By Anna Kaminski, Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Rep. Kristey Williams opened a Tuesday committee hearing by stating her intention to promote educational excellence, “review and highlight anything that may have been a deterrent to that” and examine whether diversity, equity and inclusion serves the greater good.
She said true diversity is weakened when policies sort people into groups and when dissenting viewpoints are discouraged rather than encouraged.
She said her goal was to determine whether DEI creates less inclusive environments or suppresses free speech.
But as the hearing unfolded, it became apparent that Republicans have identified the next target in their anti-DEI crusade: curriculum.
Williams, an Augusta Republican and chairwoman of the House Committee on Government Efficiency, presented four examples as evidence of DEI practices in Kansas universities despite state and federal rules against them. She included the Kansas Board of Regents’ free expression statement, which was last updated in 2021. She discussed a 2022 invitation from the Federalist Society chapter at the University of Kansas School of Law to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal and advocacy organization. Administration condemned the invitation and DEI staff at the time scolded chapter members, Williams said. Conservative Kansas Supreme Court Justice Caleb Stegall withdrew his professorship in the wake of the incident.
Williams also played an anonymous video clip containing mention of services for LGBTQ+ students, including hormone therapy for students ages 19 and older, but those services were omitted from official communications, according to Williams, who did not disclose the identity or affiliation of the video’s subject.
She included descriptions of requisite English courses at Kansas State University, which included what she viewed as DEI language.
She said her findings beg a question about potential instructional bias.
Williams said later in the hearing: “It’s just when one viewpoint is required or pushed or so predominant in regular courses that it becomes a concern.”
The Legislature passed DEI-related mandates in 2024 and this year. The 2024 law directed universities to eradicate DEI within admissions and hiring practices, and a 2025 provisionrequired all state agencies, including universities, to eliminate positions, mandates, programs, activities, training requirements, grants and contracts related to DEI.
Curricula at Kansas universities have been exempt from state and federal efforts to stifle DEI principles, but some Republican legislators are eager to change that.
A lineup of university higher-ups recounted at the hearing recently disbanded LGBTQ+ centers, eliminated STEM scholarships for women, reworked policy manuals and shuttered DEI offices in service of compliance with state and federal mandates targeting practices that are perceived by some as exclusionary and unequal. Funding, on state and federal levels, for universities has been threatened if universities don’t comply with the mandates.
The cost, for Democratic Rep. Barbara Ballard of Lawrence, wasn’t financial.
“There was a cost by individuals on campus that felt discriminated against, that felt this may not have been the right thing to do. I think there’s always a cost and it’s not only always financial,” said Ballard, who has served in various roles at the University of Kansas since 1980.
As DEI practices have grown on college campuses, opposition efforts have risen in popularity in conservative circles.
Kansas Board of Regents president and CEO Blake Flanders said the Legislature’s guidance in recent years had been clear. The board, which governs Kansas universities and colleges, advised its public universities to comply with those laws, along with federal directives, which resulted in the end of programs, positions and practices. Among the most visible were the eradication of pronouns in university staff and faculty email signatures.
However, the Legislature’s mandates left curricula untouched.
The statutory framework of the 2024 law specifically did not apply to curricula, Flanders said.
He said the board did not interpret the 2025 provision as applying to curricula because state agencies other than universities don’t have courses. Plus, applying the provision in classrooms would have conflicted with the 2024 law, Flanders said.
Doug Girod, chancellor of KU, Marshall Stewart, executive vice president of K-State, Richard Muma, president of Wichita State University, and Ken Hush, outgoing president of Emporia State University, recounted a list of changes in response to anti-DEI mandates.
Despite the changes, three legislators who are not on the committee presented personal observations of existing DEI components within Kansas universities.
Rep. Megan Steele, a Manhattan Republican, showed online examples of language and practices that didn’t adequately eradicate DEI rhetoric. She repeatedly took issue with terms such as “multicultural,” “diversity,” “oppression,” “social justice,” “intersectionality,” “belonging,” and “anti-racism,” which appeared on university websites and in policies.
Lawmakers reviewed model legislation from conservative advocacy group the Goldwater Institute that prohibits mandatory classes containing DEI or critical race theory curricula, establishes required courses that teach “the founding principles of our constitutional republic” and bars higher education institutions from requiring exercises in DEI, critical race theory or identity politics.
The members on the majority Republican committee held a range of viewpoints. The four Democrats on the committee questioned the intent and motivations of the topic of the day. After viewing the model legislation, Rep. Dan Osman of Overland Park cautioned the committee about the direction the majority was going.
“It’s not our responsibility to oversee topics of individual classrooms,” Osman said. “It’s not our responsibility to implement changes from the federal government on behalf of the federal government. To do so, I would consider to be a serious violation of the First Amendment, and it would open us up to countless legal challenges.”
Kansas law does not contain a definition of DEI, and the committee struggled to come up with one.
“You can’t just ban the word diversity from a website and call it a day,” Osman said.
Even if DEI were clearly defined, legal challenges remain a risk, he said.
Rep. Troy Waymaster, a Bunker Hill Republican, said he favored eliminating DEI courses that are part of college student’s general studies prerequisites but was not opposed to keeping those courses available later in a student’s degree.
By the end of the hearing, Ballard, who had expressed her discomfort with the nature of the committee’s conversation at the beginning, said that discomfort had dissipated.
At the onset, Ballard, who is Black, said she had never felt as uncomfortable in her 32 years in the Legislature as she did then.
“Because we have to defend everything that happened before and forget 1865. Forget slavery. Forget when one person was admitted to a school and everyone else left,” she said.
She added: “A lot of people cannot forget what happened. History follows us. History lives. History does not die.”
In the committee’s final minutes, she said she shifted from uncomfortable to intrigued by what people had to say from their perspectives. She was left thinking about the broader polarization and racism “that no one wants to talk about” underneath disagreements over DEI.
“Usually the Legislature does not have a really good discussion,” Ballard said, “and, I have to say, we have had that today — a really good discussion about how things are.”
