Week in Review: Victory over DEI

Texas? ✅

Florida?  ✅

Now Arizona? ✅

Around the country, the Goldwater Institute is putting the bloated apparatus of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives in higher education on the path to extinction. Just this past week, Goldwater struck a death blow against the use of political litmus tests in Arizona’s public universities, as the schools will no longer require “diversity statements” on job applications.

Earlier this year, a Goldwater report revealed how up to 80 percent of faculty job postings at Arizona’s public universities were requiring diversity statements to screen out insufficiently progressive candidates. But the university system just confirmed it has retired the practice, and the Goldwater Institute is grabbing headlines in places like Fox News and National Review as outlets rush to credit Goldwater for our massive victory over the campus thought police.

Goldwater is spearheading the nationwide fight to dismantle DEI in public higher education. In Texas, we enacted a powerful reform that completely defunds DEI bureaucracies in public colleges. And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantissigned the Goldwater Institute’s nation-leading reform to prohibit the use of political litmus tests for hiring and promotions.

The left is trying to use diversity statements and DEI bureaucracies to suppress political dissent before it even appears on campus. Not on Goldwater’s watch.

Read more here. 

Teachers Unions Batting .000

Teachers unions just took two big swings and misses in their recent bid to stop Florida’s groundbreaking education reforms.

“While Vice President Kamala Harris and teachers union boss Randi Weingarten unsuccessfully sought to smear the state’s new social studies standards this past week, the unions suffered an even bigger curricular defeat this summer over the state’s new online curriculum transparency law,” Goldwater Director of Education Policy Matt Beienburg writes at Fox News.

The Florida Education Association (FEA) had filed suit to block implementation of the Goldwater Institute’s landmark Academic Transparency law, which Goldwater enacted last year in Florida so that parents can find out what their children are learning. While the teachers union falsely claimed implementing Academic Transparency would be prohibitively costly, a judge rejected the union’s talking points as nothing more than hot air and hysteria. The judge even blasted testimony from the FEA’s president as “not credible”—a facade that not even the union representative herself believed.

“In short, the only real barrier stopping public schools from disclosing online what they are presenting to students is… union opposition,” Beienburg adds.

State lawmakers around the country should take note—and enact Goldwater’s full Academic Transparency Act to protect parents’ rights.

Read the rest at Fox News. 

Fighting Special Interests’ Debt Cancelation Scheme

Need a loan to start a business? Too bad.

Looking for affordable housing? It’s a pipe dream.

A special interest group funded by California unions cooked up Proposition 209 in Arizona to limit the ability of lenders to recover the money they’re owed when borrowers fail to repay. This foolhardy and unconstitutional scheme is inflicting untold economic damage on our state, but the Goldwater Institute is fighting back.

This week, the Institute joined forces with a group of Arizona business owners to file a brief urging the Arizona Court of Appeals to declare Prop. 209 unconstitutional. Prop. 209 is “already forcing property owners to charge tenants more, and reducing the willingness of employers to hire employees who might have problematic credit histories—all of which is bad for economic opportunity and growth in Arizona,” Goldwater Vice President for Legal Affairs Timothy Sandefur writes at In Defense of Liberty.

Put simply: who will lend money if they know they won’t get paid back?

Moreover, the Arizona Constitution’s Gift Clause forbids the state from giving any kind of subsidy to a private person—and this includes eliminating someone’s obligation to repay their debts.

“Prop. 209 is clearly illegal,” Sandefur adds. “And it hurts hardworking Arizonans.”

Read more at In Defense of Liberty.