Erika Bolstad | Stateline.org (TNS)

SALT LAKE CITY — Shortly after taking office in 2023, Republican state Rep. Katy Hall heard from constituents complaining about how their adult children were required to write diversity, equity and inclusion statements while applying for medical and dental schools and other graduate programs in Utah.

“It doesn’t seem right,” Hall said. “It doesn’t seem like it belongs in an application.”

It took two legislative sessions, but Hall successfully sponsored a new law that not only prohibits the use of such DEI statements but also bars state institutions from relying on specific individual characteristics in employment and education decisions. Additionally, it eliminates central offices dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion.

In Utah and beyond, lawmakers are enjoying growing success in their pushback against DEI programs at public universities, many of which have hired administrators and established departments dedicated to creating more diverse faculties and student bodies. Some schools’ requirement that job and student applicants explain in writing how they’d bring DEI initiatives to their work or schooling has aroused especially strong opposition. Some states have dismantled DEI departments and programs, as well as ended race- and gender-based programs and scholarships.

Many in Utah describe their approach as more measured than that of other states. The law, which goes into effect July 1, includes a carve-out that allows DEI to be discussed in classroom instruction as well as in research and for accreditation purposes.

Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, who signed Hall’s legislation into law in January, said it “offers a balanced solution” even as it prohibits the type of training sessions he required of his staff when he first took office in 2021.

The intent of the legislation, Hall said, is to shift higher education away from a focus on identity.

“This is what we felt was a more nuanced way to say: ‘We want diversity, we want equality of opportunity, we want inclusion, but we want diversity of opinion and a diversity of thought and diversity of religion and diversity of everything.’ Not just external, personal identity characteristics,” Hall said.

“We used to be able to have discussions about politics without it coming to a judgment of someone’s moral character,” she added. “My hope is that there will be a little more political neutrality where you can have discussions and feel safe to have those discussions without it being so divisive.”

But the bill passed along party lines, pointed out state Rep. Angela Romero, a Democrat who serves as the House minority leader in Utah. She described what’s happening in her state as part of a broader culture war aimed at painting higher education as elite and out of touch.

“This is a national agenda,” Romero said in an interview. “It’s a machine and it’s been going for a while and it’s picking up momentum.”

Utah’s rollback is among dozens of simultaneous efforts to scale back DEI programs — to varying degrees — in state capitals and on higher education oversight boards in other Republican-led states. In at least 22 states, the legislature has enacted legislation, or public universities have set policies prohibiting or modifying DEI measures at state university systems, according to a running tally in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Among the earliest passed was 2023 legislation in North Dakota that prohibits asking students and prospective university employees about their commitment to DEI. Florida followed last year with a law that does away with diversity statements and DEI offices. Alabama in 2024 enacted a law restricting public employees from being forced to agree with so-called divisive concepts, including the idea that “by virtue of an individual’s race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, or national origin, the individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.”

In South Dakota, the Board of Regents recently enacted a policy that bars employees at its six public universities from putting their preferred gender pronouns or tribal affiliations in email signatures, according to Inside Higher Ed. Most recently, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted last month to shift $2.3 million of DEI spending toward public safety and policing on campus. Then, the entire UNC System Board of Governors voted to abolish DEI policies in place since 2019 at all 17 of its campuses.

A chilling effect

Many of the efforts to roll back DEI initiatives in states have the same roots as a campaign against critical race theory spearheaded by Seattle documentary filmmaker Christopher Rufo, who in 2020 elevated a once-obscure theory about the pervasiveness of racism in American law and institutions to a household term.

Often, efforts to undo DEI initiatives argue that students — especially white students — are harmed by learning about the history of racism in the United States because it may leave them feeling guilty or ashamed of their identity. Multiple states, including North Dakota, have adopted near-identical language in anti-DEI legislation that bans instruction that might prompt a person to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.”

In April, polling by NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist found that 77% of Republicans say they believe that “discrimination against white people is as problematic as discrimination against Black Americans.”

Related Articles

Trump is proposing to make tips tax-free. What would that mean for workers?

Battle of the experts: Trump legal backers facing off against government over special counsel’s ‘legitimacy’

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Here’s the state of abortion rights now in the US

How Biden and Trump are taking very different approaches to preparing for next week’s debate

Trump proposes green cards for foreign grads of US colleges, departing from anti-immigrant rhetoric

Anti-DEI laws have had a chilling effect on higher education wherever they’ve been enacted, said Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Professors, a nonprofit membership association of faculty and other academic professionals.

“The laws are deliberately vague so that professors have to be constantly thinking, ‘If I say this, will I be breaking the law? Will I lose my job or be arrested by the government if I say this in my classroom?’“ Mulvey said. “I mean, that’s where we are in America in 2024. These are the worries faculty have in an authoritarian society, and they have no place in a democracy.”

At the University of Texas, anti-DEI legislation led the system to eliminate 300 positions recently and to cut diversity training programs at multiple campuses.

The situation is similar in Florida, said Paul Ortiz, a professor of history and a union leader at the University of Florida. He’s leaving the school after 15 years for a position at Cornell University in New York. The fallout from the state’s DEI policies wasn’t the only reason he’s leaving — he got a great job offer — but it contributed to his decision, Ortiz said.

“To pretend that it’s not having an effect on the cultural and intellectual life of the state is the worst thing of all,” Ortiz said. “I’m hoping the pendulum is going to swing back.”

Students are the real losers, Mulvey said. At the University of Oklahoma, for example, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt’s executive order ending DEI programs in state offices and agencies effectively shuttered the National Education for Women’s Leadership program. The program encourages undergraduate women to engage in politics and public policy. Since its founding in 2002, more than 650 students have attended.

Stitt told the Oklahoma Voice that his executive order was about race, not the women’s leadership program, and called the backlash against his policy “political criticism.”

“What we’re seeing now is nobody’s helped when these offices are closed or programs are shut down, no one’s better off,” Mulvey said. “We’re having watered-down discussions and anodyne classes because faculty without tenure are afraid of losing their job if they say the wrong thing or if someone takes it out of context or tapes them and puts it online.”

DEI statements

DEI statements in university hiring have been one of the easiest targets nationwide, in part because there’s less support for them even among more progressive educators who support wider DEI initiatives.

Editorial boards and columnists at outlets as varied as The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Post have railed against diversity statements, saying they too often result in “self-censorship and ideological policing” on college campuses. Many elite universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, have reconsidered DEI statements as a requirement of employment applications. At best, critics argue, they’re boilerplate that echoes what employers want to hear, rendering them useless. At their worst, they serve as ideological litmus tests.

“We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in a statement to WBUR in May, confirming the university’s new approach.

But DEI statements have their defenders. Suzanne Penuel, an associate professor who teaches first-year literature and writing at the University of South Carolina Lancaster, said she witnessed how high-quality DEI statements set job candidates apart when she served on the hiring committee for a position teaching American history. Nearly all academic applicants have polished curriculum vitae, impeccable recommendations and pitch-perfect cover letters, she wrote in an op-ed in The State.

Their DEI statements gave them personality, Penuel said in an interview. It was easier to tell which applicants would take a student-centered approach to their work; one applicant wrote that the textbooks used in the school’s history courses ought to be free, an interpretation that the hiring committee viewed as an inclusive approach to education.

She worries that the assault on already slim DEI initiatives in South Carolina is a continuation of a trend that began with a 2021 legislative requirement that all college students be taught certain aspects of American history, and a proposed state-level ban on some books in elementary schools.

“I hope I never see the day when there is this prescribed list of texts from a narrow list of publishers, and only some topics can be discussed,” Penuel said.

In Utah, where Democrats hold just 14 of the 75 seats in the state House of Representatives, Romero fought unsuccessfully to keep the anti-DEI legislation from passing.

Her reasons for opposing the legislation were partly personal. As a first-generation college student at the University of Utah, she took advantage of what was then called the Center for Ethnic Student Affairs, an academic advising center that could now be considered a DEI initiative. It was a safe place in a state where the dominant religion and culture often excludes people of color, Romero said.

Because of her association with the center, Romero landed an internship at the state legislature in 1994, leading to a career working in municipal government in Salt Lake City. And now, she serves as president of the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators.

“Because of that, I’m here now,” Romero said on the House floor when the bill was up for debate. “What it did is it addressed the disparities. … There’s unintentional consequences when we just try to sweep things and say we’re all the same, because we’re not. There’s still a lot of things that have to change in this country for us all to be on a level playing field.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Elaine S. Povich | (TNS) Stateline.org

SMITHFIELD, R.I. — Child care worker Marci Then, 32, looked over at two 4-year-olds in her care who were tussling over a toy plate in a model kitchen set. “Are we sharing?” she gently asked them. They both let go.

Then works at Little Learners Academy child care center near Providence, Rhode Island. Her daughter, Mila, 4, is enrolled there, so Then is able to keep a watchful eye on her in addition to about a dozen other 4-year-olds. Mila calls her mother “Miss Marci” at school, but “Mom” at home.

Most of the time, Mila is in another room with a different worker at the center, adhering to rules that don’t allow parent caregivers to watch their own children in a licensed setting. But for today, Mila is around her mom for a bit to show a reporter around.

Mila proudly chirps her age, then helps put toys away so the kids can quietly gather for circle time.

Then said that without help she would not have been able to afford the $315 a week for Mila to come to Little Learners. But she is taking advantage of a one-year state pilot program that authorizes the use of federal funds to pay for care for the children of early education workers.

“It’s been life-changing for me,” said Then, a single mom who is also responsible for a disabled young adult whom she adopted. Without it, “I’d have to rearrange my life.”

In 2022, Kentucky lawmakers changed the employer child care assistance program to specifically include child care workers at all income levels who work at least 20 hours a week. Other states, including Rhode Island, have since launched programs modeled after the one in Kentucky. The Kentucky program was to end Sept. 30, but Stephanie French, spokesperson for the state’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services, wrote in an email that the state will be using a combination of federal and state funding to continue the program.

At least half a dozen states now have similar programs or are considering legislation to start them, according to EdSurge, a news site that covers education issues.

Supporters, including Republicans and Democrats, see retaining child care employees as a benefit not only to the workers and the centers facing worker shortages, but also to the states’ economies. For many people, the lack of affordable child care is a barrier to joining the workforce.

Charlene Barbieri, founder and owner of four Little Learners Academy locations in Rhode Island, said in an interview that it is difficult to hire and keep qualified employees. The child care subsidy program helps, she said.

“Early learning here is very expensive as we know, right?” Barbieri said. “So any supplemental programs, monetary or otherwise, are exceptionally beneficial.

“We have had many teachers come to us to say that if this program wasn’t here, we could not afford to send our children to child care and still help our families by bringing in additional income,” she said.

Rhode Island state Reps. Mary Ann Shallcross Smith, left, and Grace Diaz, both Democrats, confer this month over the proposed budget, which includes funding of a program to subsidize child care for caretakers’ kids. (Elaine S. Povich/Stateline/TNS)

Rhode Island lawmakers added the child care subsidy to its fiscal 2025 budget this spring, moving the program out of the “pilot” category. Democratic Gov. Dan McKee is expected to sign the budget this week.

“It’s a good program, and we’ve seen great results with it,” Rhode Island House Speaker Joseph Shekarchi, a Democrat, said in an interview. “We have a labor shortage across the whole spectrum of our labor market. So, by giving [caregivers] free child care, they’re able to get back in and take care of other kids, which allows more people to enter the workforce.”

Other states that have launched programs or are considering them include Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska, according to EdSurge.

The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, a research center at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that if every state followed Kentucky’s lead, some 234,000 workers with children under age 6 could benefit.

“We see it as a no-brainer,” said Anna Powell, senior research and policy associate at the center, who co-authored a report on the program. “The educators are parents — why shouldn’t they be at the front of the queue? Every time an educator stays in the field, it benefits many parents.”

Budget challenges

In some states, though, budget woes are challenging lawmakers who want to make their pilot program a permanent one.

Arizona had a one-year Education Workforce Scholarship program that assisted child care workers and public school teachers with paying for their own kids’ child care, but that program was funded with federal pandemic dollars and ends June 30. It’s unlikely to be renewed because of state budget shortfalls.

Child care workers who now get that assistance would instead need to apply for aid through the state’s broad child care assistance program. That program, administered by the Arizona Department of Economic Security, is based on income levels, Tasya Peterson, a department spokesperson, wrote in an email to Stateline.

Barbie Prinster, executive director of the Arizona Early Childhood Education Association, a nonprofit that represents child care centers, said 3,541 children were approved for care subsidies under the early educator program this year, about three-quarters of them from families with a child care worker. The rest are from teachers’ families.

She predicted that hundreds of workers may have to quit if the subsidy isn’t renewed.

“I think providers are employing more moms that have young children because of this subsidy,” she said.

In Nebraska, state Sen. John Fredrickson, a Democrat and the dad of a 5-year-old son, introduced a bill this session that would have granted no-cost child care to employees of state-licensed child care programs, whether in-home care or at centers, who work at least 20 hours a week.

He estimated the potential subsidy, which he modeled on Kentucky’s idea, could have brought in 2,175 parent-providers. If each worker cared for eight children, there would be 16,000 children receiving care, and at least that many parents working, he estimated.

Fredrickson said the initial fiscal estimate for the bill was about $20 million, which proved to be a heavy lift, so he halved it to $10 million. But even that proved to be too much, he said, and the effort failed. He plans to reintroduce his bill next year.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, approved a bill May 1 extending a child care subsidy pilot program for early childhood caretakers and educators, regardless of income, for two years at a cost of $10.2 million using the state’s Childcare Development Fund.

Colorado agreed to continue a program for child care providers with children ages 6 weeks to 13 years old, giving them full child care benefits, regardless of the employee’s income.

And Indiana agreed to study the issue of child caregiver and early educator compensation.

‘Good for Rhode Island’

Sitting together in a hearing room just off the Rhode Island House chamber earlier this month, Democratic state Reps. Mary Ann Shallcross Smith and Grace Diaz said they understand the issue of caring for children firsthand. Both are mothers, though their children are grown now, and both are experienced child care center owners.

Shallcross Smith remembers putting up flyers in the local drug store, advertising her in-home care. She now owns 15 centers. When the issue of paying child care workers for their own kids’ tuition came up this year, she was all for it, and went to House Speaker Shekarchi with her arguments.

“No. 1, it’s good for Rhode Island,” she said, adding that it’s also good for business.

Diaz, a mother of five, said she, too, talked to the speaker. But perhaps the biggest driver in getting the program into the state budget, she recalled, was the day that they brought a bunch of little kids from various child care settings to the Capitol to be a living example of the need.

“When they saw the little kids at the State House, they all wanted a picture,” Diaz said.

Back on the Little Learners playground, care worker Kayla Champagne, 39, of Lincoln, Rhode Island, smiled up at her 3-year-old son, Jaxson, who peeked over the top of a climbing structure. Champagne, who has three other children ages 18, 14 and 8, is relieved that she can take advantage of a program that helps her pay for Jaxson’s care.

Child care worker Kayla Champagne watches her son, Jaxson, 3, climb at the Little Learners Academy in Smithfield, R.I. (Elaine S. Povich/Stateline/TNS)

She used to work at another day care place but could only afford to send Jaxson there a few days a week, she said. At Little Learners, staff helped her apply for the state subsidy.

“That’s one of the reasons I left my other child care to come here,” she said. “Now I can work full time while having four kids.”

____

Rhode Island Current reporter Nancy Lavin contributed to this report.

____

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Minnesota United vs Austin FC

When: 7:30 p.m. CT Saturday

Where: Allianz Field, St. Paul

Stream: Apple TV, MLS Season Pass

Radio: KSTP-AM 1500 ESPN

Weather: 68 degrees, 20 percent chance of rain

Betting line: Minnesota, minus-135; Austin, plus-333, draw plus-300

Series history: The Loons hammered Austin on the road on the season’s opening day, winning 2-1 in a game that was nowhere near that close. In St. Paul, the overall series is even, with both teams having won two games.

Form: Austin (6-7-6, 24 points) is on a five-game winless streak, with two draws and three losses in that span. The Loons (8-5-5, 29 points) have lost two consecutive games and have just one win in their past six matches.

Update: Wil Trapp missed last Saturday’s game for the Loons while waiting for his third child to be born, and then had to fly separately to meet the team in Dallas on Wednesday, after his daughter was born Tuesday. “For me, it’s really just relief that wife and baby are all good. And then now let’s just get back to the season, because it’s a busy week,” Trapp said.

Observation: Loons center back Kervin Arriaga trained with the team on Friday, after missing Wednesday’s game due to what the team called “an internal personnel matter.” Arriaga has been linked with several interested teams in Europe. Most leagues in Europe open their transfer windows on July 1, and will be able to officially bring in new players then.

Projected XI: In a 5-2-3 formation: LW Franco Fragapane, CF Robin Lod, RW Sang Bin Jeong; CM Hassani Dotson, CM Wil Trapp; LWB Joseph Rosales, LCB Miguel Tapias, CB Michael Boxall, RCB Kervin Arriaga, RWB DJ Taylor; GK Clint Irwin

Absences: Dayne St. Clair, Tani Oluwaseyi, Carlos Harvey, and Alejandro Bran (international duty) are away for Copa América. Teemu Pukki (knee), Hugo Bacharach (knee) and Devin Padelford (concussion) are out with injuries.

Storyline: Earlier in the season, first-year Loons coach Eric Ramsay made a point of using as many players as he could, partially to keep the squad integrated, partly to manage minutes. But now, the team is more shorthanded, and Ramsay knows that he’s going to have to ask some players to push through playing three times in eight days.

“It’s not impossible for players to play three games in a week,” Ramsay said. “It happens all the time at the highest level, that is the nature of league sport here. So it’s not an impossible ask for that group of players to go again, and perform really well tomorrow.”

Idea: MLS limits how often its teams can sign players from their MLS NEXT Pro affiliates to short-term contracts. NEXT Pro players can be in the squad for a maximum of four games per season, and can play in a maximum of two games.

It makes sense to not let teams stash extra players with their affiliates, but at the same time, I like a suggestion of a rule change that I got from social media user Brandon Hundt: replacing players who are called up for international duty, or who are out for paternity leave, should be exempted from the limits. There’s no reason that Minnesota, which has been missing between four and eight players for international duty and paternity leave for the past three games, should have to skirt the limits to try to field a full match-day roster.

Scouting report: According to fbref.com, Austin FC has an expected goal differential of minus-13.1 this year, worst in the Western Conference. If not for goalkeeper Brad Stuver, one of the top shot-stoppers in MLS, Austin might be further down the standings.