Earlier this year, I heard about a legislative effort in Texas to really defang the DEI viper. The bill was going to have serious enforcement mechanisms. Then, I heard nothing more.
Today I found out why. Writing on PowerLine, Texas attorney Louis Bonham explains that the bill was so watered down before it finally passed that it will accomplish nothing. He explains the sad state of affairs:
Consider the following hypothetical.
Assume the dean of the UT business school decides that she’ll just give her Assistant Dean for DEI a new title, but her department’s DEI activities will not change, nor will her department discontinue their race and sex conscious hiring practices and reliance on diversity statements / scoring in employment decisions. Assume further that the once-every-few-years state audit catches this. What happens to her, her department, and/or UT?
As I read SB17, neither the flagrantly violating official, her department, nor UT suffer any repercussions for such deliberate, intentional violations of SB17. Instead, UT merely gets 6 months to “cure” the specific violations that were caught. (Of course, for any violations not caught by the state auditor, nothing happens at all, because there’s no way under SB 17 anyone else who is outside of UT has the power or standing to force UT to do anything.)
But what does “cure” mean? How would UT “unspend” monies expended in violation of the law? Does it have to terminate employees hired in violation of it? How would it “cure” illegally requiring “diversity statements” from job applicants and making hiring decisions based on them, such as disqualifying applicants deemed insufficiently pious to the creed of DEI? How would it “cure” subjecting students and employees to illegal mandatory DEI training?
Or does “cure” merely mean discontinuing illegal behavior that the state auditor happens to detect? If so, there’s truly no disincentive to ignoring SB17 and continuing with business as usual, if the worst that can happen is that you’re told to stop if you get caught (and if you are, you have six months to stop).
So, the state universities will be able to continue doing the same politicized junk they’ve been doing for many years. The leftist zealots who infest the university administrations as much in Texas as in other states will ignore the law and get away with it.
Very depressing.