Perhaps the most important bill under the radar in this year’s regular session of the Louisiana Legislature would rein in excesses against free expression in the state’s higher education system.

SB 486 by Republican state Sen. Alan Seabaugh would prohibit preferential treatment based upon race, color, ethnicity, national origin, political affiliation, or sex; discrimination in the recruitment or admission of students or in the recruitment or employment of employees; requiring as a condition of admission or employment that the applicant submit an ideological statement; promoting instruction that the moral character, racial attitudes, and responsibility or guilt for past group actions of an individual is determined by race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or sex; and would ban compelled expression contrary to a student’s personal political ideas or affiliation.

During a Senate Education Committee hearing last week, Seabaugh noted behaviors the bill would prevent at present occur at state institutions. Several examples he drew from Louisiana State University, despite a fake pullback from formal diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies and information dissemination, moves publicized in leftist media. He emphasized that bureaucratic name changes and public removal of media that glorified what the bill would make illegal hadn’t stopped these practices behind the scenes.

For example, he said LSU from at least some job applicants still required a diversity, equity, and inclusion statement, a pledge that invites a prospective or current employee to demonstrate commitment to DEI, often through a written statement that factors into hiring or retention or promotion. He also accused the school of differentially enforcing regulations on expression depending upon the content of the political messages involved, as related to him by eyewitnesses.

He stated the behavior occurred at other institutions as well. At Northwestern State University, those involved in student governance had to pledge fealty to a “land acknowledgement statement,” which recognize indigenous communities’ “rights” to territories seized by “colonial” powers. He distributed at the meeting documentation demonstrating these and other practices that the bill would nullify.

It didn’t come to a vote because of some last-minute amendments Seabaugh wanted to make and others he couldn’t because some schools wanted these appended to which he was amenable but they hadn’t delivered these to him yet. He extracted a promise from the committee chairman GOP state Sen. Rick Edmonds that the bill would receive a vote this week with whatever amendments Seabaugh deemed necessary.

Actually, the bill is less far-reaching than those that have become law in five other states, with around 20 others considering similar laws. It doesn’t demand dismantling DEI bureaucracies, regardless of their appellations, nor limits the kinds of programs delivered or dollars spent on these. It does prohibit teaching “woke” precepts of racial guilt and neo-racist disguised as anti-racist interpretations of social and economic policy, which some states’ present and forthcoming regulations don’t address and others limit to just general education coursework that all students must take, and it would not be inconsistent with the bill’s purpose to prohibit that instruction only for general educational requirements and/or to require that any teaching of those precepts occur in a balanced fashion genuinely critiquing the many scholastic warts of that approach.

While outreach efforts to encourage in higher education greater participation and success of students and employees from disadvantaged backgrounds serve a legitimate purpose, these have become warped into a self-righteous defense and propagation of policies privileging such individuals at the expense of the rights of all others, a subversion based upon an ideological imperative inimical to the purpose of the university as a place that fosters critical thinking and free inquiry. SB 486 minimizes that possibility and therefore must be advanced into law.