Efforts by Republican governors and state legislators to pull back the curtain on diversity, equity, and inclusion spending at state universities are finally bearing fruit, and an entrenched bureaucracy whose livelihood depends on the racialized agenda is not happy about it.

Governor DeSantis of Florida got the ball rolling last month, when he tasked administrators across the state’s university system with compiling a list of all their DEI-related spending and the extent to which it was funded by the state’s taxpayers. The reports that trickled back have been eye-opening.

The University of South Florida, with a student body of about 50,000, reported spending $8.7 million on diversity-related efforts. The University of Florida reported spending $5.3 million, and the University of Central Florida spent $4.5 million. About three-fourths of the money came from state sources, the universities told Mr. DeSantis’s office. When it released a summary of the findings, his office called the figures “significantly” underreported and promised that his new budget would eliminate funding for what he called “wasteful spending.”

Since Mr. DeSantis began his campaign, lawmakers in Oklahoma and South Carolina have joined the fray. In his State of the State speech earlier this week, Governor Stitt said Oklahoma’s colleges and universities have strayed from their missions. “I want our universities to have less DEI offices and more career placement counselors,” Mr. Stitt said.

The efforts in South Carolina, first reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education Thursday, are being led by a group of state legislators.

The push by Mr. DeSantis has not been received warmly by faculty and administrators in that state. The chairwoman of the University of Florida’s faculty senate, Amanda Phalin, said that the diversity-spending directive sends a “chilling message that anyone who engages with topics that elected officials deem controversial is not welcome in the state of Florida.”

Students at several campuses across the state have also protested the governor’s initiative, and the American Association of University Professors has convened a special committee to review what it called a “pattern of politically and racially motivated attacks on higher education in the state.”

Defenders of the diversity initiatives say they are needed at universities in order to expand the pool of potential students and faculty to groups that have historically been marginalized on campuses. They also point out that the programs are often required by the bodies that accredit universities, and that removing them might also put schools at risk of violating Title IX and other federal civil rights legislation. 

Republican state leaders like Governor Abbott of Texas, however, are having none of it. This week, his office sent a memo to the heads of state agencies and university leaders suggesting that the initiatives violate state anti-discrimination statutes. “The innocuous sounding notion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has been manipulated to push policies that expressly favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others,” the memo said.

A recent report by the conservative National Association of Scholars looked at DEI initiatives at one school — the University of Texas at Austin — and concluded that what were once fringe academic and bureaucratic buzzwords have engulfed nearly every aspect of life and labor at the university. Curriculum, faculty training, hiring and promotion policies, and student life have all been co-opted by tenets that espouse a clear ideological agenda.

Most troubling to the report’s authors is that existing and prospective employees of the school must profess allegiance to the diversity and equity agenda if they want to join the faculty or be promoted into tenured positions. The practice “functions as a test of political or ideological allegiance,” the report states, “ensuring that the skeptical professors remain silent or pay the cost.”

“The illusion of viewpoint diversity is dead at UT Austin,” the association’s president, Peter Wood, said. “Our report provides little doubt of who runs this university. It is our hope that, armed with the details of Comprehensive Restructuring, the people of Texas and its legislature will take notice and guide the university back to its mission: the pursuit of truth.”