Arizona opinion: We are still paying high price for DEI at state's public universities

Every year, more than 200,000 students walk through the gates of Arizona’s three public universities in pursuit of a world-class education — an education requiring a substantial investment not only by their families but by Arizona taxpayers as well.

Together, families and taxpayers shell out as much as $30,000 per year per pupil to attend the University of Arizona, Arizona State, and Northern Arizona University.

For many students and families, the promise of a good job and a more secure future is worth the investment of time and money. For state lawmakers, the roughly $1 billion they invest in the universities each year is intended to pay off with a more thoughtful citizenry, a better-educated workforce, and generally a more knowledgeable world.

Sadly, Arizona’s public universities aren't living up to their end of the bargain.

Instead of providing students with a robust education in American civics and exposing them to the ideas of history’s greatest thinkers, it is increasingly evident that Arizona’s universities are forcing students into “diversity, equity, and inclusion” courses steeped in ideologically extreme content and focused on faculty members’ niche interests.

At the University of Arizona, for example, taxpayers are footing the bill for honors students — the state’s best and brightest — to spend their time in classes like “Eating the Globe: The Diverse, Weird, and Queer Food Politics,” a course that somehow satisfies the school’s honors seminar requirement and asks students to grapple with such academically unserious questions as whether food can be “colonized and decolonized.”

At Arizona State University, honors students taking a mandatory two-course sequence in the “Human Event” are expecting to confront great voices such as Plato, Aristotle, and Shakespeare but instead find themselves reading works like “Postcolonial Love Poem,” “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” and “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”

This comes as the universities have rebuffed the Arizona Board of Regents’ mandate to teach all students a course on “American Institutions” covering the nation’s founding documents and the basic principles of American constitutional democracy.

Rather than faithfully fulfill this civics mandate, ASU and NAU have engaged in academic subterfuge, substituting the required courses on constitutional principles with DEI-infused alternatives like “Sociology of Chicanx and Latinx Communities,” “Indigenizing Museums and the Art World,” and “Social Welfare, Work, and Justice in the US.”

For its part, the University of Arizona has simply defied the Board of Regents’ directive entirely — the university’s plan to integrate the civics requirement into its general education program has been mired in delays.

Of course, motivated students can still often navigate their way to high-quality coursework through specific programs in STEM or civics. ASU’s leadership deserves enormous credit, for example, for the caliber of programs they’ve built in fields like engineering and medicine, while the school’s Center for American Institutions and School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership provide pathways for students seeking a traditionally rigorous civics education.

But it is unconscionable that the broader student bodies of these universities are being corralled into fringe ideological coursework while being shortchanged the civics courses the board assured they would receive.

Arizona’s billion-dollar annual investment of state funds should not be used to fund only small pockets of civic excellence amid a sea of ideological activism.

Faculty should, of course, be free to pursue ideas regardless of their political popularity. But taxpayers should be equally free to demand that state institutions prioritize the rigorous education of our students over subsidizing the intellectually unserious pet projects of university employees.

To that end, Arizona lawmakers should consider restricting a portion of university appropriations until major reforms are enacted, including the elimination of ideological course requirements and the restoration of the board’s civics requirements.

State lawmakers should also permanently enshrine protections against mandatory DEI content through measures like a proposed state constitutional amendment put forward by Arizona House Speaker Steve Montenegro.

Such reforms would not undermine academic freedom — faculty would remain free to speak and assign controversial texts. Activist faculty would simply no longer be entitled to a captive audience — one paid for by the time and treasure of Arizona students, parents, and taxpayers.