As a law student at the University of Texas at Austin, Sam Jefferson worked in the school’s diversity office. Jefferson said he learned firsthand just how essential the offices are to the success of students from underrepresented groups.
Now it’s on the brink of being eliminated by a Texas bill that would bar public colleges from having diversity offices or officers.
“You’re talking about legislation that’s going to take away one of the only places that students can feel seen, heard, and acknowledged and helped,” said Jefferson, who just graduated.
Monday marks the end of a Texas legislative session in which higher ed played a starring role. Lawmakers made substantial investments in public higher ed, boosting funding for community colleges and creating an endowment to support emerging research universities. Yet many lawmakers also disparaged colleges’ diversity programs and tenure policies, leading to marathon hearings in which students, faculty, and alumni protested vehemently.
Over the weekend, Texas lawmakers passed final versions of Senate Bill 17, which would prohibit diversity offices starting in 2024, and SB 18, which would make changes in tenure. Both are sponsored by Sen. Charles Creighton, a Republican. The bills now await the signature of Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican.
A spokeswoman for the University of Texas Board of Regents didn’t respond to a request for comment. Texas colleges, like other institutions across the country, have generally declined to comment on pending legislation.
Proponents of banning DEI efforts say requiring students, faculty, and staff to sign diversity statements or participate in DEI programming produces a “chilling effect” on campus. “Many of these programs have been weaponized to compel speech instead of protecting free speech,” Creighton said in April. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Tenure elimination has been a key point of emphasis for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, who said the institution allows professors to “live inside a bubble” in a statement last month. “Over the past year, it has become abundantly clear that some tenured faculty at Texas universities feel immune to oversight from the legislature and their respective board of regents,” Patrick said.
The bills have undergone changes since being introduced in March. Senate Bill 18 originally proposed banning tenure entirely, and the Texas Senate endorsed that idea, but the drastic shift didn’t have traction in the House. Revisions in Senate Bill 17 carved out more exceptions that allow public colleges to describe efforts to serve diverse students if required by federal agencies or institutional accreditors.
Still, many students and faculty in Texas say that the legislation remains harmful — and that even the deliberations about banning tenure and DEI this spring were damaging to their campuses.
If Senate Bill 17 becomes law, diversity administrators will be out of a job in six months. Last week, one diversity officer announced her departure. Carol Sumner, vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Texas Tech University, will take a similar job at Northern Illinois University.
Banning DEI offices would affect not only students of color, but also veterans, LGBTQ+ students, and disabled students, four Texas students told The Chronicle.
“DEI isn’t just about enrollment,” said Jordan Nellums, a graduate student at UT-Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. “It’s about OK, how can we make sure that this student group feels comfortable enough on this campus — that way they can become part of our larger campus family.”
Kat Williams, another UT-Austin grad student, said she waited for over 14 hours to speak against the diversity-office ban in April. “I didn’t really have 14 hours to waste that day, but it happened anyway,” Williams said.
Williams said she doesn’t believe diversity programs and policies make students feel uncomfortable speaking their minds in the classroom, as critics allege.
“At least in my experience as an instructor, that’s not the case whatsoever,” Williams said. “If somebody has an unpopular opinion, they still get voiced quite frequently.”
Alexander De Jesus-Colon, a senior at the University of Texas at Dallas, said he went to the campus’s Galerstein Gender Center as early as last year to discuss the situation on campus. He was told that the center was already preparing to shut down if the Texas Legislature voted to ban such offices.
Since then, he has become involved in organizing against the legislation with the group Texas Students for DEI. He said legislators have refused to hear student voices.
“Nobody wants to listen to us,” De Jesus-Colon said. “These legislators, they’re busy passing bills that they’re not even fully aware of the consequences of what they’re doing.”
At least 34 bills have been introduced in 20 states that would curb colleges’ DEI efforts, according to The Chronicle’s DEI Legislation Tracker.
For Jefferson, the legislation in Texas is reminiscent of strategies wielded by Florida legislators. This month, Florida became the first state in the country to bar public colleges from spending money on diversity efforts.
“The whole Texas-Florida competition to see who can battle ‘wokeness’ is hilarious,” Jefferson said. “It’s not about the schools — it’s about these political forums.”
Step Toward Eliminating Tenure
While some on campuses say the tenure bill could have dealt a worse blow to higher ed, others remain worried.
The final version, which would take effect in September if it becomes law, defines tenure in state law as “the entitlement of a faculty member of an institution of higher education to continue in the faculty member’s academic position unless dismissed by the institution for good.”
The legislation also articulates reasons that tenured professors could be fired, such as “professional incompetence” and “violating university policies,” which some faculty members see as vague. What’s more, they see requiring performance evaluations every six years as a stepping stone to eliminating tenure entirely.
The uncertainty around faculty-job protections is making life difficult for people like Daniel M. Brinks.
The chair of the government department at UT-Austin, Brinks has had eight different job candidates turn down offers and cite the state’s political environment as a factor, he said.
Brinks also said that junior faculty members are particularly worried about the future of tenure, while other professors have canceled upcoming courses because of the likelihood that they could come under scrutiny.
“That bill alone could essentially destroy the notion of a national-level research university,” Brinks said of the tenure bill.
Even though the legislation doesn’t ban tenure outright, Brinks said, many faculty members still fear that another bill is “right around the corner.”
“It signals both a general willingness to interfere with the internal governance of public universities and maybe even, more importantly, hostility to the things that we do and the way that we do them,” Brinks said.
Students are noticing those impacts, too. De Jesus-Colon said several professors have shared with him that they are preparing to face consequences for teaching topics that some Republican lawmakers don’t like.
Williams, who teaches a course on rhetoric that covers concepts including Indigenous liberation, the Black prophetic tradition, queer pride, and fatphobia, worries that her class material could become a target.
The bill banning diversity efforts states that it doesn’t apply to course instruction or research. But in recent months, public-college leaders have often played it safe in political climates that appear hostile toward courses about race and gender — directing professors to, for instance, “proceed cautiously” if teaching about reproductive health.
Until she receives an order or instruction from a supervisor, chair, or dean, Williams said, she doesn’t plan to stop teaching the course because her students enjoy learning the material. The few that don’t, Williams noted, “still say what’s on their mind.”
Should she be directed to stop or change her mode of instruction, Williams said, she isn’t sure how she would respond.
“What would I even teach at that point?” Williams said. “If they can’t learn that at a public institution, where are they supposed to go?”
It’s not unusual for politicians to speak at public colleges’ graduation ceremonies. But this year, one governor’s controversial education policies have drawn protests and petitions from students decrying how an event meant to be celebratory turned hurtful.
Glenn Youngkin, the Republican Virginia governor who made the culture war central to his 2022 election campaign, is slated to speak at George Mason University on Thursday. Earlier this month, he delivered an address at Old Dominion University’s commencement.
At both public institutions, students circulated petitions that collected thousands of signatures. In each case, the petitions took aim at the administrations and asked them to reconsider their decisions to invite Youngkin.
The events showcase a now-familiar dynamic. Colleges boast of the welcoming environments they strive to provide for students, but their autonomy is being threatened by some Republican lawmakers who have targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and even exerted control over curricula. Such lawmakers aren’t guaranteed a warm welcome on campus, and colleges are left to manage sensitive relationships with the state and their students.
Youngkin’s education policies have mostly applied to elementary and secondary schools. When the governor took office in January 2022, he signed an order prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory, the academic concept that racism is the product of not only individual prejudice but also embedded in legal systems and policies. Since then, he has ordered K-12 schools to only allow students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms, and sign up for sports teams, that correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth. Students said they worry it’s just a matter of time before such policies will be extended to higher education.
“By having Governor Youngkin as this year’s commencement speaker, we believe that the university compromises its supposed values of centering students’ experiences and overall well-being,” reads the GMU petition, which had more than 8,000 signatures on Tuesday evening. “When satiating its own desire to appease the powerful few, the university, once again, has abandoned these principles.”
The Old Dominion petition, with its over 3,000 signatures, was even more pointed: “It is an absolute disgrace that ODU’s president, Brian O. Hemphill, would allow such a disgusting man to speak at this commencement ceremony.”
Creating channels for student feedback can lead to more inclusive decision making.
In an emailed statement, Macaulay Porter, a spokeswoman for Youngkin, said, “Governor Youngkin congratulated ODU students as they embark on their next chapters. Now, the governor looks forward to addressing the 2023 graduates of George Mason University and celebrating their tremendous accomplishment.”
The leaders of both institutions have sought to welcome the governor while also assuring students that they hear them. They noted that their universities have traditions of hosting Virginia governors for commencement. But their approaches differed.
Gregory Washington, the George Mason president, wrote a nearly 900-word letter to the university community that was published five days after the announcement that Youngkin would speak at spring commencement.
“As president of the largest and most diverse public university in our state, I support those students who are making their voices heard, and I applaud their courage and commitment to advocate for themselves and their communities,” Washington wrote. “That being said, I don’t believe that we should silence the voices of those with whom we disagree, especially in this forum where there is no imminent threat present as a result of the disagreements.”
That week about 100 students protested at George Mason, according to local news reports.
Hemphill has not said as much publicly as Washington has about the governor’s visit. In response to questions from The Chronicle, he wrote in an email that “ODU is committed to fostering an environment for the meaningful expression of ideas.”
The president said he met with student leaders ahead of the announcement that Youngkin would be the speaker. “It was important to us that they felt their concerns were heard,” he said. “Creating channels for student feedback can lead to more inclusive decision making and help address concerns effectively.”
One student, who asked to remain anonymous because she worried about retaliation, said she had received an emailed invitation for a 15-minute “year-end discussion” with Hemphill. The meeting took place the following day.
The invitation was a surprise. “President Hemphill is not somebody you can just meet with,” the student said.
At the meeting, the student said Hemphill told her the governor would be the commencement speaker and acknowledged that Youngkin had said things that angered certain communities. While he did not say that protesting would be discouraged, he told the student that “we want to welcome him,” she said.
That meeting was the first in a series of incidents that some Old Dominion students interpreted as intimidation tactics meant to discourage them from protesting during the governor’s appearance. Several students who spoke to The Chronicle on the condition of anonymity had encounters with the campus police. A high-school student who, alongside his brother, an Old Dominion student, held up a banner that said “Blood on your hands,” was temporarily banned from campus.
The four students who spoke to The Chronicle said they did not want to jeopardize anyone’s chance of walking across the stage and earning their diploma. So a small group met with administrators to learn what kind of protest would be permitted by the university. Officials told them that they could protest as long as it was not “disruptive” and did not stop Youngkin from being able to speak.
The students put up posters around campus, wrote chalk messages on the sidewalk, circulated the petition, and painted a campus rock that’s often used to share messages. They spread the word that if other students wanted to protest Youngkin at commencement, they should stand and turn their backs to him when he spoke.
On the morning of the speech, a few students got to campus early. One student was surprised to see that the fliers they’d put up using wheat paste had already been taken down. The rock had been painted over with a pro-Youngkin message earlier in the week.
As families and graduates filed into S.B. Ballard Stadium, the students handed out new fliers and rainbow pride flags. Campus police officers stayed close, the students said. Some students saw someone whose face was covered approach the rock and repaint it with an anti-Youngkin profanity. None of the students who spoke to The Chronicle knew who it was, or that it was going to happen.
But the police seemed to take notice. They questioned the students and pulled one aside, telling him that he was a “person of interest,” a student said. After about 20 minutes, they let him go, but some of the students felt intimidated.
“It was kind of hard to hand out posters when the police are standing there kind of menacingly,” one student said.
Inside the stadium, Youngkin spoke to about 2,000 graduates. Many held up their pride flags. About 100 turned their backs on the governor, Hemphill said in his email.
It was kind of hard to hand out posters when the police are standing there kind of menacingly.
“We were aware that some students intended to protest,” he wrote to The Chronicle. “Trusting students to act responsibly during their protest not only affirms their rights to express themselves, but also empowers them to actively participate in shaping their educational community. With students having the opportunity to engage in meaningful activism, while respecting the importance of the occasion, ODU promoted a culture of civic engagement and active citizenship.”
One student, his younger brother, and a third student, took the “Blood on your hands” banner to the top floor of a garage that overlooks the stadium. When the governor’s speech began, they unfurled the banner.
The police were on the top of the parking garage within three minutes, one of those students said.
“I was pretty anxious, pretty on edge,” he said. “I just kept my eyes forward pretty much, tried to ignore them as much as possible.”
He engaged in a tug of war over the banner with an officer, he said. Eventually, though, he gave in and took it down. The officers took his name and told him to leave. He was trespassing, they said.
Police questioned the student’s brother as he was trying to leave. They told him that because he was “trespassing,” he was banned from campus unless and until he enrolls as a student there. The third student said he was questioned further by police officers when he reached the bottom of the parking lot.
“The situation in question involved two individuals hanging a large sign from the parking garage adjacent to our stadium, which violated the no-sign requirement, blocked a walkway, and was a safety hazard,” Hemphill said in his email to The Chronicle. “In response, they were asked to remove the sign and leave the facility — an action which would have taken regardless of the content of the sign. The non-ODU-affiliated young man was not permanently banned from campus. We are not aware of any other concerns about police interactions.”
Students had designated space to protest next to the stadium, Hemphill said. Noting the importance of free expression, he said the protesters were respected and the police were not directed to engage with them.
These students said the administration’s case for the freedom of speech seemed to apply only to the governor and his right to take the stage uninterrupted, not to their right to object to him.
One ODU student, who is trans, said that having Youngkin speak at graduation transformed the event from a happy one to one that served as a reminder that “there are people out there who want us dead or want us to not have access to the care that we need.”
He watched the speech from the audience because his girlfriend was graduating.
“It’s supposed to be a time of pride for her,” he said.
The decision to ban state funding for Indiana University at Bloomington’s famed sex-research institute threatens academic freedom and sets a “troubling precedent” for legislative interference in research nationwide, the university’s president, Pamela Whitten, said in a recent public statement. The ban, included in the state budget after a heated debate, was inspired by a conservative lawmaker’s unproven claims, based on decades of circulated rumors, that the Kinsey Institute’s founder had promoted pedophilia and that the institute endangered children.
The state doesn’t allocate any money directly for the institute, which receives the vast majority of its funding from grants and outside philanthropy, so the impact of this specific prohibition will be mostly administrative and symbolic. The state simply gives money to the university, which until now, it could spend on the institute.
The institute was founded in 1947 at the Bloomington campus as the Institute for Sex Research. Its founder, Alfred C. Kinsey, was an American biologist and professor of entomology and zoology who had been teaching a college course on marriage and was surprised by how little his students knew about sexuality. After founding the institute, he and his team collected and studied thousands of sexual histories. Kinsey, who died in 1956, rose to national prominence after the publication of his books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953.
In the former, he argued that human sexuality existed on a continuum from heterosexual to homosexual, and that people didn’t neatly fit one or the other. Because Kinsey’s research included extensive interviews with at least one pedophile, his fiercest critics accused him of encouraging sexual deviancy. Others questioned his research methods and data.
In the second book, Kinsey examined the sex life of American women, which outraged many 1950s readers with its findings about the frequency of premarital sex and masturbation. Congressional critics accused the Rockefeller Foundation of contributing to the nation’s moral decay by funding the research. It stopped doing so in 1954, two years before Kinsey’s death.
Among the contemporary topics the institute studies are issues related to reproductive health, sexually transmitted disease, teen pregnancy, and sexual abuse. It also delves into relationships and dating. Researchers should be protected from interference with such work, the university’s president wrote in a prepared statement last month.
“As a premier research institution with a 200-year legacy of impact within our state and around the world, IU is firmly committed to academic freedom,” Whitten wrote. “The university is concerned that a provision singling out a specific research institute sets a troubling precedent with implications that could limit the ability of public colleges and universities to pursue research and scholarship that benefits people and improves lives.”
She went on to say that the university will conduct a thorough legal review to ensure it follows state law and added that it’s “committed to the ongoing crucial research and robust scholarship conducted by IU faculty and the Kinsey Institute.” In a letter to faculty and staff members, Whitten and other top campus administrators said the university will continue to support the institute’s faculty in finding and securing the research grants and private philanthropic support that already make up the vast majority of its funding.
The budget signed by Eric J. Holcolm, Indiana’s Republican governor, specifically prohibits state money from being used to cover the institute’s on-campus facilities, research work, utilities, office supplies, and maintenance of research photographs or films.
The stipulation banning state spending on the Kinsey Institute’s work was introduced by Rep. Lorissa Sweet, a Republican from Wabash. She introduced it as an amendment to the proposed budget because of her objections to the institute’s founder, whom she accused on the House floor of exploiting children through interviews with adults talking about how children experience orgasm. Sweet, who did not respond to requests for comment, also suggested that the institute continues to support sexual abusers, a claim that has never been proved.
On its website, the institute urged its supporters to take to social media and other channels to “defend the right to conduct sex research.” The budget restriction “takes aim at the very foundation of academic freedom and stifles critical research on sexuality, gender, relationships, and reproduction,” it said.
“Since 1947, the Kinsey Institute has been an international thought leader in providing an unbiased and apolitical scientific approach to human sexuality,” the website post said. “In this time of divisive politics and the rise of disinformation, Kinsey Institute research, education, and historical preservation are more important than ever.”
The university did not make the president or the institute’s executive director, Justin R. Garcia, available for interviews, but it referred The Chronicle to an opinion piece published this week in The Washington Post that’s also posted on the institute’s website.
“For generations, the Kinsey Institute has shone a light on diverse aspects of sex and sexuality, in pursuit of answers that bring us closer to understanding fundamental questions of human existence,” Garcia, who is a senior scientist at the institute and also a professor of gender studies, wrote. Sweet, the lawmaker who introduced the budget amendment, had “parroted false allegations of sexual predation in the institute’s historical research and ongoing work, which the institute, the university, and outside experts have repeatedly refuted.”
Rep. Matt Pierce, a Democrat whose Bloomington district includes the flagship campus, said, “These same unproven allegations about Kinsey were circulating about 20 years ago. Really crazy stuff about Kinsey experimenting with children and babies that were circulating in these conservative culture-war stories.” The reports were being recirculated because of a 1998 book by a conservative author, Judith A. Reisman, that accused Kinsey of shaking the nation’s moral foundation with dangerous research and exploitive experiments on children.
Pierce, who is also a senior lecturer in the university’s Media School, was among a group of state legislators who visited the institute to investigate and found that there was no evidence to back up their fellow lawmakers’ concerns that children were being exploited.
“Because the author requested a roll call vote, that locked it in,” Pierce said in an interview on Friday. The amendment passed 53 to 34. “Hard-core Republicans who actually believed this stuff voted for it, but others who were fearful of being taken out in a Republican primary went along with it, figuring, ‘I’m not going to lose my seat over this.’” Sweet, the bill’s author, is a freshman who toppled a longtime moderate Republican incumbent, Pierce pointed out.
When Kinsey’s report on women’s sexuality came out in the 1950s, Pierce said, “it showed that women were more sexually active than people believed, and there was an explosion of moral panic — ‘You’re lying. This can’t be true.’”
The same moral panic, he said, has been happening in Indiana around transgender people. The governor last month signed into law a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Kinsey’s research about the fluidity of gender may have alarmed many of those same lawmakers who approved the ban, Pierce said.
He told his colleagues during a heated floor debate that, even if they believed what was being said about Kinsey, “it was 50 to 70 years ago,” and that today, federal laws and university policies protect research subjects.
While the ban on using state funds will force the university to go through time-consuming checks to be sure public money isn’t going toward institute costs, “To me, the greater concern is the precedent that the legislator is attempting to stamp out a whole area of academic inquiry,” Pierce said. “What will be next?”
In his opinion piece in The Washington Post, Garcia described the institute as the leading sex-research institute in the world, staffed by internationally renowned biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, health scientists, and demographers. The institute, he wrote, publishes dozens of scientific and academic articles each year across a variety of disciplines. Its critics, over the decades, have painted a far different picture, blaming the research center for promoting homosexuality and pornography, inciting the sexual revolution, and tearing away at the nation’s moral fabric.
Garcia warned that Indiana isn’t alone in seeing debates over gender and sexuality become politicized. Legislators elsewhere, he wrote, are ignoring scientific evidence in passing laws that restrict reproductive health care, discussions of gender identity, and basic sex education. Despite the latest setback, he wrote, “I am optimistic that this latest culture war will pass. And the Kinsey Institute will carry on.”
A bill banning mandatory diversity training at public institutions of higher education in North Dakota was signed into law on Monday.
Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, signed Senate Bill 2247 into law with little fanfare. His office issued no press release about its signing. Only the Senate journal includes a communication from the governor stating that he signed the bill along with others. It will go into effect on August 1.
The new law will prevent institutions under the control of the State Board of Higher Education from mandating noncredit diversity training. An exception for training on federal and state nondiscrimination laws is included. It also prevents institutions from asking about the “ideological or political viewpoint” of students, prospective employees, or those being considered for a promotion or tenure, very likely ending the use of diversity statements in hiring.
Additionally, the bill prohibits students and college employees from being discriminated against because of their position on a “specified concept,” which is defined in a list of 16 statements, most of them about race, sex, and power. The specified concepts include: the notion that a person’s race or sex is “inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously”; that the idea of meritocracy is “inherently racist or sexist”; and that the United States itself is “fundamentally or irredeemably” racist or sexist. Another specified concept that a student or employee can’t be penalized for refusing to believe or oppose: “The rule of law does not exist, but instead is a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups.”
The bill also states that if a college employee’s main duties include efforts to improve diversity, part of their job must also encompass “efforts to strengthen and increase intellectual diversity among students and faculty” at their institution.
The language in the signed bill also states that its provisions shouldn’t be interpreted as restricting faculty members’ academic freedom or preventing them from “teaching, researching, or writing publications about the specified concepts or related topics.”
Of the 33 diversity, equity, and inclusion-related bills The Chronicleis tracking, North Dakota’s is the first to be signed into law.
The bill was sponsored by three state senators and three state representatives, all Republicans.
Two of the bill’s sponsors responded to a request for comment on its passage. State Rep. Bernie Satrom said he was unaware the bill had passed and offered no further comment.
State Sen. Randy Lemm said he was glad the governor signed the bill because it will ensure students and instructors are not penalized for their views, and that they have free speech.
Gov. Burgum’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Earlier in the legislative process, at a March 7 hearing of the House Education Committee, 17 people testified in opposition to the bill, while three spoke in favor, including one of its sponsors, Sen. Bob Paulson.
Casey Ryan, chair of the state board, wrote in opposition to the bill: “Personally, I believe the goal of our colleges and universities is to teach students ‘how’ to learn — not ‘what’ to learn.”
States’ political climates are significantly influencing where high-school seniors are choosing to attend college in the fall, according to the results of a survey released Monday by the Art & Science Group, a higher-education consulting firm.
One in four students said they had ruled out institutions due to the politics, policies, or legal situation in the state where the college was located. Students who identified as LGBTQ+ reported rejecting institutions for these reasons at a higher rate than did students who identified as straight.
There had been anecdotal evidence and speculation in recent months to suggest that some prospective students, among the small subset of those who travel out-of-state to attend college, might rethink their choice of institutions because of increasingly disparate state policies, particularly on issues such as abortion. So David Strauss, principal of Art & Science, said the researchers weren’t necessarily surprised by the survey’s findings, but rather, by the magnitude of the number of students who indicated they felt the way they did. “What this suggests is that institutions that are in states where significant parts of their constituencies might not be comfortable, they’re going to have to mount an appeal that is strong enough to be compelling that it would overwhelm these kinds of concerns,” Strauss said.
The results were consistent across the ideological spectrum — conservative students (28 percent) indicated they were about as likely as liberal students (31 percent) to reject an institution based on the political climate of a state. And while conservative-leaning students said they were more likely to avoid institutions in California and New York, liberal-leaning students said they were more likely to avoid schools in the South or Midwest.
“We’ve been struck by the observation that liberals seem to be reacting mostly to very particular policies,” Strauss said. “Conservative students seem to be reacting a little bit to particular issues, but more to a general sense of a state being democratic or too liberal in a kind of generalized sense.”
The states most likely to be ruled out overall included Alabama (38 percent), Texas (29 percent), Louisiana, and Florida (21 percent for each). The most common policy issues cited by students were a lack of concern about racial equity and conservative restrictions on abortion and reproductive rights.
A third of students said they had declined considering institutions in their home state because of a political or legal situation they deemed unacceptable. Self-identified Republican students were more likely to have done so than Democrats.
Strauss said the results indicate that institutions should do what they can do to advocate for the interests of their students — whether that means fostering dialogue across the political spectrum or finding outlets to help students access something the state does not provide.
“That’s hard work, but it’s eminently controllable,” Strauss said.
The survey was conducted between January and February and reflects interviews with 1,865 high-school seniors, 778 of whom said they intended to attend a four-year institution as a full-time student in the fall. Responses were weighted by income, race, region, and gender to make the findings representative of the college-going population. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percent.
Among an avalanche of bills filed in the Texas Legislature on Friday were at least half a dozen proposals that would affect public colleges — a sign of Republican politicians’ keen interest in reforming higher ed this year.
Prior to Friday, state legislators had already filed bills that proposed prohibiting colleges from requiring diversity statements as a condition of employment or admission; preventing employers, including city and county governments and higher-ed institutions, from using “inherent classifications” — race, gender, etc. — in employment or admissions decisions; and banning colleges from staffing diversity, equity, and inclusion offices.
The push in Texas comes amid heightened legislative interest nationwide in reforming higher ed this year. At least 21 bills in 13 states have been introduced so far that would curb colleges’ attempts to boost diversity, equity, and inclusion if passed, a Chronicle analysis found. Texas lawmakers appear interested both in restricting colleges’ diversity efforts and in reshaping other aspects of higher ed.
Here are some of the higher-ed bills that emerged in Texas on Friday.
HB 1607 would prohibit instruction on certain concepts relating to race and gender, such as discrimination and unconscious or conscious bias, by withholding state funding. Versions of the legislation have passed in a number of other states over the last two years.
SB 2313/HB 5001 would prohibit public colleges from requiring diversity training as a condition for enrollment or registration. A handful of other states are considering similar measures this year.
SB 18would eliminate tenure or any type of permanent-employment status at public institutions of higher ed. The proposal comes amid efforts in other states — including North Dakota and Florida — to significantly modify tenure.
HB 4736would prohibit the admission of Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, Russian, and undocumented students at public colleges. Current state law permits undocumented students who meet certain eligibility requirements to receive financial aid and pay in-state tuition.
SB 2335would permit institutions of higher education which are “adversely impacted by retaliatory action” taken by accrediting agencies, which control colleges’ access to federal financial aid, to sue for damages. The measure comes as accreditors and Republican-led college-governing boards clash in Idaho and North Carolina. For example, a board member at North Idaho College, which was issued a “show cause” sanction last month amid leadership dysfunction, recently accused the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities of leading a “political” process to strip the college’s accreditation.
SB 19 would create the Texas University Fund — an endowment to support four of the state’s public research institutions: Texas Tech University, the University of Houston, Texas State University, and the University of North Texas.
The Chronicle is tracking legislation that would prohibit colleges from having diversity, equity, and inclusion offices or staff; ban mandatory diversity training; prohibit institutions from using diversity statements in hiring and promotion; or prohibit colleges from using race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions or employment. All four proscriptions were identified inmodel state legislation proposed this year by the Goldwater and Manhattan Institutes.
We are tracking 21 bills in 13 states. So far,
0
have final legislative approval.
0
have been signed into law by a governor.
2
have been tabled or failed to pass.
What Would the Legislation Restrict?
We Want to Hear From You
How are people in your state or on your campus reacting to these efforts to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at public colleges? What are your thoughts on these proposals? And have we missed any relevant bills? Please email Adrienne.lu@chronicle.com and let us know.
Methodology
The Chronicle looked for bills introduced in the current legislative sessions on state legislative websites. We searched for bills that would affect diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts identified in the model state legislation proposed by the Goldwater and Manhattan Institutes this year. We supplemented those efforts by looking for articles about relevant legislation in local media outlets.
Data on student enrollment represents only full-time students for the fall of 2021, and it comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (Ipeds). Employee numbers also come from Ipeds, and these figures include only full-time employees. Nonwhite students and faculty percentages are calculated by taking the total population minus the white population. People who identified as two or more races, nonresidents, or unknown were removed from these calculations as well. Only data from Title IV, degree-granting institutions within the United States is included.
Audrey Williams June, Kate Marijolovic, Julian Roberts-Grmela, and Eva Surovell contributed to this article.
Lydia Nobles, a New York-based artist, thought everything was going smoothly with the installation of her artwork at Lewis-Clark State College’s Center for Arts and History, in Idaho.
Nobles’s work, a series of videos of women talking about their experiences with abortion and pregnancy, was going to be included in a group show, called “Unconditional Care,” that focused on health issues.
But on February 28, the artist got an email from the center’s director, Emily Johnsen, saying that Nobles’s work could not be included in the show. The decision was made, the email said, after consulting with lawyers and “based on current Idaho Law,” specifically a recent law that makes it illegal to use public funds to “promote” or “counsel in favor of” abortion.
By the time the show opened last Friday, the college had removed two other artists’ works and edited a wall label that mentioned abortion.
The episode confirms the fears of free-speech advocates who have taken note of Idaho’s particularly restrictive abortion ban. The law’s language is vague, leaving the state’s public colleges to interpret for themselves and their employees what it means to “promote” abortion in the context of scholarship, teaching, and art. Last year the University of Idaho told its staff and faculty members that they must remain “neutral” on the topic of abortion and reproductive health. Such forceful interpretations have not been limited to Idaho.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Coalition Against Censorship wrote a letter to Cynthia L. Pemberton, the college’s president, urging the institution to reconsider its decision to exclude Nobles’s work from the show and condemning its reading of the No Public Funds for Abortion Act, or the NPFAA.
“The College’s interpretation of the NPFAA — that it applies to works of art depicting the discussion of abortion — demonstrates the potential abuses of the Act,” the letter said. The decision, the groups said, threatens the First Amendment “by censoring Nobles’ important work and denying visitors of the Center the opportunity to view, consider, and discuss it.”
For her piece, Nobles interviewed 26 people about their pregnancies. Most of the participants had proceeded with abortions, though some had not. For the show at Lewis-Clark State College, she narrowed the work to four videos. She did not intend to advocate for or against abortion, she said, but to allow people to tell their stories.
“I was really interested in documenting people’s perspectives,” Nobles said. “Allowing them to frame their story how they wanted to frame it.”
Nobles said she asked the center’s director what the college had objected to, hoping there might be a way to compromise and still include some of her work. But, she said, she never heard back. None of her videos were in the show and her name was not included on the center’s website or the exhibit’s news release.
The college also removed one of the works by Katrina Majkut, an artist who curated the exhibition. The day before the show opened last Friday, Majkut walked through the exhibit with college administrators. She said they were concerned about a piece of hers that depicts abortion pills. She was told by administrators, whom she declined to name, that she could not include that piece in the show. Majkut said she was also asked to remove some language from a wall label that mentioned abortion in the context of IVF treatments.
A Lewis-Clark State College spokesperson said in a statement to The Chronicle that college officials became aware of concerns about the show on the night of February 26.
“Within 24 hours the college engaged legal counsel to try to determine if any of the concerns might be in conflict with Idaho Code Section 18-8705,” the statement said. “On Feb. 28, within hours of receiving legal advice that some of the proposed exhibits could not be included in the exhibition, the college began notifying the third-party exhibit curator and artists involved.”
Majkut said she did not intend to create the show or a piece of artwork to protest the Idaho law or advocate a position. Both were meant to prompt discussion and learning, she said.
“I, in my own work and in this exhibit, really aimed to create an exhibit that bridged the gap,” she said, “where anyone, regardless of their political views, could learn and discuss a topic with respect and empathy.”
To her, the college acted out of fear.
”It comes at the cost of free speech and expression and at the cost of academic learning,” she said.
Michelle Hartney, the third artist whose work was excluded, had included a piece that was a recreation of a 1920s letter that a woman wrote to Margaret Sanger, the nurse and birth-control activist. In the letter, the woman wrote that she had had two abortions, though much of the letter was about the cost and physical toll of her medical care.
“I was pretty surprised that my piece was pulled,” Hartney said. “I view it as a historical document. It’s really just a copy of that letter.”
Standing at a podium labeled “Higher Education Reform,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Tuesday announced a wide-ranging plan to shake up the state’s colleges. The plan includes a Western-civilizations-based core curriculum; greater authority for boards and college presidents to hire and fire even tenured faculty members; and other proposals that would, if enacted, encroach on the autonomy of the state’s public colleges.
We are going to “eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida.”
“We’re centering higher education on integrity of the academics, excellence, pursuit of truth, teaching kids to think for themselves, not trying to impose an orthodoxy,” DeSantis said during a news conference to announce the plan.
“It’s re-establishing public control and public authority over the public universities,” Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative activist whom DeSantis recently appointed to one Florida college’s board, said during the same conference.
DeSantis’s proposed higher-ed legislative package adds to his already aggressive posture toward higher education, which he has escalated in the new year. His actions in recent weeks, coupled with Tuesday’s announcement, stake out an expansive vision for state intervention at public colleges. If realized, it would leave few areas of the enterprise untouched by government regulation or scrutiny.
Meanwhile, evidence of resistance is arising at at least one university after a month during which Florida’s Republican leaders suggested they might strip public campuses of their diversity efforts, curriculum on certain topics such as critical race theory, and health care for transgender students.
DeSantis’s proposals include requiring that students at the colleges take certain core courses “grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization.” He also wants to allow certain recently established research centers at Florida International University, Florida State University, and the University of Florida to operate more independently. The centers were modeled after Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, DeSantis said, and he wants at least two of them to create K-12 curricula.
Last year, the state passed a bill that allowed Florida’s Board of Governors to require professors to go through post-tenure review every five years. On Tuesday, DeSantis proposed giving college presidents more power over faculty hiring and allowing presidents and boards of trustees to call for a post-tenure review of a faculty member “at any time with cause.”
The governor said he would recommend the legislature set aside $100 million for the state universities to hire and retain faculty members. He recommended $15 million for recruiting students and faculty members to the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal-arts college whose governing board DeSantis recently overhauled with the appointment of six new members. One of the new trustees then wrote that he intended to see if it would be legally possible to fire everyone at the college and rehire only “those faculty, staff, and administration who fit in the new financial and business model.”
“We are also going to eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said without specifying what “DEI and CRT bureaucracies” were. “No funding, and that will wither on the vine.”
DeSantis presented eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion projects as a way of saving wasted money, although a previous Chronicle analysis found that such projects make up 1 percent or less of the state universities’ budgets.
Some evidence of fresh opposition to DeSantis’s broader agenda is emerging on Florida campuses.
Last week, faculty-union leaders at four Florida universities criticized the governor’s recent maneuvers in a press release put out by the United Faculty of Florida, the umbrella union organization. DEI policies, programs, and courses help make campuses a place where everyone belongs, Liz Brown, president of the University of North Florida chapter, said in the release. “Because of the escalating attacks on these programs,” she said, “our best and brightest students are approaching faculty and asking if the classes they have elected to take will be canceled.”
In January, Paul Renner, Florida’s Republican House Speaker, asked Florida colleges for a laundry list of DEI-related documents, including communications to or from DEI faculty committees regarding various topics. Renner defined communications expansively as “all written or electronic communications, including but not limited to emails, text messages, and social-media messages.”
On Monday, the United Faculty of Florida told Florida Atlantic University’s interim provost that, in an attempt to comply with Renner’s directive, the university has asked some faculty members to turn over materials that go beyond the House speaker’s scope. FAU has also caused “confusion and panic” by telling professors that, “All records relatedto university business are public records, even if they are transmitted through personal devices, personal emails, or personal social-media accounts,” Cami Acceus, a UFF staff member, wrote to Michele Hawkins, the interim provost, in a letter obtained by The Chronicle.
The applicable standard is not whether communications are “loosely, tangentially, or even closely related to university business,” Acceus wrote. It’s if those communications actually “transact” FAU business. She cited Florida statute and the state attorney general’s “Government-in-the-Sunshine” manual.
Education is too important to our students, to the people of Florida, and to the future of our nation to be put at risk by political whim.
“Understandably, FAU has an interest in protecting itself from legislative attacks and may even fear retribution if it does not respond zealously to the House,” Acceus said. “For these reasons, the university has cast its net wide to err on the side of overproducing records to the House of Representatives. Yet, it is not fair or just to faculty when FAU intrudes into their private lives, going beyond the scope of the record request at issue.”
FAU must do a number of things to dispel the “hysteria” it has caused, Acceus wrote, including telling professors that the university is not seeking their personal communications “beyond the parameters articulated above.”
The union is prepared to take legal action to prevent FAU from accessing faculty members’ personal information and documents in a way that’s prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, Acceus wrote.
Hawkins did not reply to a request for comment from The Chronicle.
Florida Atlantic’s faculty senate also adopted a full-throated defense of DEI efforts. These programs “are not the product of a ‘woke’ ideology,” reads the statement. Rather, “DEI is a student-success strategy. Moreover, it is a strategy that responds to student demand and expectation.” The document urges Florida’s elected leaders to “realize the damage these mischaracterizations and scare tactics” have wrought, both to the reputation of state institutions and to the morale of its educators. It calls on donors, business leaders, alumni, and citizens for their support.
“Our message is clear: Education is too important to our students, to the people of Florida, and to the future of our nation to be put at risk by political whim.”
The broad effort to expose diversity spending at the state’s universities is a marked shift. In October 2020, the state university system’s chancellor at the time co-authored a memo laying out the governing board’s commitments to DEI and its expectations that its universities would support that work. For one thing, the importance of having a senior-level university administrator who leads DEI-efforts “cannot be overstated,” says the memo. For another, universities should consider integrating DEI best practices into their curriculum, when appropriate.
“Work on diversity, equity, and inclusion as strategic priorities must not be a ‘check the box and move on’ activity,” reads the memo. “To produce meaningful and sustainable outcomes, this challenging work will need to continue long after our urgent responses to the crises of 2020 are completed.”
In an email on Tuesday, Michael V. Martin, president of Florida Gulf Coast University, told The Chronicle, “We intend to continue to follow that directive.”
College is a high-priced liberal indoctrination program where radical professors and administrators quash the speech of conservatives and promote outlandish ideas like critical race theory. Meanwhile, students rack up six-figure debts to get degrees in esoteric subjects with no job prospects — a waste of time and tax dollars.
The conservative bill of indictment against higher education is longstanding and, according to public-opinion surveys, gaining in adherents.
But there’s one man many conservative critics of higher ed have learned to love: Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., who led Purdue University for a decade, stepping down as president at the end of last year. They laud his focus on freezing tuition and providing affordable degrees in valuable STEM subjects, as well as his decision to adopt a campus-speech policy that encourages “free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the University’s community.”
“As a general matter, if more universities operated the way Purdue has operated, satisfaction would be much higher,” said Lindsay Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
At a moment when higher education is under constant fire from partisan detractors and the college degree has itself become a central dividing line in American politics, is Daniels’s tenure at Purdue a model for how to effectively lead a public university through fraught times? And is Daniels, a former Republican governor of Indiana, an antidote to growing conservative disfavor of higher education?
Sitting in his office wearing a Purdue-themed, plaid button-down, Daniels insisted that he had eschewed partisan political activity while leading Purdue, and that his intent had never been to prescribe policies to other institutions. “I never used the ‘C’ or ‘L’ word, almost never the ‘R’ or ‘D’ word,” he said during an interview in early December at Purdue’s main administrative building, “but, you know, I was always trying to emphasize bringing people together.”
That’s not to say he would mind if other universities followed his model. “Could Purdue serve as some sort of a corrective or a counterexample? I’d be very proud if that happened,” Daniels said. “I’m a big believer in higher education and its importance to the country and the importance that we maintain the best network of institutions in the world. And that’s exactly why I think its shortcomings are worth worrying about trying to improve.”
He changed Purdue, but I’m not convinced he changed the university presidency as a job.
Even his critics acknowledge that Daniels has been a significant president — his name is often mentioned alongside reformers like Michael Crow at Arizona State University. But they also point out that what works for a major research university wouldn’t work at most other colleges, which have more limited resources. On Purdue’s West Lafayette campus, Daniels is not immune from criticism. He is accused of shortchanging faculty pay and benefits to freeze tuition and allowing hate speech to flourish in the name of free expression. Some of Daniels’s efforts to make the university more entrepreneurial have also fallen short.
“He’s a former governor, he knows how to get things done,” said Barrett Taylor, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Texas. “He changed Purdue, but I’m not convinced he changed the university presidency as a job.”
Conservatives have long held suspicions about the role and value of higher education, but its emergence as a national wedge issue has intensified since the 2016 presidential election, in particular over how colleges have sought to diversify their student bodies.
Polls show deep and growing discontent about college among conservatives across the country. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that nearly 60 percent of those who identified as Republican thought colleges had a negative effect on the nation. By 2021 that figure had increased to 64 percent.
Polling from Pew has also found that conservatives overwhelmingly believe professors bring their liberal political and social views into the classroom. State legislatures have passed laws to restrict how race and racism are taught, and to limit how institutions train employees on those topics.
As a candidate, Donald J. Trump dragged higher education onto the front lines of the culture wars, painting colleges as bastions of progressive groupthink hostile to conservative viewpoints. Trump also rolled back protections for LGBTQ students and, in 2019, signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to ensure that institutions receiving federal research grants were properly protecting free inquiry. At the signing ceremony, Trump introduced several college students who alleged that they had been punished for their political views.
The partisan divide on higher education is also reflected in voters’ college attainment. Nearly 60 percent of those with a college degree now identify as or lean Democratic, according to the Pew Research Center, and those without a college degree are flocking to the Republican Party.
One thing that’s totally alienated a lot of people to many higher-ed institutions is the enforced conformity of thought; the uniformity of thought.
So far, no laws restricting instruction on “divisive topics” such as race, gender, and sexuality have been passed in Indiana, though several were proposed, according to the free-expression advocacy group PEN America, which tracks such legislation. Nationwide, nearly 20 such measures were signed into law since 2021, including bills in at least 10 states that apply to public colleges.
In an interview, Daniels lamented the overall souring public perception of higher education. “We can’t be happy that people have become dismissive about the whole enterprise,” he said, “or decided that it can’t possibly be worth either the money or the time.” He added that he understands the frustrations of those who argue that campuses are not welcome to a range of political viewpoints. “One thing that’s totally alienated a lot of people to many higher-ed institutions,” he said, “is the enforced conformity of thought; the uniformity of thought.”
On some issues, Daniels is willing to take a strong stand. Republican officials have attacked President Biden’s executive action to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loans as an unconstitutional giveaway to the wealthy and an affront to those who have already paid off their education debts. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in February from six Republican-led states, though not Indiana, that sued to stop the loan-forgiveness plan. In an interview with Fox News, Daniels called the executive order “grossly unfair to those who lived up to their responsibilities or never went to college at all. It’s grotesquely expensive and will aggravate our already terrifying national debt picture.”
Speaking out forcefully on political issues is something few university presidents are willing to do, even on matters that could affect their campuses. A Chronicle survey found that presidents almost invariably self-censor to avoid controversy and political backlash. As a result, they increasingly find themselves caught in the middle of contentious debates on social issues, weighing the relative risks or rewards of taking a public position.
Daniels, on the other hand, has a regular column in The Washington Post in which he airs his views on a wide variety of topics: meddlesome mothers who interfere too much in their children’s college experience, a California law meant to prohibit inhumane conditions on hog farms, and the necessity of reopening Purdue’s campus in the fall of 2020 despite the risks of Covid-19.
Daniels’s willingness to speak out, including to publicly critique higher education, is one of the things that have made Republicans look favorably on Purdue, said Andrew Gillen, a senior policy analyst at the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Having him in leadership, not afraid to put his views out there,” Gillen said, “gave them a reason to trust that if something was wrong, he would tell them.”
Daniels downplays his role as a conservative voice, and in many ways his style of politics is out of step with a party that still largely embraces Trump. Instead, Daniels said that he believes in “politics by addition, not division,” and that making college more welcoming to conservatives, generally, could be one way to stave off enrollment declines.
“Higher education will be better off if more people, you can call them conservatives, start to feel more confidence in it.”
Daniels is part of a still small but persistent trend of politicians who are tapped to lead college campuses. The best-known among these have been the former Democratic governor and U.S. senator David Boren, who served as president of the University of Oklahoma from 1994 to 2018, and Hank Brown, a former Republican U.S. representative and senator who was president of the University of Northern Colorado from 1998 to 2002 and the University of Colorado system from 2005 to 2008.
The skills of a politician can be advantageous for a college president, particularly if that person is good at raising money and enjoys everyday interactions with people. “I sort of brought an affinity for that kind of thing from my last job,” Daniels said. “I always tell people, You know, you’ve got to find a way to stay in touch with the ground level.”
For much of his career, however, Daniels served at the highest levels of both government and corporate leadership. He has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a law degree from Georgetown, and he began his political career working for Sen. Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana. Daniels then ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee and became a top political adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
Rebecca McElhoe, Courtesy of Purdue University
George W. Bush joins Daniels onstage at a Purdue event in December. Before his election as Indiana’s governor, Daniels served as then-President Bush’s first budget director from 2001 to 2003.
In 1987, Daniels left the White House to lead the conservative-leaning Hudson Institute and three years later became a senior executive for a pharmaceutical company. Daniels served as President George W. Bush’s budget director from 2001 to 2003.
He twice won Indiana’s governorship, in 2004 and again in 2008. At the end of his second term, he briefly considered entering the 2012 presidential race. Instead, another opportunity presented itself: the presidency of Purdue University, where Daniels as governor had appointed or reappointed all 10 members of the Board of Trustees.
Daniels said he was attracted to Purdue because of the opportunity to harness the university’s already strong offerings in science and engineering to generate economic activity for the region. “Anybody can see that in today’s economy, R1s, especially STEM-centric universities, are one of the great assets you can have.”
When he arrived at Purdue, about 45 percent of undergraduates were getting degrees in STEM. That figure has now increased to nearly 70 percent, and for a student body that is about 30 percent larger. In addition, several major corporations have begun to build research and manufacturing facilities near the campus, including Rolls-Royce and Saab, which are partnering with the university’s aerospace engineers. A $1.8-billion semiconductor plant is also in the works.
With the help of the university’s research foundation, housing is being built in West Lafayette for employees of those companies and others to bolster the population and economy in a rural area that might not otherwise attract large industries.
Purdue has also sought to expand its brand nationally. In 2017 the university acquired the for-profit Kaplan University to create the nonprofit online Purdue University Global. But the arrangement has been plagued by concerns that it was too opaque, would dilute the university’s reputation for rigor, and become a drain on its finances. The enterprise did not break even financially until a year ago, according to an analysis by Phil Hill, an education-technology consultant.
The goal of that arrangement, and the focus on affordability, Daniels said, is to uphold Purdue as a steppingstone for students from various backgrounds to improve their lives.
“This is the place where people from the farms, the small towns, the inner cities, you know, have come to a public university,” Daniels said,” and I’ve heard it countless times from people like that: ‘If not for Purdue,’ ‘it started at Purdue,’ ‘I owe it to Purdue.’”
For Daniels, one key to making Purdue a place for the less privileged to succeed has been to make it affordable. Annual in-state tuition has been set at $9,992 for all but three years since he became president. (A $10 fee for the student recreation center briefly pushed the total over $10,000, but the university’s trustees rescinded that at Daniels’ request.)
The tuition freeze and Daniels’s other efforts to control costs are a big reason that Nadra Dunston, a sophomore studying mechanical engineering, admires Daniels. “He’s trying to utilize resources to make it affordable,” said Dunston, who is from West Lafayette, Ind.
What has made that tuition freeze possible is a large increase in enrollment. In addition to overall growth of nearly 30 percent over the past decade, the number of undergraduates from outside Indiana, who pay tuition of up to $29,000, has more than doubled during Daniels’s tenure. (Nonresident tuition has also remained the same since 2013.) Daniels points out that the number of students from Indiana has also increased, though it has fallen from 49 percent of the student body to 40 percent since he became president.
Freezing tuition isn’t unique to Purdue. In this case, the policy underscores Daniels’s background as a politician, noted Rebecca S. Natow, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at Hofstra University. “Tuition freezes are politically popular — they’re popular with students and families, and they’re popular with a lot of voters,” she said. But because of that popularity, they can be hard to undo even when they are no longer financially beneficial.
Moreover, the kinds of policies that made Daniels a successful governor don’t necessarily work in higher education, said Michael J. Hicks, a professor of economics and director of a center for business research at Ball State University, in Muncie, Ind. He pointed to one of Daniels’s chief accomplishments as governor: overhauling the state’s bureau of motor vehicles.
Educating college students isn’t as simple as renewing a driver’s license or registering a vehicle — basic transactions that can often be completed in a few hours or less, said Hicks, who is also on the board of scholars at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which advocates for free-market reforms. “Education would be nice if you could make it more efficient, but the challenge of getting a higher number of people educated isn’t transactional.”
What Daniels did was really good for Purdue but really bad for Indiana.
The real knock on the tuition freeze is that the university has become less accessible to low-income students. In an analysis of college-going rates in Indiana, Hicks found that the net price students were paying had increased at Purdue by nearly $1,200 between 2018 and 2020, but had fallen at the other four large public universities in the state. The reason for that increase is that Purdue is recruiting more affluent and nonresident students who pay the full sticker price of tuition, Hicks argues.
The freeze has undermined outcomes that Daniels argued for as governor, said Hicks, including seeking to improve the share of state residents with a college degree. Since 2015, the college-going rate in Indiana has declined from 65 percent of high-school graduates to 53 percent in 2020, according to Hicks’s analysis. That decline — 12 percentage points — is double the national average, Hicks found.
“What Daniels did was really good for Purdue,” Hicks said, “but really bad for Indiana.”
Another free-market idea meant to reduce the burden of federal student loans was Purdue’s income-share agreements, which offered students money for college. In return, students agreed to repay a share of their income to private investors after graduating and getting a job.
Over seven years, the program provided about $21 million to roughly 1,000 students. But the program was suspended in June after complaints from several students that the repayment terms were confusing and far more costly than they expected. In some cases, students could end up repaying 250 percent of the original amount they borrowed — far more than would have been required for a federal student loan.
A major pillar of Daniels’s legacy at Purdue is his commitment to free speech, which he describes as central to the mission of a university.
“Knowledge advances through the collision of ideas,” Daniels said during an interview, “and when on any subject, but especially science and so forth, when somebody says, ‘There’s one answer and only one answer, and we don’t want anybody here who doesn’t agree with that answer,’ you know, that’s anti-intellectual, that’s anti-academic.”
His stance echoes a chief complaint among conservative activists: that higher education is a progressive echo chamber that shuts out dissenting views.
In 2015 the university’s Board of Trustees made Purdue the first public institution to adopt the “Chicago principles,” guidelines meant to protect free expression on campus, even speech that many would find offensive or threatening. The following year Purdue began what is believed to be the first freshman orientation program dedicated to free speech. Role-playing exercises and skits demonstrate how students can react to speech they may find insulting.
If students aren’t occasionally hearing something that offends them “there’s no free speech out there,” said Gary J. Lehman, a member of the Board of Trustees who graduated from Purdue in 1974.
Spencer Johnson, a senior and the communications director of Purdue’s College Republicans, described a campus environment where a variety of political perspectives are shared and debated. “We don’t face massive pushback on our club’s simply existing,” said Johnson, “and really you’re free to express your ideas in class. You might have peers kind of balk at more conservative ideology … but for the most part, the professors aren’t hostile towards it.”
Other students feel that the university has gone too far and protects individuals who make them feel unsafe.
Rob Weiner, a doctoral student in agricultural sciences, said students have frequently complained about being harassed by street preachers on campus, but to no avail. Holding hands with a same-gender partner, Weiner said, “We were told we would burn in hell for our sexual immorality.”
But the university has occasionally taken action, including expelling a student in 2020 for repeatedly posting what Daniels termed “racist and despicable” statements on social media, according to the Associated Press. In one instance, the student posted a video where he pretended to run over Black Lives Matter protesters.
Daniels decided to expel the student a week after university officials announced that the posts were protected under the university’s policies.
When Daniels was named president in 2013, faculty members were largely skeptical of his ability to successfully lead a research university. They remain, along with graduate students, Daniels’s fiercest critics.
Their complaints are aimed, in part, at Daniels’s frugality. The tuition freeze has come at the expense of faculty pay and health-care benefits, they argue, as well as an increase in deferred maintenance on campus. Adjusted for inflation, the average salary for all instructional staff at Purdue increased 3 percent from 2012 to 2020, according to a Chronicle analysis, though salaries at similar research universities nationally declined more than 2 percent over the same period.
The minimum graduate-student stipend at Purdue was increased last year from $20,000 to $24,500, but a living wage would require someone to make nearly $8,000 more, said Weiner, who is a member of Graduate Rights and Our Well-Being, a group that advocates for better working conditions for graduate students at Purdue.
In April the university announced it was spending $50 million to improve pay for faculty and graduate students, calling it “the largest total investment in compensation in more than two decades.”
The other common complaint is that Daniels has violated shared-governance principles by forcing the campus to adopt a civic-literacy requirement over the objection of the University Senate, which voted against the plan. The curriculum of the program is meant to increase students’ understanding of U.S. politics and improve civic participation.
I believe his presidency has given Purdue an amount of cover from the legislature.
Undergraduates at all of Purdue’s campuses have to take one of several courses in political science or history, listen to a dozen podcasts created for the curriculum and attend six approved campus events. Students must also pass a test on civic literacy in order to graduate.
While faculty members were deeply engaged in developing the civics curriculum, the faculty senate voted against adopting it. The board approved it over the faculty’s objections, said David Sanders, associate professor of biological sciences.
“It’s a pointless exercise, meant for external consumption,” Sanders said, “almost all about dead white males who lived at the time of the Constitution.”
But even those who’ve clashed with Daniels acknowledge his popularity and civility. “He’s one of the smartest people I know,” said Sanders, an oft-quoted critic of the former president. His critiques were never about Daniels but about the effect of his policies, Sanders added. “We, for a long time, maintained a very cordial relationship.”
Stephanie Masta, associate professor of curriculum studies and another frequent critic of Daniels, said there has been at least one positive from his standing as a conservative.
“If you look at the way other red-state legislatures, they go hard after higher education, and that hasn’t happened in this very red state,” Masta said, “I believe his presidency has given Purdue an amount of cover from the legislature.”
John Underwood, Courtesy of Purdue University
Purdue’s marching band honored Daniels with his own mallet to strike the group’s giant bass drum. “That’s the sort of thing, you know, I’ll not forget,” he says.
In early December, Purdue celebrated Daniels’s accomplishments, providing a tidy encapsulation of his decade-long tenure. At a street festival, the university renamed a roadway for the departing president and Daniels took selfies with students and signed T-shirts for more than two hours. Hungry attendees could snack on cookies shaped in the likeness of the president.
At a forum titled “Freedom of Inquiry and the Advancement of Knowledge,” scholars praised the university for its commitment to free speech. Daniels also interviewed his former boss, President George W. Bush, at an event that was closed to the news media. Outside the venue, students protested.
But walking through Purdue’s student union late in the fall semester, it’s hard to find an undergraduate who said they wouldn’t miss Daniels when he stepped down. “Our student body loves him because he shows up at different events,” said Isabel Kurien, a sophomore who is studying management and international business.
Daniels has made himself accessible to students by eating with them in the cafeteria, working out alongside them in the fitness center, and sitting with them at football games. After a recent trustee meeting, the Purdue marching band assembled to honor Daniels with his own mallet to hit the group’s giant bass drum. “That didn’t get any notice,” he said, “but that’s the sort of thing, you know, I’ll not forget.”
Katilina White, a senior studying political science and philosophy, said the tuition freeze and the growth in enrollment have led to a decline in course quality and a major housing shortage. But most undergraduates don’t blame Daniels, she said, because they see him as something of a caricature — a meme-like figure whose oversized face is displayed on cardboard cutouts at Boilermakers football games.
Daniels may remain in the spotlight, but not at Purdue: He may be considering a run for the U.S. Senate next year, according to some news accounts.
In higher education, however, the focus from conservatives will shift away from Daniels both at Purdue and nationally.
Mung Chiang, the former dean of engineering, became president at the beginning of this year. Chiang is a study in contrasts with Daniels; an academic with extensive research and publications and no experience in politics beyond a brief stint at the U.S. State Department during the Trump administration.
While faculty have welcomed a president with deep knowledge of academe, they are also chagrined that the trustees appointed Chiang without any search or even interviewing him formally for the position.
Chiang won’t be entirely on his own — Daniels will retain his role as chairman of the university’s research foundation, which has been deeply involved in developing Purdue’s corporate ties. In addition, the university trustees plan to extend the tuition freeze through the end of the next academic year.
Nationally, all eyes are on Ben Sasse, the Nebraska Republican who resigned his seat in the U.S. Senate this week to become president of the University of Florida in February. Sasse will come to the job with far more experience in higher education than most other politicians who have sought to lead universities: He has a doctorate in American history from Yale University, taught briefly at the University of Texas, and then served as president of Midland University, in Nebraska, from 2010 to 2014.
But he is entering a job in a state where he is relatively unknown and facing backlash from faculty and students alike who raged about the process that made him the sole finalist for the position, as well as about his past criticism of same-sex marriage. Sasse has said he will try to follow Daniels’s example of eschewing partisan politics.
Daniels said he has been in touch with Sasse in recent months and has shared some advice. “I get the question a lot: ‘So, you’ve led these other lives, you know, business and government, and so what from your past experience helped you the most?’” Daniels said.
“I always start by saying, ‘scar tissue,’ right?” he said. “And I’m not being completely facetious.”
A dean at the University of Houston says he was ousted this week because of his support for abolitionism, a movement that calls for the elimination of police and prisons.
Alan J. Dettlaff, who since 2015 had served as dean of the Graduate College of Social Work, wrote on Twitter that he was removed from the post this week. He said he was proud of his work advocating for carceral reform as the college’s leader, but that “unfortunately, the resistance to this was too great.”
In an interview with The Chronicle, Dettlaff, who will return to the Houston faculty, said that the college has focused its work and programming on racial justice since shortly after he began as dean, and that conversations about abolitionism had intensified after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Dettlaff has led faculty study groups on abolition, and the college has purchased copies of books on the subject for all faculty, staff, and students, he said.
“We’ve really been engaged in a process of learning about this collectively,” Dettlaff said. “But there has been resistance, and that resistance has grown over time among a small group of people that led to this outcome.”
The Chronicle tried to contact every faculty member listed on the college’s website on Wednesday, but none who opposed Dettlaff’s leadership would speak on the record.
The decision to remove Dettlaff as dean was “initiated,” the university said in a statement, by Robert McPherson, the interim senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, “to better align the college with the university’s academic priorities, which include growing research expenditures and elevating the learning experience for all students as UH works to realize its vision of becoming a Top 50 public university.”
Dettlaff, the statement read, will “continue his own important scholarly work, which focuses on racial disparities, improving outcomes for LGBTQ youth, and addressing the unique needs of immigrant families. Dr. Dettlaff is a well-respected thought leader in his field and will continue to do this important work as a member of our faculty.”
In response to assertions that opposition from a small group had led McPherson to demote Dettlaff, Shawn Lindsey, a university spokeswoman, said that the institution doesn’t provide details on personnel actions but that “our practice is to verify facts prior to any action and the timing occurred so as not to disrupt the academic semester.”
Dettlaff, meanwhile, thinks his removal from leadership sends a troubling message. “My university thinks that the dean should be neutral, and I disagree with that,” Dettlaff said. “I think it’s our responsibility as leaders to move our professions forward and to take bold stances, to know what’s coming on the horizon in our disciplines.” (Lindsay did not answer a question about the university’s stance on whether deans should remain neutral.)
This is not the first time an abolitionist scholar has alleged pushback and professional consequences. The University of Mississippi in 2020 terminated an assistant professor who was an outspoken abolitionist, leading to criticism from advocacy groups such as PEN America and the American Association of University Professors and, eventually, to a confidential settlement with the professor, Garrett Felber. Other institutions, too, have wrestled with how to support faculty members who face vitriol for their opposition to the police.
At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, a campus-policing task force that convened in 2020 included members who supported abolishing the police. But group members told The Chronicle that they struggled to advance conversations about truly reforming policing, citing resistance from university administrators, as well as from parents of undergraduates who opposed scaling back the university’s police presence.
Abolition, Dettlaff said, is “not as fringe a topic as it was a few years ago, and I think that academia has a responsibility to understand that.” That doesn’t mean that it’s a source of universal agreement, Dettlaff added, but it’s crucial for the field of social work to engage with the subject.
“I have always said to all of my faculty, ‘You don’t have to be an abolitionist to work here, but I want you to understand what abolitionism is so that you can have conversations with our students about that,’” he said. “Because the reality now is that students come to the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work specifically because of our focus on abolition.”
That’s true of many faculty and staff members, too, said Melanie Pang, a clinical assistant professor. “Many of us have made super-clear that the reason we came to this college was because it was committed out loud to racial justice,” Pang said. She believes the decision to remove the dean was based on opposition within the college that was “anti-racial justice, anti-equity, and anti-anything that doesn’t center their voices.”
More than 120 students signed a letter, sent to university administrators on Wednesday, asking that the college remain committed to racial-justice and abolitionist work and that a justification for Dettlaff’s removal be provided. Among them was Savannah Lee, a second-year master’s student. “I’m really proud to be a student because of the work that we were doing collectively and because of the work that Dean Dettlaff does,” Lee said. “We are surprised, and I am hurt, by the loss of him. I think it’s a detriment to the university and the college itself.”
The university did not seek faculty or student input in demoting Dettlaff, Lee and Pang said. The decision was made solely by McPherson, the interim provost, said Lindsey, who noted that “deans serve at will at the discretion of the provost.”
An interim dean has not been announced, and Lindsey said that, in the meantime, the college’s administrators will report to McPherson.
Pang said she and her colleagues are determined to push ahead. “The majority of us are moving in a direction that centers racial justice, period,” she said. “It doesn’t matter who the dean is, we’re going to carry our work forward.”
After his decisive victory in the Florida governor’s race last week, Ron DeSantis dubbed the Sunshine State as the place “where ‘woke’ goes to die.” But a federal judge on Thursday pushed back against that notion, blocking the State University System of Florida from enforcing through regulation a new law that puts strict limits on what professors can teach or say about race in the classroom.
In a searing 139-page order, Judge Mark E. Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida cast as Orwellian the state’s defense of the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the “Stop WOKE” Act. The order comes in response to litigation from university professors and college students, who have argued that provisions of the law prohibiting the expression of certain viewpoints, such as those related to sex and race, are unconstitutional. Defending the law, the State University System has argued that public university professors do not have free speech rights when it comes to what they teach. In his order, Walker took strong exception to that argument.
“Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves,” Walker wrote. “This is positively dystopian.”
Walker, who was nominated to the bench in 2012 by President Barack Obama, is known for his rhetorical flourishes. In the opening line of his order, granting in part a preliminary injunction to the plaintiffs, the federal judge quoted from George Orwell’s 1984. “‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,’” Walker wrote, “and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.’”
Under the Individual Freedom Act, professors are prohibited from “training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels … student[s] or employee[s] to believe” eight specified concepts. Among others, those concepts include promoting a belief that “A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
Florida’s law is part of a broader conservative pushback against “woke” liberalism and critical race theory in colleges and schools. DeSantis, who is widely expected to be a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has made these issues central to his political identity. As governor, DeSantis is empowered to appoint most members of the state’s Board of Governors, the systemwide university governing body. Under the law, it falls to the board to ferret out unchecked “wokeness” and enforce prohibitions against it. (Violations of the law could result in forfeiture of performance-based funding from the state.)
Walker’s order, however, enjoins the board from enforcing its regulation. Jerry C. Edwards, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, who represented some of the plaintiffs, said the order sent a strong signal to public colleges and the Legislature.
“We are very happy with this ruling,” he said. “Judge Walker enjoined the Florida Board of Governors from being able to enforce this law, which he called ‘positively dystopian.’ And we totally agree that it is positively dystopian, violates the First Amendment, and is unconstitutionally vague under the Fourteenth Amendment.”
A spokeswoman for the Board of Governors said in an email that the board had “no comment, as it is our policy not to comment on pending litigation.”
This is at least the second case this year in which Walker has written a strong order related to First Amendment issues at public universities. In January he issued a blistering order against the University of Florida, saying it could not enforce a policy that had blocked university professors from participating in litigation against the state.
Walker’s order on Thursday took strong umbrage at what the judge characterized as a troubling notion that the state can ban speech it does not like.
“Defendants respond that the First Amendment offers no protection here,” Walker wrote. “They argue that because university professors are public employees, they are simply the State’s mouthpieces in university classrooms. As a result, Defendants claim, the State has unfettered authority to limit what professors may say in class, even at the university level. According to Defendants, so long as professors work for the State, they must all read from the same music.”
Edwards, the ACLU lawyer, said Walker’s two orders signal a judicial check on efforts to encroach on professors’ speech rights. “What this ruling and the other ruling says is that the State of Florida has not been good about protecting free-speech rights on college campuses and promoting free speech on college campuses, and that the courts aren’t having it,” Edwards said. “They are pushing back and saying you need to respect the First Amendment. You need to respect academic freedom.”
