‘Complete censorship’: Arizona anti-DEI bill bars teaching almost anything

Inside a lab at Arizona State University, Scott Menor studies eukaryotic cells. They’re a crucial building block of most lifeforms, including every human, animal and plant on the planet. But Menor worries that the current GOP war against diversity, equity and inclusion might hamper his ability to research them.

That fear started as a joke among Menor and his fellow research scientists at ASU’s Biodesign Institute, but Menor increasingly feels “there’s some truth to it.” Some eukaryotes have as many as 14 different mating sexes, Menor said. When he sees directives from President Donald Trump and other Republicans to outlaw the instruction of “gender ideology” — basically banning anything that suggests there are more than two sexes — he thinks of eukaryotes.

“It sounds like a joke,” Menor told Phoenix New Times. “But just talking about them probably runs afoul with the only two sexes kind of language.”

While attention has mostly focused on Trump’s effort to root out DEI from schools and universities, a similar effort is making its way through the Arizona Legislature. Sponsored by Republican state Sen. David Farnsworth, Senate Bill 1694 would withhold state funding from state universities and community colleges that offer courses on diversity, equity and inclusion. At stake is more than $970 million in state funding to ASU, the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University.

ASU and NAU declined to comment on the bill to New Times. U of A, the Arizona Board of Regents and Maricopa Community Colleges did not return messages seeking comment.

The bill is problematic on its face — DEI initiatives serve as a corrective to inequality and are not a cause of it, as Republicans like to suggest. But even more troublesome is the bill’s incredibly broad language. According to Farnsworth’s bill, DEI courses are any that feature material that “relate(s) contemporary American society” to:

“…critical theory, whiteness, systemic racism, institutional racism, anti-racism, microaggressions, systemic bias, implicit bias, unconscious bias, intersectionality, gender identity, social justice, cultural competence, allyship, race-based reparations, race-based privilege, race-based diversity, gender-based diversity, race-based equity, gender-based equity, race-based inclusion or gender-based inclusion.”

That’s a lot. That definition could prevent med school professors from teaching about racial, class and gender-based health disparities. It would kneecap the entire discipline of sociology. It could force STEM and literature courses to narrowly focus on old, white scientists and authors. Even statistics courses that identify statistically significant differences between two racial or ethnic groups could run afoul of the proposed law.

Basically, Menor said, the bill could “impact everything.”

Past and present

Farnsworth’s bill makes exceptions for most history courses. Not covered by the law are any courses that deal with “historical movements, ideologies or instances of racial hatred or race-based discrimination,” which the bill says includes “slavery, Indian removal, the Holocaust and Japanese-American internment.”

That doesn’t satisfy Alexander Aviña.

An associate professor of history at ASU, Aviña said the bill tries to “completely sever that relationship between past and present,” as if history simply stopped at some point to make way for the now. Farnsworth’s bill implies that “the current state of things is this country is a good one, where there is no such thing as racial inequity or class inequality,” Aviña said. Which is, of course, not true.

“That idea is extremely antithetical to the work that we do as professional historians,” Aviña said, “because that’s not the way the past works.”

The bill is particularly relevant to Aviña’s area of expertise, which is Latin American and Mexican history. He’s not worried that his less U.S.-centric classes would be affected, but he’s sure his courses on migration and the history of the U.S. empire would. The bill would ban any history courses that:

• Talk about anything on that laundry list of verboten subjects in the context of modern America
• Suggest that racially neutral or colorblind laws perpetuate oppression, including white supremacy and white privilege
• Promote the differential treatment of any individual or group — or the idea that anyone is biased — based on race or ethnicity in contemporary American society

History isn't just something that happened a long time ago, Aviña said. The past encroaches upon the present all the time. Any honest history course would quickly trip over the myriad landmines Farnsworth’s bill would install.

“If we teach about things that happened in the past that somehow stayed in the past, that’s fine,” Aviña said. “But if you start to make connections in our history courses between these ongoing systems and processes of oppression that continue into the present, well that’s deemed illegal and that’s highly problematic.”

DEI pearl-clutching

Despite the widespread consequences of the bill, it’s not clear that Farnsworth fully understands its implications.

Wednesday, Farnsworth introduced the bill at a hearing of the Senate Education Committee, which he chairs. As a preface, the 73-year-old shared his educational experience, including how his elementary school principal disciplined him with a paddle. He graduated from Mesa High School in 1969 and obtained an associate's degree from Mesa Community College but always regretted not earning a bachelor’s.

This year, Farnsworth has begun working toward a degree in elementary education at Rio Salado Community College. To that end, he enrolled in a diversity class that featured what he felt was a troubling textbook.

Reading from it Wednesday, Farnsworth noted that the textbook said that the dominant culture in the U.S. is White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, which is “often bigoted, segregationist and exclusionary.” He quoted the textbook as saying that “men historically are treated superior to women. They tend to speak before and over women in meetings.”

In a press release about the bill’s passage through the committee, Farnsworth noted that the “course's material went as far as to admit that educators must develop and implement plans to protect individuals they claim are targeted by ‘white supremacy hate groups, run by white nationalists.’” Farnsworth did not say why that would be bad, nor did he respond to an email seeking comment.

During the meeting, Farnsworth said that “we need to understand diversity” and that “we should love and respect each other because we are all creations under God,” but that “we shouldn’t require teachers to be indoctrinated.” Democratic Sen. Catherine Miranda replied that “it sounds like you support diversity, equity and inclusion,” to which Farnsworth responded, “Absolutely.”

“I’m not opposed to diversity training and I realize there is diversity in the world,” Farnsworth continued. ‘We have to make sure it is correctly done and make sure there isn’t bias on either side.”

Farnsworth's comments confused Alberto Plantillas, the central regional director of the Arizona Students' Association. Testifying against the bill before the committee, Plantillas called the senator’s support of the bill “counterproductive.”

“We kind of are on the same page when he mentioned diversity and inclusion,” Plantillas told Phoenix New Times after the hearing. “But if this bill passes, it will get rid of everything else that he says he supports at the university level.”

Farnsworth admitted that “the bill is imperfect” and said he was open to amendments, though none were added. The anti-DEI bill passed out of the education committee with a 4-3, party-line vote. It now goes to the Senate Rules Committee.

Chilling effect

The effect Farnsworth’s bill would have on higher education isn’t theoretical. Another state has already tried this.

Farnsworth’s bill is reminiscent of Florida’s anti-DEI laws, which limited how race and sex are taught at the university level. After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed that bill into law in 2022, many institutions engaged in what Aviña called “anticipatory obedience.”

“They went way beyond what they needed to do really quickly to show the state that they were going to abide by these new unconstitutional laws,” he said.

Now retired, Dave Wells used to teach political science at ASU. One of his intro-level courses, required for all poli-sci majors, was American Government and Politics. After Florida’s bill went into effect, Wells added a new line to his syllabus: “In Florida, this course might be illegal.”

Now, he and others worry that Arizona is heading down the same path. Farnsworth’s bill has no chance of evading the veto stamp of Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, but Wells wonders what would happen if Hobbs isn’t reelected in 2026. With a clear runway to whitewash education — if Trump hasn’t managed to do it already — professors and universities might show how compliant they’re willing to be.

Aviña and Wells said professors in their disciplines wouldn’t change their syllabi based on a bill like Farnsworth’s, but Menor isn’t so sure. He’s already seen professors adjust their curriculum in response to the anti-DEI turmoil being foisted on the country.

“It puts people in a position where you’re kind of always afraid,” Menor said. “It forces you to comply in advance.”

The result would be immeasurable harm, affecting every corner of higher education. Race and gender are “foundation elements” of American society, Wells said. You can’t teach most subjects by avoiding them, at least not honestly.

“It’s complete censorship,” Aviña said. “We can’t do our jobs as history professors effectively if we are told how to teach the past in a way that is somehow disconnected or disjoined from the present. We’re going to fail our students.”