Working around barriers to promote diversity
Anti-DEI laws in Florida lead some on college campuses to push back
BOCA RATON – It doesn’t take much searching to spot the fallout from the newest Florida law seeking to erase diversity, equity and inclusion from public university campuses.
The staff offices at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Inclusion, Diversity Education and Advocacy are vacant, with desks abandoned and LGBTQ+ flags, posters and pamphlets left behind.
Elsewhere on a campus lined with palm trees, the Women and Gender Equity Resource Center remains, but a laminated paper on the door offers a new identity: “Women’s Resource and Community Connection Division of Student Affairs.”
In Florida, which along with Texas, has the most extreme anti-DEI laws in the country, virtually all DEI staff have been fired or reassigned and offices shuttered – but that’s not the only story. There is also mounting resistance.
Students have devised workarounds, such as camouflaging FAU’s annual homecoming drag show as “Owl Manor,” nodding to the school mascot. Student Mary Rasura launched an LGBTQ+ newspaper, “Out FAU,” saying, “It just seemed like a no-brainer. You know, we are still a community. Like, we’re still here.”
From advising to curriculum
DEI efforts arose over the past decade as a direct response to campuses growing more diverse, racially and in other ways. The aim has been to institute policies and practices that allow all students to feel accepted.
But the move to dismantle DEI programs in higher education has taken off. The Chronicle of Higher Education identifies 85 anti-DEI bills introduced in 28 states since last year, with 13 becoming law. Conservative activists like Christopher F. Rufo say DEI efforts are an affront to colorblind meritocracy.
Brendan Cantwell, a professor at Michigan State University who studies politics and policy in higher education, argues that there is nothing ideological about how DEI offices operate. Their efforts are “very bureaucratic and institutional,” he said.
DEI shows up in tasks such as student advising or ensuring that databases accommodate gender identities and meet federal regulations, Cantwell said. Along with people of color and LGBTQ+ people, DEI efforts cover veterans, first-generation students, international students, people with disabilities and people of different faiths.
Now, anti-DEI laws are reaching beyond attacking such functions to seeking to control what may be taught in college.
“We are fighting over whether or not political parties that are in control of state government, in control of Congress, can control higher education,” Cantwell said.
That was apparent in January when the board of governors for Florida’s state university system, in approving regulations for the new anti-DEI law, removed sociology from the list of courses that meet general education requirements. On X, formerly Twitter, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz berated sociology as “woke ideology.”
For Professor Michael Armato, the sociology undergraduate director at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, eliminating the general education credit for his discipline was upsetting enough; introductory sociology enrolls 700 to 800 students per semester. With 70,000 students, UCF is one of the nation’s largest college campuses.
Even more disturbing, he said, “was the absolute silence on behalf of our administrators” who failed to defend the field or challenge state “meddling” in campus curriculum.
“What’s next?” he said, noting that fields such as literature, anthropology and psychology also grapple with issues of race, gender and sexuality. “There is this sort of fear hovering over us,” said Armato, raising concerns “for what we can teach.”
As a result, his department now allows faculty assigned to teach potentially hot subjects like race and ethnicity to bow out. “It is their neck on the line,” he said.
Yet he is not backing down himself. He is preparing to teach a graduate course that includes critical race theory, refusing to bow “to attempts to have me not teach what is the accepted and documented evidence within my field,” he said. Last semester, he taught a course called “Beyond the Binary.”
“Is this going to blow up on me?” Armato wonders.
Similarly, his colleague Professor Robert Cassanello feels compelled to object. He warned in red ink on the syllabus for his graduate seminar on the
Civil Rights Movement that the course, as for all courses he teaches, “will expose you to content that does not comply with and will violate” anti-DEI laws.
“My area of research is Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement,” Cassanello said. Being told not to discuss institutional, structural racism, “What would be the point of me teaching? You know? I might as well just go home.”
However, he has latitude that others don’t, because he has tenure. If he didn’t, he might change what he teaches, he said.
Marissa Bellenger, one of Cassanello’s doctoral students, served as a teaching assistant for a visiting professor’s American history course. The professor warned her to “be careful of students asking you questions to get a rise out of you, to get you to say something that will get you in trouble.”
‘I’m not going to learn the content that I need’
Certainly, it’s easy to spot worry on campuses. At UCF, the student government counts on staff members to run an annual diversity training. The responsible staffer first said he was unsure if it could happen – “we are waiting on guidance” – then ignored all follow-up emails.
Across the state, more than a dozen campus and student leaders declined to be interviewed about DEI or even to answer questions via email. Some apologized, including one who said, “This is a very sensitive subject for state employees.” Some sources spoke only on background.
Bellenger, who is from Tampa, has weighed leaving the state: “I’m going to be censoring myself.”
Such calculations are shaping Grace Castelin’s plans as well. Castelin, a senior and the president of the UCF chapter of the NAACP, sees professors avoid certain discussions. They make comments like, “Oh guys, you know, so the law, I can’t really say too much on this,” she said, or, as another did, add a disclaimer about “not trying to impose any beliefs on you guys.”
“It’s frustrating. It’s like we’re not getting the full course content,” Castelin said. She plans to attend public policy graduate school out of state: “If I stay here, I’m not going to learn the content that I need to know.”
It is this kind of worry that spurred Michael H. Gavin, the president of Delta College in Michigan, a two-year institution, to start Education for All a year ago. The group gathers 175 higher education leaders, many of them community college presidents, to monitor attacks on DEI and coordinate support.
Gavin, who wrote a book on white nationalism and politics in higher education, said it is critical for leaders in states not facing anti-DEI laws to speak up for those who cannot.
“Let’s not get tricked into this notion that we have to somehow be quiet about things that are right in our domain,” like restricting curriculum topics and banning books, he said.
Finding a way to stay open
In Florida, even as home pages for DEI offices are redirected or show error messages, services may still exist. For example, when the University of North Florida in Jacksonville dissolved all DEI-related offices, OneJax, which had run UNF’s Interfaith Center for 11 years, became an independent nonprofit.
Elizabeth Andersen, its executive director, finds the anti-DEI landscape absurd. “The idea that diversity, equity and inclusion have been co-opted to be bad words is bizarre to me,” she said.
Outrage fuels Carlos Guillermo Smith, a policy adviser for Equality Florida and a former state representative now running for the state Senate. Smith, a UCF graduate, helped lead a large protest on campus last spring. He is campaigning to support abortion rights, affordable housing and college affordability – and to hold Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration “accountable.”
Smith said he sees no choice but to speak up and push back. “Resistance, public pressure and litigation are the only paths” to counter “the far right’s extreme agenda of censorship and control,” he said. “I am committed to that fight for as long as it takes.”
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.