No DEI, No Diploma: Texas Colleges Force $100M Indoctrination Scheme into the Classroom

Public, taxpayer-supported universities across the country are forcing students to take courses instructing them in the poisonous tenets of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) just to graduate. And even in Texas, students and taxpayers are being forced to subsidize these wasteful and destructive mandates to the tune of $100 million, a new Goldwater Institute report finds. 

The report reveals that at least five major public institutions in Texas force students to take DEI courses as part of their general education or program requirements. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, requires students to take a course that examines “systemic barriers to equality and inclusiveness” erected against “underrepresented cultural groups” in the United States. This course also requires students to reflect on how they can “minimize marginalization in the U.S.”  

These descriptions clearly show that DEI courses are promoting a one-sided, leftist view of American society that sees a multitude of “oppressed” groups held back by the schemes of “oppressors.” Furthermore, students are expected to reflect on how they can take action to “minimize marginalization.” Students are being encouraged—if not required—to join in the struggle of the “oppressed” to tear down this supposedly unjust American society and replace it with something more “equitable.” This activist agenda masquerading as academics should have no place in core university requirements.  

In addition to having an obvious political agenda, DEI course requirements waste an enormous amount of taxpayer and tuition money. Satisfying DEI mandates at Texas’s public universities costs students and state taxpayers approximately $100 million or more over each four-year period in which the student body has to complete the requirements. This is $100 million that could be spent promoting more academically serious coursework or streamlining the completion of students’ degrees. 

President Donald Trump has dismantled federal support for DEI, but his executive orders rightly exempted “academic instruction” in higher education from these new federal protections, leaving oversight of academic standards to the states. Texas can build on previous legislation that eliminated DEI bureaucracies at public universities by passing a similarly groundbreaking law that ends DEI indoctrination in the classroom.  

Already, legislative champions in Texas have introduced legislation modeled on Goldwater’s Freedom from Indoctrination Act that ends mandatory DEI coursework while protecting faculty from mandates to adopt DEI practices in their teaching. By passing this legislation, Texas would take the critical next step in returning public universities to their core missions: the pursuit of knowledge and the education of citizens.  

Read the full report here. 

 Timothy K. Minella is a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.