Exclusive: Kentucky’s Higher Ed Bureaucrats Mandate Racial Discrimination

Racial discrimination. Arbitrary quotas. Top-down mandates from above imposed by unelected bureaucrats. These are the dictates of Kentucky’s Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE)—a powerful body that holds punitive sway over the state’s public colleges and universities.

A new Goldwater Institute report reveals the extent of the council’s power—including the ability to punish those who don’t comply with its arbitrary orders. It’s the latest example of divisive dogma being forced on America’s students through the nation’s higher ed system, even as the U.S. is beginning to reject the discriminatory, politically charged tenets of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Indeed, CPE now uses its power to force DEI practices and programming upon public institutions of higher education in ways leading to deeply troubling—and in some cases, outright bizarre—outcomes.

As documented in this analysis:

• CPE misuses its powers of oversight intended to promote “equal educational opportunity” to instead require public postsecondary institutions to engage in racial discrimination and dubious DEI practices.
• As required by CPE, institutions must set yearly quotas for student enrollment by race and ethnicity. They must also set quotas for the racial and ethnic makeup of faculty and staff.
• CPE evaluates institutions annually on whether they meet these “diversity” quotas and other “diversity” goals. Institutions that fail this evaluation process are prohibited from establishing new academic programs to serve students.
• During its 2024 DEI review process, CPE failed just one four-year institution—Kentucky State University (KSU), one of the state’s only two federally recognized historically black colleges and universities—despite the school enrolling an undergraduate student body that was two-thirds African American. In its performance improvement plan following this failure, KSU committed to increasing its enrollment of “Latinx” students.

It isn’t just bad policy—the Attorney General of Kentucky has found that CPE’s requirement that institutions discriminate on the basis of race violates the Constitution.

But there’s a solution: the Kentucky legislature can put an end to CPE’s “diversity” regime by adopting reforms designed by the Goldwater Institute to prohibit the promotion of DEI and racial discrimination in public higher education and to end all curricular requirements forcing students to take DEI courses in order to graduate.

At public universities around the country, DEI is seeping every aspect of university life. But the Goldwater Institute is spearheading the nationwide campaign to fight back, ending discriminatory DEI practices in 10 states.

Taxpayer-funded discrimination has no place in higher education—so we’re putting a stop to it.

Read the report here.