Roe was only the first step. The next isn’t exactly obvious.

    Since the 1980s, rescinding the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe, which established a nationwide right to abortion, had been the movement’s top goal, because it was the key that unlocked everything else. There could be no real prohibitions on abortion as long as Roe was in effect. Charging into battle was easier under a single banner, with resources and energy directed toward a single national project: filling the Supreme Court with abortion foes.

    Now, though, across all 50 states, different leaders are pressing for abortion restrictions of varying types and degrees: heartbeat bans, gestational limits, restrictions on the abortion pill, or outright bans with few or no exceptions.

    America’s anti-abortion movement has always been a rich tapestry. Although its members share an overarching goal—ending abortion—they have disagreed on tactics and approach. Some groups—including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Americans United for Life (AUL), and the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC)—have prioritized legal and political strategies; others, including many Catholic organizations, have advocated more for funding the country’s 2,700 pregnancy centers or expanding the social safety net. But there was always a power hierarchy among these groups. “If you were wondering where the bills came from, the lawsuits, it was obvious: A handful of national groups dictated everything,” Ziegler said. The NRLC and AUL organized the troops and drafted model legislation. They planned judicial strategy and pushed court cases forward.

    In the post-Roe world, those groups are less powerful and less relevant. The central players now are the thousands of state-level politicians, local leaders, and grassroots activists who are writing and passing legislation, often independent of those once-dominant national groups.

    From the May 2022 issue: The future of abortion in a post-Roe America

    The influence of the national groups has been waning since even before the fall of Roe. A Texas pastor and a former state solicitor general, for example, came up with Texas’s 2021 S.B. 8, which banned abortion once a fetal heartbeat was detectable (typically after six weeks) and authorized private citizens to sue abortion providers. The two men did so without much input from any national group, according to the experts I spoke with. Abortion restrictions in Alabama and Georgia, which passed in 2019 and went into effect in 2022, were drafted by different state activists and leaders and contain starkly different language, showing little influence from national groups.

    The national anti-abortion movement clearly wasn’t ready for this flurry of activity. But it could have been better prepared, Daniel K. Williams, a history professor at the University of West Georgia, told me. When Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the Court, or even as soon as Trump was elected president, national organizations could have put forward a single model law for lawmakers, and uniform guidance for health-care providers and hospitals. Instead, America ended up with a chaotic patchwork of abortion restrictions—a mixture of newly written trigger laws and dusty legislation from the late 19th century. Some of these new policies are vague or fail to address health complications such as miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy. They propose varying consequences for abortion providers and different mechanisms for enforcement.

    In November, the AUL released its American Life Initiative and its model legislation, the Ready for Life Act, which bans abortion after conception and includes a life-of-the-mother exception, as well as clarifications regarding miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy. But it came five months after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe. That groups were drafting these guidelines “months after Dobbs and not experiencing any uniformity in state legislatures is a sign of how decentralized and swift-moving all of this has been,” Williams said.

    Clarke Forsythe, the senior counsel for AUL, defends his organization’s strategy: “We needed time to analyze Dobbs and its impact and implications and needed time to put the package together,” he told me. “It’s a long-term initiative and a long-term vision. There was no need to get it out before the election.”

    Abortion opponents insist that a state-level free-for-all could turn out to be helpful for the movement. With more people involved and working toward different initiatives, the argument goes, activists might come up with innovative ideas and policy proposals. Democracy, by nature, is messy. “It’s good for the country and good for our politics to decentralize the issue,” Forsythe told me. “The Court sent it back to the local level, where public policy can be better aligned with public opinion, where the people responsible for it are responsive to people at the local level.” Decentralization is the movement’s strength, Lila Rose, the president of the national anti-abortion group Live Action, told me. “It requires a diverse and multifaceted approach. It’s not strategic conflict so much as strategic differences.”

    This particular moment gives anti-abortion activists a chance to think creatively and to forge new alliances, some in the movement argue. Now that Roe is gone, do they need to keep up their ties with the GOP? “I would like to see the movement disentangle itself from particular political parties,” Erika Bachiochi, an anti-abortion writer and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. Maybe, she added, there’s room for a return of the “old pro-life Democrat.”

    But an unintended consequence of overturning Roe could be that the movement has inadvertently pushed its highest objective—ending legal abortion—further out of reach. “On the one hand, when there’s a free-for-all, ideas that may never have been given the time of day can emerge and work,” Ziegler said. “On the other, you can have bills that are damaging nationally get passed.” Texas’s S.B. 8—the Texas Heartbeat Act—frustrated some movement leaders because it empowered individual citizens to sue, which meant that those individuals would control the narrative, Ziegler said. Others worry about the vocal “abortion abolition” groups, which have been calling for women who obtain abortions to be punished.

    These days, Ziegler says, “there’s no single voice in the movement to say, ‘No, that’s not what we stand for.’” A few extremists, in other words, could damage the movement’s reputation—and interfere with its ultimate goal.

    Before Dobbs, anti-abortion advocates seemed confident that once a handful of states banned abortion, many more would follow—that they could build a “culture of life” in America that would put the country on a righteous path. In some ways, the opposite has occurred. As a few states put limits on abortion rights, others, such as Vermont, California, and Michigan, have reacted by enshrining those rights into state law. Meanwhile, voters in red states including Kansas, Montana, and Kentucky rejected attempts to restrict abortion. Former President Donald Trump—the man whose nomination of three Supreme Court justices led directly to the overturning of Roe—has gone so far as to blame Republicans’ disappointing midterm performance on the anti-abortion movement. (In response, Rose called his comments “sniveling cowardice.”)

    Nationally, the movement’s relationship with the Republican Party is troubled. Last fall, when Senator Lindsey Graham proposed legislation restricting abortions after 15 weeks, only a handful of his Republican colleagues were publicly supportive. “Most of the members of my conference prefer that this be dealt with at the state level,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters at the time.

    David Frum: Roe is the new prohibition

    Even in the new Congress, where Republicans have a House majority, one of the first pieces of legislation passed in the lower chamber was the so-called Born Alive bill, which would require health-care providers to treat babies in the vanishingly rare cases of failed abortions. Here was a chance for Republicans to pass a bill restricting abortion after 15 weeks or even six, in a show of support to the movement that they purport to champion. But they didn’t. Republicans in Congress are “afraid to do anything on this issue that’s meaningful” for fear of the political consequences, Ziegler says.

    Anti-abortion leaders like Rose believe that they’re being unfairly blamed for these recent Republican losses and missed opportunities. They argue that in the midterms the GOP chose candidates who were insufficiently anti-abortion, or simply problematic, such as Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker. But there was also a communication issue, they say. Candidates weren’t outspoken enough about abortion; they should have talked more about the Democrats’ support for abortion at late gestational ages, and their plan to codify abortion rights into law. “That’s where the real problem was” in the midterms, Marilyn Musgrave, the vice president of government affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me. “Republicans weren’t pointing out the extremism on the other side.”

    It’s true that some Republicans campaigned successfully on abortion restrictions last year, including GOP Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kay Ivey of Alabama, Brian Kemp of Georgia, and Greg Abbott of Texas, each of whom won reelection by a substantial margin. Still, the recent state referenda and post-Dobbs polling suggest that the anti-abortion movement is too optimistic about the level of support for their goals.

    “We’ve clearly lost the narrative,” Charlie Camosy, an ethics professor at Creighton University School of Medicine and a columnist for the Religion News Service, told me. Activists like Camosy hope that the movement’s new emphasis will be a grassroots effort to educate Americans and persuade them to oppose abortion. Camosy isn’t attending the March for Life tomorrow; instead, he’s giving a speech at a Catholic seminar in Freehold, New Jersey, where he lives. “Something is wrong in our ability to communicate what’s at stake,” he said of the broader movement. “Focusing on the national level distracts from getting Michigan or Montana or Kentucky or Kansas right.”

    But eventually, Camosy’s movement will have to face the reality of abortion in America: Some states just aren’t going to budge. “Fewer than 50 percent of states are likely to meaningfully curtail abortion,” Williams estimates. Even if the movement gains ground in some states, “that’s likely only to harden the resistance in more strongly pro-choice states.” Which means that, rather than a growing national consensus on abortion, Americans probably can expect more polarization—a cultural standoff.

    Tomorrow’s March for Life will be the first time activists have held a major national gathering since Roe was overturned in June. But it will probably be a much smaller event than before. Some activists have wondered whether it should happen at all. More states and cities will be hosting their own rallies, because that’s where the next round of work needs to be done. And many people will be at those local marches instead—to start, or maybe to double down, on their difficult project of creating a “culture of life.”

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    Elaine Godfrey

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