What are the Current DEI Laws in Place Around the Country?

Chloe Ripoli, a second-year student at Kent State University, was just a freshman when they discovered that Senate Bill 1 (SB1) had been passed. The bill required the university to make changes around campus, including closing the LGBTQ+ Center.

 

“The experiences that I did have [at the LGBTQ+ Center] were really transformative and supportive. I was able to connect with my community and get any resources that I needed just directly from the center and the people who worked there,” Ripoli said.

 

Like Ripoli, many students found that the programs they were involved in were going to be cut or were going to lose support from the university.

Photo by Jillian Flack

SB1 was signed into law by Mike DeWine on March 28. It required many changes to public universities in Ohio, including banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, limiting universities from taking public stances on political issues and banning faculty from striking.

 

Before this bill passed, as the Queer Equity Chair of the Ohio Student Association (OSA), Ripoli and their group was focusing on preventing SB1 from becoming law. They have worked on garnering support from students in protest of SB1 by staging a walk out and they have encouraged students to send out testimonies about the bill.

 

“Most of my experience as a freshman was finding friends who were like me and building community that way, and now that those spaces are gone, it feels a lot harder to find those communities,” Risoli said.

 

At Kent State, the ban on diversity-related programming resulted in not only the closure of the LGBTQ+ Center, but the Women’s Center and the E. Timothy Moore Student Multicultural Center as well. The decision to do this was communicated via email to students and staff on June 2, and these programs were officially shut down on June 27.  

Photo by Jillian Flack

“The bill did not necessarily define for us exactly what it meant by DEI. We had to interpret, what does that mean here for Kent State?” said Yvonna Washington-Greer, the Associate Vice President of the Division of Student Life.

 

Across Ohio, SB1 resulted in state universities closing down or defunding any program that supported anything DEI-related. Because the bill did not directly state what must be removed, Washington-Greer emphasized the importance of discussing what the changes could mean with one another and at other Ohio universities.

 

“There was a lot of conversation about what that means. Other institutions took similar actions as us, many of them did. . .We thought that was important also to kind of be unified in that no one’s an outlier,” she said.

 

Other Ohio universities also closed down their DEI programs in addition to Kent State. On February 28, Ohio State University closed its Office of Diversity, and Inclusion and they also stopped the services they formally offered at their Center for Belonging and Social Change. This resulted in job cuts in these departments. The University of Akron made the decision not to fund their “Rethinking Race” series this year, which allowed students and staff to discuss racial issues. It had previously been in place for nearly thirty years.

 

Similar laws have also been implemented in other states across the country. Senate Bill 102 was passed in 2023 in Tennessee. In response, East Tennessee State University decided to close its diversity center and changed a previously required discrimination training for staff and students to be optional. 

 

Additionally, in October 2024, Alabama’s Senate Bill 129 banned schools and colleges from supporting DEI programs and requiring DEI training. Florida has laws banning all types of DEI. Any sort of funding is banned for them and classes are required to follow specific guidelines. 

In the midwest, Indiana has banned DEI with Senate Bill 289. Additionally, North Dakota’s Senate Bill 2247 bans diversity training at universities from being required, but the training itself is not completely banned.

 

There have been over 30 bills regarding DEI since 2022 across the U.S. and at a minimum, eighteen states have passed a bill surrounding it. Anti-DEI are in place in Florida, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Alabama, Idaho, West Virginia, North Carolina, Iowa, Wyoming, Arkansas, Ohio, Mississippi, Indiana, Oklahoma and Kansas.

 

“It definitely feels. . .less safe because, again, with the loss of that community space as well as the community spaces from the LGBTQ LLC [living learning community], it’s hard to find your community and root yourself in the friends that you make that share that identity with you,” Ripoli said.

 

Despite this, students can still engage in their own programs on their college campuses, but they have to do so on their own without university support.

 

Washington-Greer said, “This bill is targeted at staff and faculty. . .If a student group wanted to start and it was DEI focused, they could start.”

 

For example, instead of going to the LGBTQ+ Center for resources, Ripoli and other members of the LGBTQ+ community have to turn to other routes to receive support on campus that are student-led and funded.

 

“Any resources that I would be looking for I would have to go through CAPS or I would have to reach out to the queer orgs on campus and see if they could help me rather than just going to the student center and just grabbing a pamphlet,” Ripoli said.

 

Ripoli said PRIDE! Kent and Transfusion are student groups that are still in existence after SB1. They offer resources to LGBTQ+ students and allow them to have a space for self-expression and support. Although they are not allowed to receive any funding or assistance from the university, they meet once a week.

 

Similarly, other groups in universities across Ohio and other DEI restrictions are creating their own groups. For example, Black United Students at Kent State University still runs and holds events for their members.

 

“The future is in your hands. . .All students get to have a say and students may think one way, other students might think another way and there is space in this community for all of those things,” Washington-Greer said.

Photo by Jillian Flack