Politics Over Education: The DEI Smokescreen

By The Flannel Fist

Kentucky’s legislative session took a hard turn this summer. Not to audit overspending, but to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from our campuses. HB 4, passed this year, was sold as a cost-cutting, viewpoint-neutral reform. But when state officials leaned on universities about DEI and courses like UK’s Gender & Women’s Studies, the conversation suddenly shifted from policy to political fear-mongering.

DEI Didn’t Cost the State Much But They Still Targeted It

Let’s get something straight: this wasn’t about saving money. At the July 15 hearing, representatives from Kentucky’s public universities reported how much money was "saved" by complying with HB 4’s DEI restrictions, and the numbers are laughable. Western Kentucky University reported just $13,000 in savings. The Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) redirected about $2.5 million (>1% of the total budget) from DEI programs to generalized student support. Not cut, just reallocated. That’s pennies on the dollar of university budgets.

And yet, lawmakers like Rep. Shane Baker and Sen. Steve Rawlings treated these programs like existential threats to higher education. Why? Because it was never about money. It was always about power. Power and silencing institutions that challenge conservative narratives around race, gender, and equity.

Meanwhile, the University of Louisville said it now needs to hire additional legal staff just to navigate the bureaucratic maze HB 4 has created. So we’re not saving money, we're spending more to monitor and muzzle.

If this were truly a conversation about fiscal responsibility, lawmakers would be holding hearings on administrative bloat, massive sports subsidies, or the crippling cost of tuition for working-class families. Instead, they're chasing imaginary "leftist indoctrination" in courses and offices that, in many cases, have already been dismantled.

The real cost isn’t measured in dollars. It’s the loss of campus trust, the chilling of academic exploration, and the students who no longer see themselves reflected or supported in their own institutions.

This isn’t budget reform. It’s budget-based censorship.

Culture Warriors in Committee

The July 15 hearing wasn’t a fact-finding mission. It was a performance. And the lead actor was Rep. Steve Rawlings, who used his time not to understand the impact of HB 4, but to launch into a now-familiar monologue about “woke indoctrination.”

Rawlings called DEI a “multi-billion dollar industry” that provides “no measurable improvement.” That claim, of course, is pure rhetoric. No data, no academic studies, no campus surveys. Just a buzzword cocktail of Fox News fear and anti-intellectualism. He didn’t care that university officials had already testified that DEI savings were minimal and reallocated to general support services. He wasn’t interested in nuance or policy outcomes. He was there to score culture war points.

This is the same tired script: slap the “woke” label on anything that promotes equity, then accuse public institutions of brainwashing the youth. And if you’re wondering what DEI actually looks like on campus, it’s usually a few staff working underpaid jobs to make sure minority students aren’t left behind in overwhelmingly white, historically exclusionary systems. These are the folks helping first-generation students navigate college, ensuring disabled students receive accommodations, and making sure campus events aren’t completely tone-deaf to the diversity of Kentucky’s student body.

But instead of asking how those roles improve retention, graduation, and job readiness, Rawlings and his colleagues framed them as ideological infiltrators. As if a DEI coordinator is more dangerous to Kentucky than poverty wages, underfunded schools, or student debt.

This isn’t just bad faith, it’s more bad governance. And it shows how far certain legislators are willing to go to manufacture an enemy for their base, even if it means sabotaging the very public institutions that serve their own constituents.

Rawlings didn’t show up to listen, he showed up to fight a war that only exists in right-wing media headlines. And in the process, he made it crystal clear: he’s not interested in education policy, he’s interested in controlling the narrative.

This Is Not Reform, It’s Repression

Kentucky needed solutions, not showmanship. We don’t need lawmakers playing at culture wars while real educational and social needs go unmet. We needed to focus on rural healthcare, teacher pay, and infrastructure, not symbolic attacks on universities.
Location: Kentucky, USA

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