It’s time for Louisiana not only to ban legally race-conscious practices in programming and personnel actions in the state’s higher education institutions, but to go beyond that to aid in understanding why.
Recently, the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors voted to end practices such as requiring diversity statements for hiring and review programs for whether these privilege race-conscious activities and to institute a policy of neutrality in institutional communications on issues of the day. Some, like LSU’s Baton Rouge campus, have taken this a step further voluntarily by at least renaming, and presumably repurposing, academic offices and positions fundamentally tied to the diversity, equity, and inclusion concepts.
But it’s not enough. The three other systems since then have not done the same. Two will have their supervisors meet in December and the Southern University System’s supervisors met this past weekend; it didn’t address the topic and the other two don’t indicate that they will.
This is why it’s imperative that the Legislature pass a law that mandates what the LSU System did – and more. It should pass something close to SB 486 by Republican state Sen. Alan Seabaugh in the 2024 Regular Session. That bill also would have banned privileging or burdening through omission students on the basis of categories such as race and spending self-generated funds on those activities, making students submit ideological statements for admission or base that admission on those suspect characteristics, and in recruiting employees requiring the same, among other things.
That bill didn’t progress as systems promised they would take up the issue, of which to date only the LSU System has. And the bill should include something like the University of Georgia System Board of Regents tacked on when it recently promulgated regulations for its higher education institutions: mandatory instruction in key documents of the American polity, in this instance the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers, the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, as well as the Georgia Constitution and Bill of Rights, adding to an already-existing civics requirement.
At the higher level, this easily could be accomplished in the scheme of things through the general education requirements that the Board of Regents requires to receive a college degree, which requires that students complete coursework in the social sciences and humanities. Those requirements could be altered to require taking a course in American Government or U.S. History that would cover this material.
This change would address a growing civics illiteracy noted over the past several years. One of the latest studies of the topic discovered that more than 70 percent of Americans fail a basic civic literacy quiz on topics like the three branches of government, the number of Supreme Court justices, and other basic functions of our democracy. Just half were able to correctly name the branch of government where bills become laws. This is despite that overwhelmingly Americans believe such knowledge is vital to the nation’s success even as higher education does an inadequate job of preparation on this subject.
Georgia is among several states whose higher education authorities require this (in fact, LSU President William Tate IV implemented that effort at the University of South Carolina). Louisiana should become part of this crowd, which could happen through regulation by the Regents but would become reality with certainty if the Legislature made this law. Removing the noxious emphasis on DEI that creates preferences and inequality is just the other side of the coin to a study and explication of founding principles of the U.S. that stand in direct contrast to the flawed premises of DEI, which Louisiana higher education must do.