Defending and Supporting DEIB Educators and Scholars Against Censorship and State Bans

This session addresses the increasing efforts to ban diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) programming in higher education. Social work's focus on social justice values and inclusive, anti-oppressive frameworks, makes it an ideal target. This session will delineate threats to DEIB content and formulate strategies to challenge these measures.

This partnership session, facilitated by Association of Community Organization and Social Action (ACOSA), focuses on countering legislation censoring and dismantling diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) educational content. Building on last year’s partnership session, in which we collectively identified threats to DEIB and the harm done to faculty and students, this session will focus on strategies to mitigate damage, counter censorship initiatives, and foster support networks for scholars and educators impacted by anti-DEIB efforts.

Recently, coordinated campaigns have aggressively targeted the removal of content related to race, class, gender, and sexuality. These efforts, described as “educational gag orders,” aim to suppress materials that could cause “discomfort,” promote “divisive concepts,” discuss diversity and fluidity of gender and sexual identities, or support leftist perspectives (PEN America, n.d.). As of February 2023, UCLA’s CRT Forward Tracking Project identified 783 anti-CRT efforts nationwide with 8 legislative proposals and 17 state-level anti-CRT enactments in higher education since January 2023 (Alexander et al., 2023). These initiatives have led to the elimination of DEIB in academic programs and curricular content, ending DEIB programs and funding, examining faculty communications for DEIB content, and denying tenure and promotion to faculty engaging in DEIB-related research and teaching. Furthernore, faculty accused of teaching “decisive concepts” face employment risks (Ross, 2022) and are increasingly subjected to bullying, intimidation, and death threats (Moreno, 2022). Ultimately, this legislation undermines efforts to address racialized inequities within higher education and restricts the rights and perspectives of transgender and racially minoritized communities (Sonsteng-Person et al., 2023).

Social work, with its emphasis on social justice, multiculturalism, and anti-oppressive frameworks, is an ideal target for proponents of gag orders. Given social work's historical inability to confront white supremacy, colonialism, and racism (Harty, 2023), anti-DEIB efforts will further hinder our profession's ability to liberate racial, sexual, and gender minoritized groups. Past APM programs feature numerous sessions on pedagogical strategies to address race, gender, class, and other inequities, including managing the discomfort that arises when power and privilege are scrutinized and contested. The tendency of social work educators to push the boundaries of DEIB content and processes in their classrooms - and, disproportionately, assigning such courses to untenured and thus largely unprotected faculty - renders them especially vulnerable to anti-DEIB censorship, particularly in times of extreme political polarization (Garcia et al., 2019; Goode et al., 2020; Greenfield et al., 2018; Wilcox, 2022). Despite faculty and students responding to anti-DEIB legislation with resistance and dissent, schools of social work and the profession’s governing bodies have been punitive or largely silent (Sonsteng-Person et al., 2023).

Session presenters bring extensive DEIB-related teaching, research, and practice experiences, covering areas such as feminist organizing, Indigenous studies, abolitionism, LGBTQA+ advocacy, and Critical Race and Latinx Critical Race praxis. Most have experienced a lack of support and forms of censorship for their work. Collaboratively, we will identify support mechanisms for faculty and students who face delegitimation because of their work and strategize around collective advocacy to challenge anti-DEIB campaigns.