by Michael Poliakoff, Forbes Magazine
In the current legislative session, five state legislatures will review bills that seek to limit or abolish offices on public university campuses known by the catch-all acronym “DEI.” (The initials stand for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” though the exact titles vary from campus to campus.) Another 15 state legislatures will review bills that seek to ban or limit functions related to DEI offices.
The case against DEI offices (and the sizable bureaucracies they spawn) almost always holds that their operations restrict free speech and encourage divisiveness, rather than the open-minded pursuit of knowledge and understanding that one typically finds in college mission statements.
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Violating the First Amendment will cost you. Universities and other public institutions are learning this lesson the hard way as the dust settles on a series of lawsuits brought by university faculty and staff who were punished for their comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder last September.
If Johns Hopkins University wanted to signal its seriousness about creating an alternative to the left-leaning orthodoxy that permeates higher education, it couldn’t have done better than the recent hire of economist Peter Arcidiacono.
House Republicans have now formally backed President Donald Trump in fulfilling his campaign promise to dismantle the Department of Education, voting Wednesday to advance 10 bills that would codify the White House’s efforts to disperse numerous education programs and offices to other federal agencies.