In 2024, three states—Alabama, Iowa and Utah—banned diversity, equity and inclusion offices at public universities, continuing a trend that kicked off in 2023 with Florida and Texas. Three more states prohibited colleges from requiring diversity statements in hiring and admissions: Idaho, Indiana and Kansas. And lawmakers in at least 10 other states proposed legislation related to DEI in higher education that didn’t make it into law.
Those bills represented a shift in focus from a few years ago, when critics of DEI primarily took aim at classroom concepts like critical race theory, a decades-old framework that asserts that racism is structural. Conservative politicians and pundits claimed that lessons employing CRT unnecessarily vilified white people—and discomfited white students—while framing nonwhite people as victims.
But attempts to ban CRT in college classrooms were broadly unsuccessful—at least in comparison to K-12-level efforts—and Republicans shifted their focus to DEI trainings, hiring practices and offices. The rhetoric around the issue, too, has changed. Lawmakers now focus less on white students’ comfort, preferring to stress the tax dollars being spent on programs they describe as frivolous at best and discriminatory at worst.
“We’re seeing state legislatures … go after the infrastructure, the offices, the hiring practices, the sort of organizational makeup of this work,” said Alex C. Lange, an assistant professor of higher education at Colorado State University. “This specter of DEI is sort of a much easier target” than CRT was.
And so it became one of the defining and politically divisive issues of 2024 for higher education, with crackdowns and proposals drawing the ire and frustration of students, faculty and DEI professionals. They argue that conservative backlash to DEI is based on mischaracterizations of what DEI is: a set of resources and programs aimed at making college more accessible to those who have been historically locked out of higher education, without disenfranchising any other populations.
But despite the virulent pushback anti-DEI bills have received, it’s unlikely the momentum will slow in the new year, when Republicans will control both legislatures and governor’s offices in 23 states. Several red-state lawmakers have already signaled they plan to file similar bills in 2025—and some conservative groups and pundits have hinted that they intend to focus again on restricting classroom learning.
The impact of 2024’s anti-DEI legislation reached beyond the states where it was passed. In several states where bans were proposed but failed, colleges have chosen to take pre-emptive action, dissolving offices and cultural centers despite the fact that no law required them to do so. That was the case in Missouri, Kentucky and Nebraska, where several institutions, including all three states’ flagship institutions, shuttered their DEI offices voluntarily.
Presidents at some of the institutions acknowledged that these dissolutions were done, at least in part, at the urging of conservative lawmakers.
“We want to ensure we have a positive dialogue with [lawmakers] that support our university,” said University of Missouri at Columbia president Mun Choi on a press call in July. “We believe this offers a sustainable path forward.”
Even in states that have passed DEI bans, some universities have gone beyond the letter of the law to eliminate offices, cultural centers or staff they weren’t required to. Utah’s anti-DEI law was praised upon its passage for carving out exceptions for cultural centers, but most of the state’s public universities shuttered LGBTQ+ and multicultural centers nevertheless.
The University of Texas at Austin also laid off a slew of DEI staff members four months after the state’s DEI ban went into effect on Jan. 1, despite the fact that those the staffers had already been moved to non-DEI positions. One former UT Austin DEI employee, Shawntal Z. Brown, told Inside Higher Ed that she felt the university had wanted to take the “easiest route” to satisfy Republican lawmakers.
Most recently, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges’ Senior College and University Commission, an accrediting body, announced that it was considering removing the words “diversity, equity and inclusion” from its standards, replacing them with “success for all students.” Though WSCUC’s outgoing president said the potential change has more to do with how contentious those words have become, some fear it’s an attempt to appease President-elect Donald Trump, who has repeatedly criticized and threatened to “fire” accreditors.
In many ways, the year was defined by this overcompliance, which has been nearly as common as actual DEI bans. That could be an omen for the coming year, Lange said.
“My perception is a lot of campus administrators take the tactic that, if we stay silent on these issues or we proactively do the thing we’re afraid is going to happen,” an even worse scenario can be avoided.
Acceleration in 2025
Bans on DEI offices and hiring practices are likely to continue cropping up—or even accelerate—when lawmakers reconvene in the new year, especially after the country swung right in the 2024 election.
Several state legislators have already announced that they plan to file anti-DEI measures in their upcoming sessions—or refile bills that were unsuccessful in 2024.
An Ohio bill that aimed to ban mandatory DEI trainings and diversity statements and punish university employees who impede “intellectual diversity” passed the state Senate but never made it to a vote in the House. It’ll likely be back. In a June article in Statehouse News, its sponsor, Republican senator Jerry Cirino, blamed “a lack of leadership” for the bill never reaching the floor and vowed to bring it back in 2025. This legislative session, there may be a clearer path to victory for the bill as the likely new Speaker of the House, Republican Matt Huffman, has strongly backed the legislation.
In West Virginia, an anti-DEI bill referred to as both the Anti-Woke Act and Restoring Sanity Act died in committee this year, but its lead sponsor, Republican senator Patricia Rucker, told Inside Higher Ed via email that she intends to introduce it again in 2025. The legislation would ban DEI offices and trainings and diversity statements.
Meanwhile, an Arkansas state senator said in September during a meeting of the Arkansas Legislative Council’s Higher Education subcommittee that in 2025 he plans to file a bill to ban DEI programs, following the conclusion of a study into DEI at the state’s colleges and universities. The Arkansas Advocate reported that the senator, Dan Sullivan, a Republican, did not present a formal report on the study’s findings, but said that the new legislation would be based on laws in Florida and Texas.
An anti-DEI bill has also been prefiled in South Carolina. It would prohibit DEI trainings and statements but not DEI offices, although universities would be required to submit annual reports of how many people work in DEI-related roles on their campuses and how much they’ve spent on programs.
The debate over DEI could also re-enter the classroom in multiple states in 2025, potentially inspired by Florida’s controversial recent changes to general education courses; under the state’s far-reaching anti-DEI legislation, courses that involve “identity politics” or teach “that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States” may not be used for general education credits.
The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank and one of the driving forces behind existing anti-DEI legislation, published model legislation in 2023 aimed at prohibiting universities from requiring DEI-related courses to graduate or complete any degree program. Though this legislation, called the Freedom From Indoctrination Act, hasn’t passed anywhere in the country yet, Goldwater’s director of education policy, Matt Beienburg, said he has heard from numerous legislators who are interested in introducing it this year.
If taken up by states, this or similar legislation would represent a revitalized effort to eliminate left-wing ideologies from coursework, mimicking the anti-CRT laws of 2021 and 2022. Legislators appeared reluctant to breach the walls of the classroom in 2024, with most anti-DEI laws specifically carving out space for classroom instruction on concepts that are otherwise barred, and faculty have argued that any legislation limiting what can be taught at a public university is an overt violation of academic freedom.
Indeed, Beienburg said, lawmakers have been trepidatious about such legislation for that very reason. But he argued that the model legislation is intended to in fact improve academic freedom by preventing students from being required to take—and professors from having to teach—DEI courses and content.
“You want to be an accounting major, a biology major, there’s no justification forcing that student to go spend a semester’s worth of time and tuition dollars taking a DEI class simply in order to graduate from a state institution,” he said. “We’ve had significant interest from lawmakers who, I think, for a long time have really felt powerless, because they have concerns about DEI but, again, also want to make sure that they are addressing coursework and classroom issues in a way that does respect academic freedom.”
