Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives appear to be alive and well in universities associated with the athletic Southeastern Conference (SEC), despite the fact that many of those schools belong in states that have enacted bans on the ideology.
According to a report from CriticalRace.org, numerous SEC schools have worked to hide and embed their DEI initiatives within other departments, pointing to a deficiency in some of the bans on the ideology that have been passed statewide in the South.
“I want legislators, I want policymakers, I want stakeholders in this particular world of policy and decision-making at the state level to know that one piece of legislation is not a magic wand that’s going to cure this ideology,” Kemberlee Kaye, managing editor of CriticalRace.org, told The Federalist. “I mean, we’re dealing with institutional capture. This stuff has been going on for decades under different names.”
“A lot of these things are just being dispersed and rebranded,” she added. “Even though there’s been a little bit of effort to disband, I think much is being moved around and reshuffled.”
Kaye noted that the reshuffling is particularly notable in SEC schools, and that the existence of DEI there should be a stark reminder that the ideology continues even in ostensibly conservative states.
Despite the fact that many Republican-led states across the country have passed bans on DEI, some bans are more potent than others, and deceptively, some bans are not functional as bans at all, such as Wyoming’s. In another report from September, CriticalRace.org explored how universities are able to find loopholes in DEI bans simply by changing the name, as many laws amount to just banning the words “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.”
Kaye said that because of the secretiveness behind some of the retrenchment of DEI staff into the ether of other departments, it is difficult to know the extent to which the SEC schools are able to maintain the ideology behind closed doors. The report is based only on publicly available information, and Kaye said that the issue is likely much larger than the report might imply.
Auburn University decided to comply with SB 129, the state law that blocked funding for DEI programs, after Gov. Kay Ivey, R-Ala., signed it into law. However, the staff members who made up the Office of Inclusion and Diversity were simply reassigned to other departments having to do with recruitment, admissions, and student organizations — many of the same areas DEI targets.
In addition, the school’s athletics department still states that part of its “mission” is to maintain a “spirit of inclusion, encouraging diversity and equitable treatment for all.”
Prior to the ban, Auburn spent the most money in Alabama on its DEI programs. However, the weak spot of many of these laws, Kaye explained, is that no matter how much money is spent on DEI, the underlying issue is personnel and ideology: Laws can ban the words and the offices, but they cannot extinguish the surreptitious motivations of the employees themselves.
“You can call it whatever you want to call it, but it doesn’t need a specific office. DEI doesn’t need a specific department or administrators in order to be implemented. This is an ideological war,” Kaye said. “We have to continue to make a compelling case that this kind of ideology is anti-American. It’s not sustainable for any kind of country or society to believe that dividing people up based on their skin color is a path forward.”
“We have a broader culture war that has to be fought and must be won,” she added. “I think it’s very real that if we can’t get this under wraps, and if this ideology can’t be quashed, I’m not sure how we continue forward as a cohesive country.”
At the University of Arkansas, where the college decided to get rid of its DEI offices in 2023, the athletics department appears to have outsourced DEI to its “Hogs UNITED” group, which hosts “‘Quarterly Training Opportunities,’ including ‘Safe Zone Training, Microaggression Awareness Sessions, Implicit/Unconscious Bias Awareness Sessions, [and] Confronting and Combating -Isms,’” the report states.
According to the Arkansas Advocate, lawmakers in the state proposed a study be completed about DEI by the end of this year to make legislative proposals next year.
Some schools have preemptively rebranded their DEI offices in hopes they can ward off a legislative ban on the ideology.
Schools in Mississippi and Missouri, both of which have had legislation in the works but no enacted bans, are among them.
A spokesman for the University of Missouri told The Federalist that, while the school shut down its DEI office, it wanted to make sure that the services provided went unchanged.
“The University of Missouri community represents a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives, and the broad exchange of ideas and experiences within that community creates a strong learning environment for our students and scholars,” spokesman Travis Zimpfer said. “While the university decided to dissolve the Office of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity, our leaders wanted to ensure the services it provided — which fostered that environment — remained in place and continued to serve the ever-evolving needs of our students, faculty and staff.”
SEC states are all places conservatives might expect Republicans elected to office to be vigilant about thoroughly eradicating the ideology, but Kaye said that far too many are still stuck in a bygone era when Republicans tried to brush off the importance of cultural issues and the power of liberal arts institutions.
“Conservatives have always pooh-poohed off what was going on in the arts, always ignored what was happening in Hollywood, ignored what was happening in all of these other realms of culture, to our detriment, and that cannot be the case anymore,” she said. “The culture battle has to be something that conservatives take interest in. We need people in the arts. We need people working in Hollywood. We need people being professors. We need people actively engaged in these institutions that have been captured by DEI and this whole universe of ideology.”
“Everyone wants to talk about tax policy and all kinds of stuff that no one else cares about. No one wants to put any skin in the game,” she concluded. “No one wants to step up and be in the line of fire, but everyone wants things to change, and it just doesn’t work that way. If you want to win the war, you have to have soldiers in the fight.”
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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