Even before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, university administrators had begun adopting “holistic” admissions calculated to evade bans on affirmative action. But similar efforts to subvert state regulations on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices, policies, and activities have escaped public attention.

Legislatures in 22 states have proposed 40 bills to regulate DEI this year. Only seven have become law. Bills to curtail DEI activities in public universities have died in deep-red states like Ohio, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana, and Iowa. As of this past summer, at least five states (Florida, Texas, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Idaho) have banned the use of DEI statements in university hiring through legislation or administrative action. Two (Florida and Texas) prohibited the establishment of DEI offices; several others (including North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Florida) have prohibited mandatory DEI training for employees.

Florida’s and Texas’s reforms stand out as the most impressive of 2023 to date. The Texas bill prohibits universities from operating offices that condone differential treatment of races, promote racial hiring, or conduct diversity training programs. Administrators who violate these provisions can be suspended after a first offense and fired after subsequent incidents. The Florida bill bans monies supporting DEI activities or political activism. Penalties for violations are enforced through administrative rules.

But while Texas and Florida universities are rewriting their rules to bring their practices into alignment with new state law, DEI commissars have signaled their intention to overcome the ban on DEI statements through “holistic hiring.” Even as former Texas A&M president Kathy Banks was promising to obey Governor Greg Abbott’s executive order banning DEI statements, her hand-picked associate provost for diversity, Annie McGowan, was articulating a strategy for obeying the letter of the law but violating its spirit. She told the Texas A&M Senate to discontinue DEI statements but to keep evaluating candidates based on their diversity-related experience and to construct job searches in such a way as to attract and hire DEI advocates.

[The cult is insidious. ~ Beege]