Indeed – it’s possible that SB 17 makes the situation worse.
But while I am happy that the Texas legislature is taking the threat of the woke industrial complex in our schools seriously, I am not very optimistic about the new law’s chances of defeating DEI in our universities. As a professor who has had many unpleasant run-ins with the DEI stasi at my Texas university, I don’t want to suggest that we would be better off without SB 17, or that it could have been meaningfully improved through further amendment. SB 17 is a thoughtfully-crafted piece of legislation that seeks to impose legal and financial penalties on colleges and universities that continue to use public revenue for the spread of what amounts to left-wing propaganda. Like the so-called “Ministry of Love” in Orwell’s 1984, the “Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” is a title that serves as the velvet glove that covers the iron fist of the institutional bureaucracy.
Often, these offices also serve as the enforcement arm of the campus left, processing and adjudicating complaints that allege violations of a significantly expanded concept of Title IX protections. Recent reporting from Campus Reform has shown that wherever they exist, DEI offices typically serve as the vehicle for imbedding left-wing activism into university policy. Texas conservatives and classical liberals alike celebrated a win this summer when Governor Greg Abbott signed into law Senate Bill 17 (SB 17) which prohibits public universities in the state from “establish or maintain a diversity, equity, and inclusion office” in addition to adding a number of regulations aimed at stopping the formal implementation of DEI and woke social justice ideology in university governance and academic programming. He writes political and cultural commentary for outlets like Human Events, Quillette, American Greatness, The American Conservative, New Discourses, Minding the Campus, and many more. His primary areas of expertise are rhetoric and critical theory. Adam Ellwanger is a professor of English at the University of Houston - Downtown.
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