The Goldwater Institute (GI) released a new report revealing that Arizona’s public universities are offering Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) courses to students that fulfill the civics and history education requirement.
“Arizona’s public universities are failing students by allowing niche courses steeped in DEI to satisfy the state’s robust history and civics requirements,” said Timothy Minella,GI’s Director of Higher Education and the report’s author. “If university leaders won’t fully comply with state requirements, Arizona lawmakers should step in to ensure that students are getting the civics education they need and deserve.”
The Arizona Board of Regents initially ordered Arizona’s three public universities to initiate a civics and history education requirement. The University of Arizona (UA) has failed to implement one, GI said, but is finally starting to work on it. GI also found that after its prior report exposing mandatory DEI courses at UA, “UA quietly eliminated the ‘Diversity and Equity’ Attribute. Documents on UA’s website, however, indicate that faculty have merely renamed the ‘Diversity and Equity’ Attribute to the ‘Understand and Value Differences’ Attribute while keeping many of the same DEI themes of the previous Attribute.
Arizona State University (ASU) offers courses to fulfill the civics and history education requirement like “Social Welfare, Work, and Justice in the US” and “Theatre and U.S. Democracy.” Another course, “Anthropology of American Democracy,” “requires students to ‘critically reflect on positionality — recognizing how their identities, assumptions, and cultural background influence their understanding of U.S. democracy’ and covers “anthropology’s role in American Empire Building” with assigned reading from such works as Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World.”
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