A Victory against DEI in Wisconsin

National Review Online

Monday, December 18, 2023

 

The speaker of the Wisconsin assembly, Robin Vos (R.), has said that DEI really stands for “division, exclusion, and indoctrination.” During budget negotiations in May, he said assembly Republicans would cut funding for DEI programs in the University of Wisconsin system. At long last, Vos (rhymes with “boss”) has secured a win against leftist ideology in higher education in a purple state.

 

Wisconsin is one of the most evenly divided swing states in the country, and the Republican majority in the legislature clashes with a Democratic governor, Tony Evers. The budget the legislature passed in June included $32 million in cuts to the university system, equal to the funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The budget also included pay raises for the rest of the system’s employees and funding for new building projects on campuses.

 

Evers threatened to veto the entire budget over the DEI cuts. He ended up signing the budget in July, but he used his line-item veto to protect 188 DEI positions in the university system. He was unable to legally line-item-veto the spending cut, though, so it still went through.

 

That meant it was up to the university system to cut DEI on its own. Once passed in the budget, the pay raises still had to be approved by a committee in the legislature. The committee approved the pay raises for all other state employees, but Vos said it wouldn’t approve the UW employees’ pay raises until the DEI cuts were made.

 

His hardline stance was the starting point for negotiations with the university system, and by this month, they had a deal. The legislature would approve the pay raises and release the funding for building projects, including for a new engineering building that Republicans had initially rejected, in exchange for a series of reforms.

 

The UW system agreed to freeze all DEI hiring and reassign 43 current DEI officials to other roles. Diversity statements on student applications would be prohibited. An affirmative-action program for faculty hiring would be abolished.

 

UW-Madison would establish a new endowed chair for the study of conservative political thought. A new module for free expression would be implemented on all campuses. The university system would adopt a race-blind admissions program in which Wisconsin students who finish in the top 5 percent of their high-school class are guaranteed admission to UW-Madison, and students who finish in the top 10 percent are guaranteed admission to other campuses in the system.

 

Vos and UW system president Jay Rothman were both happy with the deal. But, under pressure from progressives, the board of regents rejected it by a 9–8 vote on December 9. Vos stood his ground. “We are not changing one thing in this deal,” he said. “If they want to walk away, they can walk away.”

 

Realizing he was serious, the board of regents met again on December 13 and approved the same deal it had just rejected. Finally, when push came to shove, it wasn’t worth rejecting pay raises for all employees and putting building projects on hold for the sake of a handful of progressive ideologues working in the DEI bureaucracy.

 

The implicit admission: DEI isn’t necessary to the educational mission of the university system.

 

Republican trifectas in several states have succeeded at reining in DEI. Vos is the first to do it with divided government. All along, Vos made clear that he wanted the university system to focus on education and merit, not indoctrination and politics.

 

Pairing the DEI reforms with the automatic-admissions system for high-performing high schoolers made that commitment concrete. He wasn’t just ripping the things he didn’t like. He proposed a reasonable alternative that could gain broad support.

 

Universities’ job is education. That should be obvious to everyone, and it is obvious to most people. But progressive radicalism has made it into the conservative position. The Left has ceded the reasonable ground on education. Vos has just shown Republicans how to take it — even in a closely divided state.