After Texas passed the strongest anti-DEI legislation in the country last year, the faculty and administrators who opposed it predicted apocalypse.
They insisted that professors would leave Texas and no talented prospects would come to replace them. They said students would wander their campuses lost in despair without DEI’s identity-based support centers and programs that separate students on the basis of race, gender and sexuality — the “oppressors” and the “oppressed.”
Two years later, the sky has not fallen; Texas institutions of higher education are among the best in the nation. Still, there are academics who are part of the wider DEI infrastructure—faculty members and administrators—who remain disgruntled.
They insist the work of DEI is to help minority and marginalized students succeed in college, and to ensure that faculty members reflect Texas’ great multi-cultural community.
But neither point is even remotely true. Minority enrollment and faculty diversity did not increase in the decades after DEI programs were put in place on Texas campuses, because closing gaps and real inclusion aren’t the goals of DEI. Their objective is re-writing history and undermining American values.
According to the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, the mission of DEI is to “engag[e] in ongoing ways to incorporate alternative narratives in the curriculum and provide robust learning opportunities on the history of racism, colonization, and conquest and on how higher education and other sectors of society have been complicit in maintaining systems of privilege.”
DEI, as expressed both in and out of the classroom, is rooted in the notion that systemic racism and patriarchy are the core foundation of every American institution. That is why using DEI as a minority recruitment tool has not been successful in increasing the number of minority or marginalized students or improving their graduation rates or outcomes. The Texas Legislature was absolutely right to get rid of it.
When Senate Bill 37, the next wave of higher education reform, passed the Texas Senate, some of the same professors and administrators who opposed the anti-DEI bill raised their voices to predict Armageddon again. Leonard Bright, a professor at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, told the Dallas Morning News that the bill represents a “political invasion.” Professor Bright said “Ultimately the goal of the bill [SB 37] is to intimidate faculty, quiet our voices and to punish us for having the courage to speak truth to power.”
Talk of intimidation is pretty rich coming from faculty members who, until SB 17 passed two years ago, had made sure anyone who wanted to be considered for a university job had to present a “diversity statement” pledging their fealty to the ideology of DEI.
Led by Harvard’s resistance to President Donald Trump’s recent decision to pull $2.2 billion from the school because of its failure to address anti-Semitism and revert to merit-based admissions and hiring, university professors across the country are circling the wagons, vowing to protect their “right” to continue to play a leading role in running universities and determining what is to be taught. The professors at Texas universities who oppose SB 37 may be inspired by this “resistance” movement.
But there’s a big difference. Faculty members at public universities in Texas are state government employees. Their salaries are paid by taxpayers and ultimately, they answer to the people’s elected representatives. They have not been anointed with some edict from on high that gives them complete control over what is taught in classrooms or spoken on campus.
SB 37 clarifies this by affirming that Boards of Regents have the responsibility for hiring all university leadership and ensuring the curriculum is fundamental and foundational, so that every course of study will produce graduates with the skills to succeed in the global economy and serve as good citizens. It also makes clear that the role of faculty in both hiring and curriculum is strictly advisory.
Some faculty insist that expanding the role of the Boards of Regents in curriculum review will somehow violate their academic freedom, but most courses, like Numbering Race and Measuring Racial Inequality, can still be taught. They just can’t be used to substitute for core credit in place of Introduction to Mathematics, Differential Calculus or Statistical Literacy. SB 37 won’t limit ideas in the classroom, but it will require that precepts like the DEI premise that every sector of American society is complicit in maintaining white privilege is not presented as fact.
Faced with the reality of change, some faculty argue that SB 37 drastically departs from how Texas universities have “historically operated.” Perhaps they are right, but look at what that history has gotten us. In addition to failing to increase diversity and foster successful outcomes for minority and marginalized students, they have created college campuses where too many students are afraid to speak their minds. According to the latest survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), 40 to 50 percent of students at Texas universities say they are afraid to say what they think both in class and on campus.
FIRE also found that, while the ratio of liberals to conservatives is 1 to 1 at Texas A&M and Texas Tech, at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas State and the University of North Texas, the ratio is 4 to 1—about the same as Harvard.
This insulated ivory tower does not serve Texas students or the taxpayers who provide billions for state universities. The changes in the way Texas universities are governed put forward in Senate Bill 37 are critically needed. It is time.
Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.
