Nebraska lawmakers are considering legislation that would ban diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and offices at public universities — the latest in growing and contentious efforts by GOP-led states to reject the diversity measures.

The legislature’s education committee is hearing testimony on the bill on Tuesday, as civil rights groups and public university administrators in the state push back against the legislation in an attempt to keep it from advancing out of committee. The bill was introduced by a state senator, Dave Murman, and is sponsored by 14 other senators. Opponents of the measure include the American Civil Liberties Union in Nebraska, which says it would “harm” thousands of students of color and LGBTQ students in the state’s public colleges.

Nebraska’s effort comes as a slew of states across the country, including Texas, Florida, Iowa, Arizona, and South Carolina, have passed or are considering similar measures to ban DEI at public schools. Spikes in antisemitism since the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel have put a harsh spotlight on DEI initiatives, which have been criticized as hostile to Jews, as the Sun has reported. 

Since 2023, 71 bills targeting DEI have been introduced in 25 states and in Congress, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s DEI Legislation Tracker. 

Nebraska’s legislation, if passed, would prohibit employees of public educational institutions — defined as the University of Nebraska, the state colleges, and community colleges — from attending or participating in programs that focus on describing systems and privilege based on race, sex, color, gender, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation. It also would prohibit “justifying differential treatment or benefit” based on those characteristics. 

The bill would prohibit public universities and colleges from requiring employees to engage in DEI programs, spending public money on them, and establishing DEI offices and positions. Unless required by federal law, no public educational institution could adopt policies that base hiring on race and sex, and they could not “promote or adopt any theory of unconscious or implicit bias,” nor engage with a long list of controversial concepts popularized by the far left, such as cultural appropriation, transgenderism, microaggressions, anti-racism, system oppression, and more.

Employees of public universities who are required to participate in DEI programs could bring action against the schools, the bill notes. 

Civil rights groups say the bill goes too far, citing the language in the text that would ban colleges from promoting concepts including allyship, anti-racism, and transgenderism, which according to the ACLU is “a term that has recently been used by trans rights opponents to imply being trans is an ideology rather than an identity. It raises the question: would a university be in violation for simply acknowledging trans students and employees as themselves?”

The group says that the decision isn’t one state senators should be making but rather should be handled by the University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents and community college boards. Opponents of the DEI ban are encouraging students and others to submit public comments about the bill online ahead of the Tuesday hearing. 

“DEI programs unite us. Bills like this seek to divide us,” the ACLU notes, adding that the programs “prioritize and celebrate our differences.”

Yet an Arizona-based think tank called the Goldwater Institute — which, along with the Manhattan Institute, drafted model legislation upon which Nebraska’s is based — says that anti-DEI efforts across the country are halting “the insidious creep of social justice agendas.” 

The efforts “strike a double blow on behalf of taxpayers — not only rolling back the Administrative State in general, but also removing the epicenter of so much leftwing lunacy undermining intellectual diversity on college campuses,” a director of education policy at Goldwater and one of the writers of the model legislation, Matt Beienburg, noted.