How red states are killing college Anti-DEI has created a red-tape nightmare

When a video of Melissa McCoul presenting a “gender unicorn” during a class at Texas A&M University in July 2025 went viral, the professor was quickly fired, the university president stepped down shortly thereafter — and culture warriors and opponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion reacted with glee. McCoul, a senior lecturer in the English department, was using the unicorn to explain the difference between “sex assigned at birth,” gender identity, and gender expression during a class on children’s literature, material which ran afoul of the university’s attempts to comply with pressure from state and federal authorities to limit “race or gender ideology” in its classrooms. 

Voters in favor of such changes have been supportive as politicians in red states give speeches against local universities, legislators circulate viral clips denouncing campus ideology, and college presidents suffer ritual humiliation when called to explain what, exactly, happens in an Office of Inclusive Excellence. These voters imagine their representatives are putting an end to biased hiring practices, shutting down alienating classroom polemics, and making campuses safe for conservative speech. 

The reality, however, is much more complex. The opponents of DEI have weaponized regulation and are creating a Pandora’s box of tools that can be used and reused by successive administrations — all to the detriment of higher education. 

A look at new state-level bills being enacted — the certification language, the reporting dates, the audit authority, the clauses decreeing that money may be withheld and not later restored — reveals much more than the substitution of one ideology for another. Instead, we are seeing the establishment of a new system of governance. It is much bigger than DEI and the current political moment. 

Ohio is the clearest place to witness the shift, because the state has already moved beyond messaging into the mechanics of enforcement. Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 1, the “Advance Ohio Higher Education Act,” into law on March 28, 2025. The statute bars public institutions from establishing or continuing DEI offices; prohibits DEI training and orientation except in narrow circumstances; forbids institutions from recreating the same functions under another label; restricts universities from stating official positions on “controversial belief or policy”; and requires a three-credit course in American civic literacy. The law took effect last June.

One issue is the law’s vagueness, which masks matters of fundamental importance. What is a “controversial belief or policy,” and what is the curriculum of the new required course in “American Civic Liberty,” and who gets to decide? In the usual functioning of universities, faculty would, for better or for worse. But under Ohio’s law, politicians — with few if any qualifications — will be empowered to reject curriculum. 

Universities will have no metrics by which to judge their own compliance and will operate under constant surveillance. Any student could report any faculty member to the state at any time: an enlargement and statewide codification of a DEI measure in place at some universities, except now in the opposite ideological direction. It is nigh impossible for any teacher to uphold a requirement to stay within unknown bounds on any “controversial belief or policy” as judged by any student. The rule is bound to severely impact teaching.

Moreover, under existing arrangements, faculty have already been rigorously reviewed by their peers; their courses are also peer-reviewed; and universities receive extensive and serious peer-review through national and state accreditors, plus discipline-specific reviews. It isn’t a perfect system, but it is a system nonetheless, and could help address student concerns, if that is the desire. Instead, in order to correct one perceived problem, the state has instituted a new system that will destroy student-faculty relations and drain the coursework of meaningful content: essentially, each student will be dragooned as a potential informant on professors, who will have a strong incentive to steer clear of any controversial topic (Proust and homosexuality? Foucault’s diagnosis of power-knowledge? Aristotle on natural slavery?).

And this system will have teeth. Consider the Ohio bill now following behind Bill SB1. House Bill 698, introduced in February, would require each public institution to annually certify that it is complying with the statutory obligations created by SB 1. Beginning in fiscal year 2028, if an institution fails to submit that certification, the state university chancellor “shall withhold” the university’s share of a designated set-aside of funds that pay for classes. If a certification is found to be “recklessly false or fraudulent,” the chancellor may withhold the entire share. More striking still, the bill says withheld funds might not later be released even if the institution comes into compliance. Meaning, even if the errors are minor and corrected quickly, the instructional funds withheld might be lost forever. The state has built a lever and attached it to an essential revenue stream.

HB 698 is invasive in another way, too. The bill would require institutions to produce a public inventory of employees who, on Jan. 1, 2025, had DEI-related duties and were reassigned by Sept. 25, 2025. Universities would have to identify those employees by name, list their former and new titles, describe old and new duties, detail compensation changes, and provide a justification report explaining why the reassignment complied with the law. The president and board chair would have to certify that report. The bill aims to prevent universities from renaming, relocating, and redistributing functions, and it is designed to catch them doing so. This is understandable from the perspective of lawmakers but represents an unprecedented penetration of the state into granular aspects of university life — where it will have new abilities to impose political ideology. 

Such changes on local campuses are the first consequences of the new administrative order. At the University of Cincinnati, the implementation page simply states that “all four” identity centers have closed. Another university page says the central equity and inclusion office has also closed. At Ohio State, cultural and awareness observances — such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride Month, Juneteenth — may continue, the university says, but administrative support is permitted only under certain conditions, and funding can only be sourced from donations or gifts to the university. The university also says that it has paused communications that move beyond recognizing such occasions while it reviews the law’s restrictions on institutional statements.

This represents a transfer of authority inside the institution: the center of gravity is moving away from the administrator, the faculty committee, the dean’s meeting, and the campus debate, and toward general counsel, compliance staff, HR, and whichever office must eventually certify to the state that the university has obeyed. Lawyers become the curators of permissible language. Budget officials become interpreters of ideological risk. These laws do not simply ban. They reorganize decision rights. The change will also require the hiring of another layer of administrators to ensure institutional compliance, which will further constrain university budgets and siphon money away from student instruction.

The money matters because Ohio’s State Share of Instruction fund, which underwrites teaching, is not a decorative line in the budget — it is the core public subsidy for public higher education. SSI was funded at about $2.16 billion in fiscal year 2026 and $2.18 billion in fiscal year 2027. The Ohio Legislative Service Commission’s analysis of HB 698 says the state budget has already set aside $75 million of SSI funds (intended to support student instruction) for fiscal year 2027 to be distributed under the bill’s compliance framework (meaning the funds will go toward compliance mechanisms). One does not need to know the precise exposure of every campus to see the point. We can only expect the share of funds diverted toward compliance to grow. 

In Iowa, this logic has moved beyond public universities. There, House File 2488, passed by the state house on Feb. 24, 2026, but not yet law, would apply not just to state institutions but to private colleges, as well, if they participate in the Iowa Tuition Grant program — which is to say, almost all of them. The bill would prohibit participating private institutions from establishing, sustaining, supporting, or staffing DEI offices or doing DEI work, with some carve outs.

Similar to the design in other states, under the Iowa bill, any person may report a suspected violation on any college campus to the attorney general. The attorney general must notify the institution and the state department of education within 15 days. The institution then gets 30 days either to  prove it has fixed the matter or persuade the attorney general that no violation occurred. If it fails, it becomes ineligible for the Iowa Tuition Grant program beginning with the next academic year. 

Texas offers a preview of where such initiatives tend to end up. The Texas State Auditor’s Office issued the first required higher-education audit under that state’s DEI restrictions in February 2025. The auditor reviewed the Texas A&M University System’s 20 components and five community colleges. Most entities were found compliant, but the audit still flagged Texas A&M University-Central Texas over contract language and McLennan Community College over an employee training video. The findings themselves were small. The institutional meaning was not. Once the state creates auditable categories, someone eventually begins checking contracts, websites, trainings, handbooks, and organizational charts against them. To combat this, universities will need to hire their own internal policing and compliance staff.

That is why the present moment can’t be understood simply as a dispute over whether DEI offices had become too large, too jargon-heavy, or too detached from the core educational mission — though they plainly had. They expanded carelessly. They confused student support with progressive catechism. They made themselves vulnerable through mandatory trainings whose claims outran their evidence and whose language alienated even sympathetic audiences. When anti-DEI clips go viral and red-state politicians grandstand, most audiences (though too few academics) can see exactly what the problem is. 

To admit all this, however, is not to concede the larger point. The danger, which is being hidden by the cultural unpopularity of DEI on the Right and the adoption of new, more pressing causes on the Left, is that state governments are building a reusable apparatus for directing universities through appropriations, attestations, complaint systems, public reporting, and audit authority.

Today, the target is DEI. It will not stay there. Once the mechanism exists, it can be turned toward rules governing anything. The state need not relitigate the culture war each time. It need only redefine the category, set the reporting date, and threaten the funding. For some states, this would require revision of the law; in others, the laws are vague enough that any administrative interpretation could set a yo-yo in motion. 

Universities still tell stories about themselves that belong to an older age. They imagine governance as a matter of argument: faculty debate, committee process, a report circulated for comment, a meeting running long in a room with bad carpeting and weak coffee. That world has not vanished, but it is no longer where power most decisively sits. Under this new dispensation, power lies with the office that certifies compliance, the official who can trigger an inquiry, the auditor who can define a violation, and the budget language that quietly waits for someone to miss a deadline.

The new university leash is not a slogan. It is not even, in the end, an idea. It is a system of control to be yanked by anyone who holds the leash. And it tugs whether anyone is persuaded or not. 

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