I’m okay. I’ve rested long enough. This kerfuffle over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has reached a red line with me, and my dander is up. I can’t hold it in. I’d like to skim the top, say there had been a little trouble and now it’s all okay. I can’t, and it’s not.
“I’M APPALLED,” SAID GOVERNOR REYNOLDS
Ed Tibbetts covered this terrain in a Bleeding Heartland post from early August. But the kerfuffle has a new wrinkle almost every day. Tibbetts tells us the details: In a law approved this year, Iowa Code §261J.2, Republican lawmakers made talk or teaching of or about diversity, equity, and inclusion forbidden, effective July 1, 2025.
Sec. 31.NEW SECTION 261J.1 DEFINITIONS.
As used in this chapter: Diversity, equity, and inclusion” includes all of the following:
Any effort to manipulate or otherwise influence the composition of the faculty or student body with reference to race, sex, color, or ethnicity, apart from ensuring colorblind and sex-neutral admissions and hiring in accordance with state and federal antidiscrimination laws.
Any effort to promote differential treatment of or provide special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity.
Any effort to promote or promulgate policies and procedures designed or implemented with reference to race, color, or ethnicity.
Any effort to promote or promulgate trainings, programming, or activities designed or implemented with reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
Any effort to promote, as the official position of the public institution of higher education, a particular, widely contested opinion referencing unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation, allyship, transgender ideology, microaggressions, group marginalization, antiracism, systemic oppression, social justice, intersectionality, neo-pronouns, heteronormativity, disparate impact, gender theory, racial privilege, sexual privilege, or any related formulation of these concepts.
A few days after July 1, a couple of University of Iowa employees commiserated with colleagues about the ifs, ands, and buts of the new law, especially as to how it related to their prior practice.
Someone covertly recorded the chitchat and passed it around, all the way up to Fox News where it riled the right wing, including Governor Kim Reynolds. She asked Attorney General Brenna Bird to open an investigation.
“I’m appalled,” said Reynolds, “by the remarks made in this video of a University of Iowa employee who blatantly admits to defying DEI restrictions I signed into law on May 9, 2024.”