Trump axed DEI at the federal level, but state-level course mandates still smother students.
In red and blue states alike, public universities are forcing students and taxpayers to pump billions of dollars and millions of hours into mandatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) coursework. Even as President Donald Trump recently obliterated the federal government’s support for DEI, his executive order leaves academic instruction untouched. And, unfortunately, as the watchdog organization Speech First reported in 2024 that more than two-thirds of colleges and universities in the U.S. require undergraduate students to complete DEI coursework as part of their academic studies.
A new report released by the Goldwater Institute, where I work, has revealed that such requirements at public universities are extracting at least $1.8 billion from students and taxpayers to prop up DEI-based general education course offerings that effectively seek to turn millions of college undergraduates into a captive audience for ideological indoctrination. The report’s estimate is conservative: Many public universities have forced degree-specific DEI content to be embedded into the required coursework for all majors and/or given financial kickbacks to professors who infuse DEI content into their classes, meaning that the real financial investment in DEI-laden coursework is likely much higher than $2 billion.
Taken together, the value of these DEI course subsidies likely exceeds even the massive amounts that were showered on DEI programs by the Biden administration over the past four years, as recently revealed by the watchdog group Parents Defending Education. Put another way, the current undergraduate population at public universities will spend at least 40 million student hours satisfying DEI general education course requirements.
Yet perhaps even more shocking than the price tag is the scope of the content pushed on students — and the euphemistic banners under which it often appears.
Consider Iowa State University, for instance, where all undergraduates must complete the blandly titled “U.S. Cultures and Communities” requirement. Despite the dull label, campus administrators have carefully crafted it to ensure the study of “intersectional understandings of diversity” in which students will “analyze systemic oppression and personal prejudice and their impact on marginalized communities and the broader U.S. society.”
The University of Virginia’s College of Arts and Sciences, similarly, corrals students using a benign label (“Engaging Differences”) for its DEI requirement and steeps such coursework in issues of “class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, privilege, and power,” ensuring that students “consider how we develop and experience bias and discrimination, inclusion and exclusion.” Yet even such vaguely stated learning outcomes fail to capture the militantly ideological — and, in this case, explicitly partisan — nature of the instruction being pushed on students, including those who are seeking to graduate in fields such as biology or statistics. Indeed, the course description of the very first class listed by UVA that satisfies this requirement amounts to little more than an anti-MAGA screed, naming President Donald Trump in the context of its survey of “far right politics,” “fascism,” and “right-wing imagination in imperial states.”
While most institutions are careful to avoid such nakedly partisan rhetoric in their public-facing descriptions of their DEI coursework requirement, the goal remains clear: ideological indoctrination into progressive politics — all subsidized at taxpayers’ expense.
For too long, and at too high a cost to their students and taxpayers, state lawmakers have turned a blind eye to the politically radical requirements of their state universities. But now, states have the opportunity to build on the success of Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation successfully eliminating DEI classes from the course catalogue at state universities. More important, state lawmakers have the opportunity to enact legislation — such as the Freedom From Indoctrination Act, a model drafted by the Goldwater Institute and Speech First — to prevent similar DEI mandates from being implemented at lower levels of higher education, such as in major-specific requirements.
Such decisive action would no doubt trigger the outcry (and hypocrisy) of activist academics — even as many faculty associations actively lobbied for California’s pro-DEI university curriculum requirement, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020, which now ensures that hundreds of millions of dollars go to DEI course requirements in the Golden State. And while it is not the role of the federal government to dictate the curricula of our nation’s schools, under the U.S. Constitution, state lawmakers have an opportunity — nay, an obligation — to safeguard the academic integrity of their public institutions.
Academic freedom is one thing — and it can and should be defended — but holding students’ college degrees hostage to radical progressive orthodoxy is quite another.
This op-ed was originally publish in National Review.
