Kansas higher education board prohibits DEI statements for hiring and admissions

Kansas’s institutions of higher education will no longer be able to require diversity, equity, and inclusion statements from prospective students or staff, according to a measure approved by the state’s higher education board Wednesday.

Following pressure from state lawmakers, the Kansas Board of Regents amended the Board Policy Statement on Diversity and Multiculturalism to bar the Sunflower State’s six public universities from compelling an allegiance to DEI ideology.

“This is, again, our good-faith effort in trying to listen to the Legislature,” board chairman Jon Rolph said, according to the Kansas Reflector. “It’s not something central to our practice of wanting student success and trying to fulfill our promises to people when we invite them onto our campuses.”

The board adopted language, seemingly without an enforcement mechanism, that states, “No state university shall on its applications for admission or hiring, reappointing or promoting a faculty member require statements pledging allegiance to, support for or opposition to diversity, equity or inclusion.”

Gov. Laura Kelly (D-KS) is facing even more pressure to sign similar restrictions into law, which would empower Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach to sue schools that run afoul of it and seek a $10,000 fine per violation. The law would terminate DEI programs at all public traditional, community, and technical colleges.

Currently, lawmakers in the Republican-controlled House and Senate are separately threatening $36 million in state university funding if Kelly, a Democrat, does not sign the legislation. In order to access the $36 million, lawmakers are requiring schools the publicly prove that they do not have DEI requirements.

The bill would also require schools to post publicly all training materials for employees and students related to topics such as DEI, race, nondiscrimination, sex, and bias.

Kelly has until Friday to make a decision on the DEI bill, coming after a 2023 decision to use the line-item veto to slash DEI bans from the state budget. She has until April 25 to decide on the new budget threat.

“I don’t think we ever would have had a state law if this was their policy at the outset,” said Republican state Sen. J.R. Claeys, who wrote the budget threat, according to the Associated Press. He also explained that the lack of an enforcement mechanism in the board policy was to be expected.

Republican state Rep. Bob Lewis said DEI is tantamount to “division, exclusion, and intimidation,” comparing it to the allegiance requirements from the 1950s, such as California’s Levering Act and other public pressure campaigns, that required an oath disavowing communism.

“That was offensive and found to be unconstitutional,” Lewis said. “Decades later … we have institutions requiring people to essentially swear to a political ideology before they can be hired.”

Pro-DEI Democrats in the state are not happy about the movements against the ideology in Kansas.

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“How do we even tolerate the extortion of funds from our post-secondary institutions?” said Democratic state Rep. Kirk Haskins, a Baker University professor. “If you continue to restrict higher education, you will see one ideology, one race back into schools.”

According to a legislature-commissioned audit of universities in Kansas for the 2022-2023 school years, the six state schools were spending roughly $45 million on DEI-related activities, $9 million of which was public funding and primarily used for DEI staff salaries and training.