A student walks on the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City in April. Utah has enacted a new law that prohibits schools from using diversity, equity and inclusion statements, bars state institutions from relying on specific individual characteristics in employment and education decisions, and eliminates central offices dedicated to DEI. Erika Bolstad/Statelin

SALT LAKE CITY — Shortly after taking office in 2023, Republican state Rep. Katy Hall heard from constituents complaining about how their adult children were required to write diversity, equity and inclusion statements while applying for medical and dental schools and other graduate programs in Utah.

“It doesn’t seem right,” Hall said. “It doesn’t seem like it belongs in an application.”

It took two legislative sessions, but Hall successfully sponsored a new law that not only prohibits the use of such DEI statements but also bars state institutions from relying on specific individual characteristics in employment and education decisions. Additionally, it eliminates central offices dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion.

In Utah and beyond, lawmakers are enjoying growing success in their pushback against DEI programs at public universities, many of which have hired administrators and established departments dedicated to creating more diverse faculties and student bodies. Some schools’ requirement that job and student applicants explain in writing how they’d bring DEI initiatives to their work or schooling have aroused especially strong opposition. Some states have dismantled DEI departments and programs, as well as ended race- and gender-based programs and scholarships.

Many in Utah describe their approach as more measured than that of other states. The law, which goes into effect July 1, includes a carve-out that allows DEI to be discussed in classroom instruction as well as in research and for accreditation purposes.

Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, who signed Hall’s legislation into law in January, said it “offers a balanced solution” even as it prohibits the type of training sessions he required of his staff when he first took office in 2021.

The intent of the legislation, Hall said, is to shift higher education away from a focus on identity.

“This is what we felt was a more nuanced way to say: ‘We want diversity, we want equality of opportunity, we want inclusion, but we want diversity of opinion and a diversity of thought and diversity of religion and diversity of everything.’ Not just external, personal identity characteristics,” Hall said.

“We used to be able to have discussions about politics without it coming to a judgment of someone’s moral character,” she added. “My hope is that there will be a little more political neutrality where you can have discussions and feel safe to have those discussions without it being so divisive.”

But the bill passed along party lines, pointed out state Rep. Angela Romero, a Democrat who serves as the House minority leader in Utah. She described what’s happening in her state as part of a broader culture war aimed at painting higher education as elite and out of touch.

“This is a national agenda,” Romero said in an interview. “It’s a machine and it’s been going for a while and it’s picking up momentum.”

Utah’s rollback is among dozens of simultaneous efforts to scale back DEI programs — to varying degrees — in state capitals and on higher education oversight boards in other Republican-led states. In at least 22 states, the legislature has enacted legislation, or public universities have set policies prohibiting or modifying DEI measures at state university systems, according to a running tally in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Among the earliest passed was 2023 legislation in North Dakota that prohibits asking students and prospective university employees about their commitment to DEI. Florida followed last year with a law that does away with diversity statements and DEI offices. Alabama in 2024 enacted a law restricting public employees from being forced to agree with so-called divisive concepts, including the idea that “by virtue of an individual’s race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, or national origin, the individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.”

In South Dakota, the Board of Regents recently enacted a policy that bars employees at its six public universities from putting their preferred gender pronouns or tribal affiliations in email signatures, according to Inside Higher Ed. Most recently, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted last month to shift $2.3 million of DEI spending toward public safety and policing on campus. Then, the entire UNC System Board of Governors voted to abolish DEI policies in place since 2019 at all 17 of its campuses.

A chilling effect

Many of the efforts to roll back DEI initiatives in states have the same roots as a campaign against critical race theory spearheaded by Seattle documentary filmmaker Christopher Rufo, who in 2020 elevated a once-obscure theory about the pervasiveness of racism in American law and institutions to a household term.

Often, efforts to undo DEI initiatives argue that students — especially white students — are harmed by learning about the history of racism in the United States because it may leave them feeling guilty or ashamed of their identity. Multiple states, including North Dakota, have adopted near-identical language in anti-DEI legislation that bans instruction that might prompt a person to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.”

In April, polling by NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist found that 77% of Republicans say they believe that “discrimination against white people is as problematic as discrimination against Black Americans.”

Anti-DEI laws have had a chilling effect on higher education wherever they’ve been enacted, said Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Professors, a nonprofit membership association of faculty and other academic professionals.

“The laws are deliberately vague so that professors have to be constantly thinking, ‘If I say this, will I be breaking the law? Will I lose my job or be arrested by the government if I say this in my classroom?’“ Mulvey said. “I mean, that’s where we are in America in 2024. These are the worries faculty have in an authoritarian society, and they have no place in a democracy.”

At the University of Texas, anti-DEI legislation led the system to eliminate 300 positions recently and to cut diversity training programs at multiple campuses.

The situation is similar in Florida, said Paul Ortiz, a professor of history and a union leader at the University of Florida. He’s leaving the school after 15 years for a position at Cornell University in New York. The fallout from the state’s DEI policies wasn’t the only reason he’s leaving — he got a great job offer — but it contributed to his decision, Ortiz said.

“To pretend that it’s not having an effect on the cultural and intellectual life of the state is the worst thing of all,” Ortiz said. “I’m hoping the pendulum is going to swing back.”

Students are the real losers, Mulvey said. At the University of Oklahoma, for example, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt’s executive order ending DEI programs in state offices and agencies effectively shuttered the National Education for Women’s Leadership program. The program encourages undergraduate women to engage in politics and public policy. Since its founding in 2002, more than 650 students have attended.

Stitt told the Oklahoma Voice that his executive order was about race, not the women’s leadership program, and called the backlash against his policy “political criticism.”

“What we’re seeing now is nobody’s helped when these offices are closed or programs are shut down, no one’s better off,” Mulvey said. “We’re having watered-down discussions and anodyne classes because faculty without tenure are afraid of losing their job if they say the wrong thing or if someone takes it out of context or tapes them and puts it online.”

DEI statements

DEI statements in university hiring have been one of the easiest targets nationwide, in part because there’s less support for them even among more progressive educators who support wider DEI initiatives.

Editorial boards and columnists at outlets as varied as The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Post have railed against diversity statements, saying they too often result in “self-censorship and ideological policing” on college campuses. Many elite universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, have reconsidered DEI statements as a requirement of employment applications. At best, critics argue, they’re boilerplate that echoes what employers want to hear, rendering them useless. At their worst, they serve as ideological litmus tests.

“We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in a statement to WBUR in May, confirming the university’s new approach.

But DEI statements have their defenders. Suzanne Penuel, an associate professor who teaches first-year literature and writing at the University of South Carolina Lancaster, said she witnessed how high-quality DEI statements set job candidates apart when she served on the hiring committee for a position teaching American history. Nearly all academic applicants have polished curriculum vitae, impeccable recommendations and pitch-perfect cover letters, she wrote in an op-ed in The State.

Their DEI statements gave them personality, Penuel said in an interview. It was easier to tell which applicants would take a student-centered approach to their work; one applicant wrote that the textbooks used in the school’s history courses ought to be free, an interpretation that the hiring committee viewed as an inclusive approach to education.

She worries that the assault on already slim DEI initiatives in South Carolina is a continuation of a trend that began with a 2021 legislative requirement that all college students be taught certain aspects of American history, and a proposed state-level ban on some books in elementary schools.

“I hope I never see the day when there is this prescribed list of texts from a narrow list of publishers, and only some topics can be discussed,” Penuel said.

In Utah, where Democrats hold just 14 of the 75 seats in the state House of Representatives, Romero fought unsuccessfully to keep the anti-DEI legislation from passing.

Her reasons for opposing the legislation were partly personal. As a first-generation college student at the University of Utah, she took advantage of what was then called the Center for Ethnic Student Affairs, an academic advising center that could now be considered a DEI initiative. It was a safe place in a state where the dominant religion and culture often excludes people of color, Romero said.

Because of her association with the center, Romero landed an internship at the state legislature in 1994, leading to a career working in municipal government in Salt Lake City. And now, she serves as president of the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators.

“Because of that, I’m here now,” Romero said on the House floor when the bill was up for debate. “What it did is it addressed the disparities. … There’s unintentional consequences when we just try to sweep things and say we’re all the same, because we’re not. There’s still a lot of things that have to change in this country for us all to be on a level playing field.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

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FILE - A woman enters the Great Circle drug treatment center in Salem, Ore., on March 8, 2022. Two years ago, Oregonians voted to decriminalize drugs and dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to treatment services, but the state's first-in-the-nation drug decriminalization has had a rocky start. Secretary of State Shemia Fagan said on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, as she released an audit of the program that it's too early to call it a failure. (AP Photo/Andrew Selsky, File)

PORTLAND, Ore. — Just before Portland’s city council approved a ban on public drug use last week, Mayor Ted Wheeler described what he’d observed on his way to work that afternoon: “The last time I saw somebody consuming what I believe to be fentanyl publicly on our streets was less than five minutes ago, three blocks from City Hall,” the Democrat said.

The Portland ban, approved unanimously but subject to legislative approval, was the latest repudiation of the state’s recent, groundbreaking approach to drug use.

Oregon voters in 2020 passed Measure 110, a first-in-the-nation law decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of controlled substances such as heroin, methamphetamines, cocaine and fentanyl.

Three years later, public drug use has wearied even the most tolerant of Oregonians. In recent months, Portland has reeled from a record number of opioid overdoses, bad press and a drop in convention and hotel bookings linked to the perception that the city is disorderly and unsafe.

Now, the Oregon law faces significant overhaul or repeal, a prospect likely to slow movements in other states to treat addiction as a public health matter, not a criminal one.

“If we don’t figure out how to get this right, efforts to try this approach in other states probably don’t launch,” said Oregon state Rep. Rob Nosse, a Democrat from Portland who worked on implementation of Measure 110 and who continues to support it.

What went wrong? A state audit found that the law’s rollout was beset by bureaucratic fumbles and a short implementation timeline; a study also has shown the measure’s civil ticketing approach had tepid law enforcement support. More critically, it coincided with a national fentanyl crisis that overwhelmed the country — not just Oregon — with a cheap, addictive and deadly drug.

The measure also took effect during a long-standing homelessness crisis in Oregon and other West Coast states that made public drug use more visible — and discomfiting — in neighborhoods where people live on the streets. It’s particularly problematic in Portland, Oregon’s biggest city, where high rates of commercial property vacancies have hollowed out some downtown sectors.

“People think that Measure 110 has been harmful to Oregon,” said pollster John Horvick of DHM Research, who conducted surveys this spring that found 6 in 10 voters think it has made drug addiction, homelessness and crime worse in Oregon. “That’s really clear. There’s no doubt that that’s where the majority of people are.”

An even more recent poll in Oregon found that 64% of voters want to repeal portions of the measure, including possibly bringing back criminal penalties for possession, and 56% support repealing it entirely. The poll, conducted by Emerson College Polling, was commissioned by the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions, an Alexandria, Virginia-based organization that opposes decriminalization nationally.

Several rural Oregon counties, but also suburban Clackamas County adjacent to Portland, are considering non-binding advisory ballot measures during the May 2024 election to ask voters whether they think Measure 110 should be repealed.

A group of prominent civic leaders, led by the state’s former head of the Department of Corrections, Max Williams, is pressuring state lawmakers to re-criminalize possession of small amounts of controlled substances, even as they maintain funding for detox and recovery services. It’s an approach Williams and others have dubbed “amend, not end,” but it comes with an implicit threat: If the legislature fails to make timely changes to Measure 110, they’ll ask voters to repeal it in 2024.

Republican state Rep. Jeff Helfrich, a former Portland police officer, argues that without the threat of criminal conviction or prison, there’s no incentive for people with substance use disorders to stop using.

“I am all about let’s get people help, let’s get ’em what they need,” said Helfrich, who represents Hood River, a community about an hour to the east of Portland. “But you have to deter the behavior at some point. And how do you deter that behavior? That’s the million-dollar question.”

Many specialists who work in recovery, though, say reverting to a punitive system to treat addiction won’t get people sober or keep users from overdosing. That’s what they’ve learned in a decade of experience providing service to thousands of opioid users, said Joe Bazeghi, director of engagement at Recovery Works NW, which recently unveiled the first new detox center in the state to open with Measure 110 money.

The 16-bed facility in Portland is expected to serve at least 1,200 people a year, in particular those addicted to fentanyl. People can spend about five days under medically supervised detox before being offered a transition to alcohol and drug treatment and supported housing, Bazeghi said.

“What we know across the board is that when treatment is voluntarily engaged with, outcomes are better,” Bazeghi said. “And we can say that from experience, and we can say that across all our disciplines. That will be the docs, that will be the therapists, that will be the counselors, the peers, the case managers. Everybody backs that up.”

Other states reconsider

Just to the north in Washington, lawmakers this year raised the state’s penalty for drug possession to a gross misdemeanor. It’s a harsher classification than a misdemeanor, but not a felony. They also criminalized public drug use.

Both actions were in response to a 2021 Washington Supreme Court decision that found the state’s felony drug possession law unconstitutional; a temporary law passed after the ruling lowered felony offenses to misdemeanors. People found in violation while the law was a misdemeanor had to be referred twice to treatment before they could be charged with possession of a controlled substance.

The reaction to Washington’s brief experiment with lesser penalties for possession of a controlled substance proved too politically fraught, said Alison Holcomb, the director of political strategies for ACLU Washington, which supports decriminalization. Donors who had supported a statewide ballot measure similar to Oregon’s were spooked by the backlash, Holcomb said.

“The first impact that we saw was the funders, but then we also saw in the primary and general election in 2022 these narratives being leveraged by candidates,” she said. “Candidates that were looking for easy wins on 1980s, tough-on-crime, War on Drugs rhetoric, were explaining or were arguing that it would be a disaster for Washington to move in the direction of decriminalization.”

Maine lawmakers and policy experts have been watching Oregon carefully. There, the legislature considered but failed in 2021 to pass a bill similar to Oregon’s measure that would turn minor drug possession into civil fines. Winifred Tate, director of the Maine Drug Policy Lab at Colby College, said she’s hopeful discussions will continue. Maine is a small place, Tate said, with people who are committed to addressing its addiction and overdose crises.

“People know each other and have deep relationships,” she said. “That creates opportunities for political change that might be harder on a bigger scale.”

Yet many in Maine are split on whether to move forward with a health care or law enforcement approach to future drug policy. Those fissures have emerged in discussions about how to spend a $235 million settlement with the drug companies that contributed to the opioid crisis.

The quandaries are similar in California, Colorado, Massachusetts and other states considering decriminalization or other approaches aimed at reducing overdoses, including supervised injection sites. Colorado lawmakers considered but ultimately didn’t advance a bill allowing supervised drug use in some cities. And in California last year, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a pilot program to reduce overdoses that would have allowed supervised injection sites.

Oregon’s path

Oregon laid out its shortcomings in a state audit released earlier this year that described the launch of Measure 110 as “beset by delays and public friction” that could have been addressed with more proactive management by the Oregon Health Authority. Oregon health officials have acknowledged they were slow to roll out the initial $300 million for Behavioral Health Resource Networks, the treatment and recovery services established in each Oregon county to help fill gaps in addiction services.

The audit also pointed out that the measure had “unrealistic timelines” for implementation. The law decriminalizing possession took effect just three months after the election, before detox and recovery networks were fully built out. It was “a very ambitious timeline,” acknowledged Kellen Russoniello, a senior policy counsel at the Drug Policy Alliance, the New York-based advocacy group behind the ballot measure.

Police in much of the state also were slow to issue civil tickets, which fine drug users up to $100 unless they call an addiction services hotline to have the penalty waived. A study conducted by researchers at Portland State University found that police are skeptical of Measure 110′s ability to motivate people to voluntarily seek treatment. As a result, they’re less willing to hand out citations, said Christopher Campbell, a co-author of the study, and an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the school.

“We spoke to one officer from an urban sheriff’s office and they said that they believe Measure 110 took away the system’s ability to help people recognize rock bottom and kickstart a new life void of drug use,” Campbell said. “So this, along with many other reasons, leaves officers feeling like giving out that citation really isn’t worth their time.”

In 2020 when Oregon voters approved the measure, the state had the second-highest rate of substance use disorder in the nation and was ranked last in providing access to addiction treatment. Fatal overdoses were on the rise.

The status quo wasn’t working and voters knew it, said Tera Hurst, executive director of Health Justice Recovery Alliance, a coalition of organizations working to defend the new law.

“It wasn’t an accident that they overwhelmingly said: ‘No, we believe that addiction is a health care issue. We don’t want to send people to jail and we don’t want to waste our money on that, and it doesn’t work,’” Hurst said.

Hurst notes that since Measure 110 passed, thousands of people are getting help with substance use disorders. In the Portland area alone, 41 organizations received $59 million to ramp up treatment, recovery and peer support programs. Other more rural parts of the state are seeing similar levels of resources, she said, many for the first time.

“There’s more outreach, there’s more drop-in centers, there’s more housing,” Hurst said. “If you stay in the bubble of everything’s awful, you miss all the good that’s happening around.”

So far, Oregon lawmakers have resisted calls to repeal the measure, although they did pass a bipartisan law this year making it a misdemeanor to possess 1 gram or more of fentanyl or five or more pills. Other states slammed by the fentanyl crisis toughened laws around the drug, too, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. At least 103 laws were enacted, including those that harden penalties for possession and distribution.

This fall, some Oregon lawmakers will travel overseas to Portugal to see how officials there have managed more than two decades of decriminalization. “This will give us a greater understanding of what trials and tribulations Portugal went through over their journey,” said Democratic state Sen. Floyd Prozanski, a municipal prosecutor who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Advocates continue to plead for more time, saying that such a massive societal shift in how Americans consider addiction requires more time to take hold. And no state is immune from discussions on how to address an epidemic of opioid-related deaths. Accidental overdoses are now the No. 1 cause of death for young people in 37 states.

“I’m not going to say this has been a pretty rollout,” Hurst said, “but I don’t know that I’ve ever really heard of any new, transformational law going into effect without a lot of bumps.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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