AIM’s Kentucky DEI Investigations Featured in Inside Higher Ed
September 16, 2026
DEI Ban Led to End of Minister Benefits and Call for Professor to Be ‘Fired or Worse’
By Ryan Quinn | September 16, 2026
Last October, a Kentucky state senator emailed the general counsel at the state attorney general’s office with a complaint concerning a family member.
“My granddaughter goes to a public institution,” Republican Sen. Gary Boswell wrote in an email obtained via a public records request. “She is being required to take a DEI course. The professor told the class without knowing she was my granddaughter that she ‘changed the title of the course to avoid the state law.’”
“I want this professor fired or worse,” Boswell wrote. He alleged that the Murray State University course was using a book from Howard University professor Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist.
Christopher Thacker, the general counsel for the Kentucky attorney general’s office, checked with the university. Murray State said the course was one of multiple that could satisfy a requirement for one degree. Thacker said he’d follow up with Boswell, and that’s where emails on the subject end. Boswell and the targeted professor didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment, and Murray State didn’t provide comment.
These are among a raft of communications and documents provided by James Orlick, a University of Louisville Ph.D. candidate who filed the records request, that open a window into what Kentucky universities and their employees have faced after Kentucky Republicans passed House Bill 4 last year. State legislators overrode Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto to enact the broad anti-diversity, equity and inclusion law during the 2025 legislative session.
HB 4 bans what it defines as DEI offices, employees and training in public colleges and universities. It also prohibits affirmative action in hiring, awarding scholarships and selecting vendors. And it affects curriculum, though only regarding required courses. The law bars institutions from requiring courses whose “primary purpose is to indoctrinate participants with a discriminatory concept,” which it generally defines as one that “justifies or promotes differential treatment” for people based on “religion, race, sex, color or national origin.” The law tasks the attorney general’s office with enforcing it.
Differing interpretations of HB 4—from state politicians, state and university lawyers, activists and others—are also part of ongoing debates and disputes across multiple states about what DEI bans actually do or don’t prohibit, and whether universities are under- or overcomplying. Orlick, who said HB 4 cost him his job at Louisville, said seeing the emails has been traumatizing.
“State monitoring, political oversight, institutional restructuring and restrictions on university autonomy are tactics that we associate with governments such as Orbán’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia,” said Orlick, who stressed he was speaking in his personal capacity. “And I think that seeing some of these same mechanisms emerge in public higher ed should concern us.”
Thacker’s emails show him investigating various allegations of noncompliance with HB 4 that the attorney general’s office received from lawmakers, activists and others. Last September, he invited university presidents and their lawyers to a meeting the following month, telling them that “our review identified a few areas of apparent non-compliance.” The attorney general’s office didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment for this article.
Read the rest of Inside Higher Ed’s article here.