This article was updated at 8:56 a.m. on Oct. 16 to include it was President Pro Tempore Sen. Greg Treat that Sen. Mary Boren raised concerns with, not with Sen. Rob Standridge.
Oklahoma senators heard various speakers criticize diversity, equity and inclusion in the state’s higher education during an interim study on Wednesday.
State Sen. Rob Standridge (R-Norman) requested the interim study to look at the influence of DEI programs in Oklahoma higher education. Standridge is listed as the author of a resolution filed in May to defund institutions that don’t eliminate DEI programs.
Speakers at the study included: Allison Garrett, chancellor of the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education; James Lindsay, an author and cultural critic; Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute; Jonathan Small, president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs; Jonathan Butcher and Adam Kissel from the the Heritage Foundation; and Matt Beienburg and Brian Norman from the Goldwater Institute.
During the meeting, Standridge said implementing DEI programs and initiatives in the state’s universities is unfair to Oklahoma taxpayers who disagree with DEI efforts.
“I saw the OU Sooner camp. I didn’t see any Bible study, which I would have been surprised to see that, but we see queer tours, drag shows and drag bingo for all these young kids coming onto campus. Is that really what we want to spend our money and time doing?” Standridge said. “Shouldn’t we just talk to them about math and science and English and just let them study?”
In August, OU’s Gender + Equality Center hosted Queer Tour and Drag Bingo: Pride on the Prairie. GEC described Queer Tour as a guided tour through OU’s campus connecting students to resources, allies and queer-friendly spaces across campus. Drag Bingo is a signature event during Camp Crimson, according to the GEC, and features local, student and prominent drag performers.
Sen. Mary Boren (D-Norman) said in an interview with OU Daily that when she first heard of the interim study, she had raised concerns with President Pro Tempore Sen. Greg Treat (R-Oklahoma City). She said she was hopeful that the discussion would be balanced but was disheartened to see the beliefs of the speakers were “skewed.”
“I could tell that he has an agenda to ridicule diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education in Oklahoma and throughout the United States,” Boren said.
Lindsay said in the meeting subjects such as critical race theory and gender theory are “identity categories” that have a historical precedent in Marxist language.
“It's an identity defined in terms of opposition to dominance in society. … These are permanent categories designed to facilitate division and revolution,” Lindsay said.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Lindsay regularly shares conspiracy theories suggesting that communists will take over the world and promotes “groomer” rhetoric against the 2SLGBTQ+ community. He also voices that Marxists want to eradicate the white race, according to the center.
Shapiro spoke in the meeting about his own experiences with diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
Shapiro faced scrutiny after a series of tweets posted in January 2022 criticizing U.S. President Joe Biden for vowing to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court.
“But alas doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman,” Shapiro wrote in a now-deleted tweet, according to NBC News. “Thank heaven for small favors?”
Shapiro was suspended from taking over his new position as senior lecturer and executive director at Georgetown University’s Center for the Constitution. After an investigation, Shapiro was reinstated but decided to resign anyway.
“The trend of canceling speakers rather than challenging them also represents the loss of grace in our culture,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro said DEI programs and initiatives prohibit civil discourse and undermine free speech.
“These offices have brought in terms like harassment and discrimination, not to promote welcoming environments, but to enforce progressive ideology,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro implored universities to return to their mission of seeking truth and knowledge and law schools to their goal of teaching future lawyers to uphold the rule of law.
In an interview with OU Daily earlier this week, Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it’s important that all educators avoid limiting information as much as possible, especially in a college setting.
In recent years, state government officials, like Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have made efforts to limit teaching topics like critical race theory and 2SLGBTQ+ related issues.
“Freedom of speech includes not only the freedom to convey information and ideas on the part of the speaker, but also the right to receive information ideas on the part of the audience members,” Strossen said during the interview.
Boren said she believes diversity, equity and inclusion help all students reflect on their own identity and better understand themselves. She said these initiatives help articulate students’ world views in a respectful way that doesn't demean the identity of other people.
“It's very interesting to me that there's a huge fear that Sen. Standridge and others have is that by allowing diversity, equity and inclusion and being deliberate about it, it's going to cause conservatives or Christians to feel muted in their own identity and their own experiences,” Boren said.
Small, president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank, said in the meeting DEI programs can have a negative impact on the student they are meant to serve.
Small encouraged aggressive education reform for K-12 as the solution if people want to see more underrepresented communities in STEM fields.
“They have to be able to read at grade level. They have to be able to pass sufficiently well the ACT and other math-related tests,” Small said. “That’s the only way that you’re really going to see an increase in the number of underrepresented people that are functioning well and producing well from our society.”
Butcher, Kissel, Beienburg and Norman presented state solutions for DEI during the meeting.
Beienburg, director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute, said DEI proponents have aggressively forced their ideology into curriculum, knowing that course content is the centerpiece of a university experience.
According to Beienburg, in conjunction with the Manhattan Institute, the Goldwater Institute created model legislation to abolish DEI. This legislation would eliminate DEI administrator positions, prohibit programming with reference to race and gender, prohibit universities from requiring DEI coursework and prevent racial discrimination in hiring processes. Beienburg said the model legislation would also enforce academic transparency from educators to prevent conversations of race and gender entering the classroom.
Kissel, a visiting scholar at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, said it’s important to help universities go back to their original mission of “good quality research” and “good quality teaching.” He called DEI expensive, counterproductive and unlawful.
In a September interview with OU Daily, OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. said with the state of the country and Oklahoma’s political division, the university cannot waiver on its commitment to DEI.
“The current political climate is bad, and it's going to get more contentious,” Harroz said. “We're heading into an election year in 2024. We see this issue and especially folks trying to use universities as culture war battlegrounds. … It would be naive to say it's not going to continue and it's not going to get worse over the course of the next 18 months. I hope it doesn't. But that would defy logic.”
Kissel said any reference of an identity group that privileges some group over another is crossing a line.
“If you really want to play the DEI game, the most underrepresented group in Oklahoma colleges and universities today are conservative Republican faculty members,” Kissel said, “If you want to play that game, that’s where you would go.”
Butcher, Will Skillman Senior Research Fellow in Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, said in the meeting the implementation of DEI programs promotes discrimination.
“Everyone, regardless of the color of their skin should have the opportunity to be successful and pursue the American dream,” Butcher said. “What (DEI) has done is insert racism back into the life of college campuses.”
Boren said DEI programs are especially important for university students so they can learn to work collaboratively with those that have different identities, priorities and values because learning how to interact with different people is important when entering the workforce.
“I think it's very important for students at OU to understand that there is an agenda and a strategy in place to dilute or remove diversity, equity and inclusion within higher education in the same way that affirmative action was removed to the Supreme Court,” Boren said. “The next thing that's on their agenda is to start whittling away and removing diversity, equity and inclusion.”
This article was edited by Alexia Aston, Peggy Dodd and Taylor Jones. Mary Ann Livingood copy edited this article.
