As more and more corporations are rejecting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and phasing out many related programs, Arizona’s universities continue to push the discriminatory materials and messaging on students – and at a high cost.
A government watchdog group, the Goldwater Institute, recently released a report which found that Arizona taxpayers and undergraduate students are being forced to subsidize “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) course mandates at public universities to the tune of nearly $2 billion and 40 million hours.
The report found:
- DEI general education course mandates ran up students and state taxpayers a bill of at least (and likely far more than) $1.8 billion in tuition and state appropriations over each four-year period in which undergraduate student bodies must complete these requirements.
- The current undergraduate population at public universities, meanwhile, will spend at least 40 million student hours satisfying DEI general education course requirements.
- The watchdog organization Parents Defending Education (PDE) recently revealedover $1 billion in federal grant funding has been distributed by the U.S. Department of Education to promote DEI in K-12 schools and universities across the country in the past four years alone. This massive federal footprint is dwarfed by the in-kind contributions forcibly extracted from students and state taxpayers for DEI efforts, all under the watch of their local lawmakers in both red and blue states alike.
- Even uncontroversial-sounding DEI labels in conservative-leaning states, such as Iowa State University’s recently renamed “U.S. Cultures and Communities” requirement, directs students to explore “intersectional understandings of diversity” and “analyze systemic oppression and personal prejudice and their impact on marginalized communities and the broader U.S. society.”
- Other, more nakedly political DEI general education courses, such as the University of Virginia’s “‘Hateinnany’: Fascism, Antifascism, and the Global Far Right,” even offer course descriptions explicitly naming President Donald Trump in the context of “far right politics” and “fascism.”
The Goldwater Institute argues that by teaching that modern American society is systemically bigoted against various minority groups, DEI trains Americans to view themselves as victims of a rigged system, telling them that the only way to remedy past discrimination is by discriminating against “privileged” groups today.
The Institute alleges that with faculty governing bodies having abdicated their responsibility to promote intellectual inquiry free of ideological coercion—and university regents opting to ignore this development—state lawmakers now have an obligation to their taxpayers and students to intervene.
The Institute offers suggestions for ending what it believes are problematic policies:
1) building on the work of Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation successfully eliminating DEI classes from the general education catalog at state universities, and
2) adopting the Goldwater Institute’s Freedom From Indoctrination Act, which eliminates all DEI course requirements in public universities at all levels—including degree specific requirements. Under this legislation, only students actively seeking a degree in fields focused upon racial and gender identify shall find themselves steeped in the current avalanche of politicized DEI ideology.
