‘Make it happen’: Legislature pushes to ban DEI as political pressure mounts

With President Donald Trump elevating bans of diversity, equity and inclusion programs to the top of national Republicans’ education agenda, Mississippi lawmakers are working to shutter DEI across the state’s higher education system.

Lawmakers in Mississippi’s Republican-dominated Legislature have for months considered the issue and met with university officials. Now, legislators will decide how far they will go in rooting out DEI in the state’s colleges and universities. They are determining what academic concepts count as “divisive” and what legal recourse to provide students and faculty who feel wronged by DEI-related initiatives.   

DEI programs have come under fire mostly from conservatives, who say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors, exacerbate antisemitism and infuse left-wing ideology into every facet of campus life. DEI also has progressive critics, who say the programs can be used to feign support for reducing inequality without actually doing so. Proponents say the programs are necessary to ensure that institutions meet the needs of increasingly diverse student populations.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to elimate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other DEI bans in Republican-led states to exploit as models, Mississippi lawmakers are poised in 2025 to move forward with legislation targeting the programs. 

In the House, Republican Reps. Donnie Scoggin, Joey Hood and Becky Currie have introduced bills to clamp down on DEI. Scoggin, Chair of the House Universities and Colleges Committee, said negotiations around the proposals are ongoing, but Hood’s bill is the leading contender to move forward.   

Hood’s bill would eliminate diversity training programs that “increase awareness or understanding of issues related to race, sex or other federally protected classes.” It would also seek to regulate academic instruction, barring universities from offering courses that promote “divisive concepts,” including “transgender ideology, gender-neutral pronouns, heteronormativity, gender theory, sexual privilege or any related formulation of these concepts.” 

Scoggin said the Legislature should settle on a finished product that is “semi-vague” in its language to protect universities from a flurry of legal challenges and funding cuts by the state. 

“There may be a professor that gets out here in left field somewhere. Well, the administration may not know it until they’re notified,” Scoggin said. “It’s about trying to be vague enough that we’re not hurting the college, yet strong enough that we’re getting the message across.”

After falling tiny with little discussion at the Capitol in 2024, the push to write DEI restrictions into state law picked up steam after a growing chorus of lawmakers said voluntary moves by universities to limit DEI programs were insufficient, Scoggin said. 

He said he and Sen. Nicole Boyd, R-Oxford, chairwoman of the Senate Universities and Colleges Committee, made it clear to university administrators that DEI programs, excluding those that benefit groups such as veterans and disabled students, needed to be whittled down.  

“We met with the college presidents and said ‘OK we would like, and when I say we, I mean myself and Sen. Boyd, we would like for y’all to govern yourselves and do what you want to do. But you know what you’ve got to do,” Scoggin said. “Make it happen.”

Over the summer, after other states banned DEI, the University of Mississippi restructured its Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. Other Mississippi universities also made changes to their diversity offices.

Scoggin and Boyd both said in interviews with Mississippi Today that they consulted campus administrators when writing their proposals to restrict DEI.