Abstract
We argue that anti-“DEI” legislation constitutes a form of state-sanctioned epistemic oppression that reproduces racial hierarchies by restructuring the boundaries of knowledge in U.S. higher education. Through a critical case study of Texas Senate Bill 17 at a public university in the state, we examine how this law operates as a racial project, invalidating intellectual and situated knowledge tied to racial justice, constraining equity-oriented labor, and producing an epistemic double-bind for faculty members and former administrators whose work interrogates race and racism. Through analysis of interviews, observations, and documents, we show how participants navigate dissonance and constrained agency within racialized hostile institutional environments, some enacting strategic refusals and adaptive practices aligned with the third university and the undercommons to refuse racialized knowledge erasure and reimagine liberatory futures. We contend that while anti-“DEI” laws accelerate racial harm, they also clarify the stakes of epistemic and racial justice, inviting renewed commitments to abolitionist inquiry, collective study, and the transformation of higher education as a site of racial equity.
Introduction
Colleges and universities help define the value and legitimacy of knowledge in U.S. society. Higher education offers space, resources, and funding, ostensibly free from corporate or political influence, to develop ideas that shape how we think and live. This dynamic creates opportunities for liberatory scholarship—academic work that challenges oppressive social conditions and racial hierarchies—though scholars must also contend with deep-rooted systems of White supremacy reinforced by generations of White-male dominated knowledge production (Lynn and Dixson 2022; Stein 2022; Wilder 2013). In the decades that followed Civil Rights legislation and student movements, scholars within emergent programs and disciplines like Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies contributed volumes of rigorous scholarship illuminating structures of White supremacy and how they reproduce inequity (e.g., Bell 1995; Collins 2002; Wolfe 1999). If broadly adopted into mainstream thought, these scholarly ideas could mitigate racial inequity and other forms of systemic oppression.
In practice, higher education institutions operationalized insights from this scholarship in ways that regulated their radical potential (Ferguson 2012; Martínez and Villarreal 2025). For example, universities developed diversity- and inclusion-focused offices and programming to support minoritized students and educate those in positions of power on the reality of structural oppression (e.g., Ahmed 2012). These initiatives helped cultivate living and working conditions where minoritized scholars could think, theorize, and advance non-mainstream understandings of the world, promoting a sense of belonging for marginalized communities on campus (e.g., Museus and Jayakumar 2012). However, this work was diluted by legal developments (e.g., Jayakumar, Garces, and Park 2018), and often siloed, with institutions symbolically aligned to equity efforts that preserved an inequitable status quo (González-Stokas 2023; Jayakumar 2023; Thomas 2020).
Today, these diversity- and inclusion-focused initiatives—and the narrow space of possibility they offered for disrupting systemic racial inequities—are under attack. Of late, 19 states have passed anti-“DEI” legislation (Chronicle Staff 2026), which, coupled with legal challenges to affirmative action (e.g., Garces 2020), create a revisionist movement that frames empirically informed concepts like implicit bias as “divisive” and mislabels inclusion-promoting structures, such as identity-affirming spaces, as “preferential” or “discriminatory.” 1 Anti-“DEI” laws advance a “colorblind” and race-evasive ideology (Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison 2017; Bonilla-Silva [2004] 2022) that obscures the contexts of inequality meticulously documented by decades of scholarship—contexts that reveal how systemic racism shapes access, opportunity, and outcomes. Anti-“DEI” laws recast racial justice as unnecessary and criminalize efforts, however compromised, to build social equity (Pratt and Deramo 2024). Amidst escalating state-based attacks on “DEI,” muted university responses allow for uncertainty and fear to flourish, leading some scholars to unnecessarily restrict their work (Garces et al. 2021; Pedota et al. 2025).
This study documents the knowledge-based consequences of anti-“DEI” legislation. Through the lens of epistemic oppression (Dotson 2014)—which names how certain people are blocked from contributing to the development of shared knowledge—we conceptualize anti-“DEI” laws as state-mandated restrictions on what is possible to think, know, do, and be on university campuses and beyond, particularly for work that addresses structural inequities. We focus on Texas’s anti-“DEI” bill (SB 17), which, despite opposition from advocates (e.g., Valenzuela, Unda, and Bernal 2025), became law in June 2023. The law prohibits the funding of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” initiatives, triggering dramatic changes in policy, practice, and knowledge possibility across Texas public universities, with ripple effects nationwide. This critical case study focuses on the law’s implementation at one public university 2 in Texas, asking:
How does Texas’s SB 17 shape knowledge that challenges dominant narratives about race and inequity at one public university?
How does Texas’s SB 17 shape the labor expectations and conditions for faculty members whose scholarship focuses on race or racism and former “DEI” administrators at one public university?
How do faculty members whose scholarship focuses on race or racism and former “DEI” administrators describe their experiences in the context of knowledge constraint under Texas SB 17?
We contribute to the sociology of race and ethnicity by documenting how anti-“DEI” legislation reproduces racial hierarchies by restructuring the boundaries of legitimate knowledge in U.S. higher education. Specifically, we find that anti-“DEI” laws discredit the scholarship underpinning equity-focused initiatives; restrict faculty whose research contests prevailing ways of knowing; and generate exploitative labor conditions. Our findings show that this state-sanctioned epistemic oppression creates dissonance for faculty members who study racism and former “DEI” administrators, as they wrestle with laboring in or leaving increasingly oppressive institutions. Campus community members face an epistemic double-bind, where any agentic decision they make as legitimate knowledge-holders leaves them less empowered.
We argue that the double-bind—a condition produced by the systemic oppression of knowledge under anti-“DEI” legislation—invites engagement with those building the third university (paperson 2017). The double-bind offers opportunity to join with undercommons scholars (Harney and Moten 2013), who, through everyday acts of refusal, repurposing, and relationality, leverage the tools of the university (e.g., research, teaching, administration) to transform how knowledge is produced and understood. Our findings lead us to frame anti-“DEI” legislation as an opportunity to answer questions posed by abolitionist scholars, such as “toward what ends do we labor?” (Boggs and Mitchell 2018:438) and “of what and to whom are we answerable?” (Patel [2015] 2016:5). Anti-“DEI” laws are an invitation to join union calls and study groups, to articulate our energy and scholarship toward a non-hierarchical, less precarious, more economically equitable and affirmative vision of higher education that embraces all humans (McKittrick 2015; Tomlinson and Lipsitz 2018).
Higher Education Context
In the late 1960s, minoritized students sought alignment between the world they knew from experience and the content they encountered in higher education (Lye 2010). Through organized movements (e.g., Lumumba-Zapata, Third World Liberation), they demanded increased representation alongside “epistemological and institutional transformations” that could build social equity (Ferguson 2012:51). Emergent disciplines—Black Studies, Native American/Indigenous Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Chicano Studies—offered space in academia to develop concepts and theorizations about our social world, its institutions, the limits of their liberatory power, and their role in reproducing oppression. Critiques from scholars identified the foundations upon which U.S. universities, like U.S. society, were built—a project of resource theft (e.g., Native land, enslaved labor) (Dancy, Edwards, and Davis 2018; Lee and Ahtone 2020), racialized exclusion (Goldstone 2006), and the maintenance of elite power (Boggs and Mitchell 2018; Stein 2022).
Within these sedimented systems, minoritized faculty members—even tenured ones—whose scholarship addresses social inequities, face ongoing challenges about the rigor and legitimacy of their work (Rangel 2020). They find their scholarship rejected from “top” journals or excluded from grants because their methods or frameworks fall outside of disciplinary norms—with consequences for career longevity and success (Bernal and Villalpando 2002; Gonzales et al. 2025; Settles et al. 2021).
Moreover, in taking up these scholars’ work, universities included only palatable fragments of the critical knowledge offered, putting it to work in ways that reinforced, rather than disrupted, the status quo (Ahmed 2012; Ferguson 2012). And while they offer moderately hospitable conditions to marginalized perspectives, initiatives like “DEI” policies did not deliver equity. As enacted, they exploited minoritized campus community members through labor extraction in the service of “diversity” (Lerma, Hamilton, and Nielsen 2020), created debt-burdened students of color (Hamilton and Nielsen 2021), and reified the dominant, White organization (Cabrera 2019; Cottom 2017; Iverson 2007; Ray 2019). Per critical and abolitionist readings, the “first world university charges fees and grants degrees” (paperson 2017:37), pumping up its wealth, pumping out workers.
Meanwhile, critical scholars proffering critiques within a “second university” are stymied at transformational change, as their work operates within and ultimately affirms the dominant university that normalizes, manages, and coopts the radical power of the critique—in part through diversity and inclusion-focused initiatives (Boggs and Mitchell 2018; Grande 2018; Kelley 2016). Some scholars contend a third university is possible, under (de)construction from within and beyond campus, built from “the scrap material” (paperson 2017:43) of the first and second university (Harney and Moten 2013; Rodríguez 2025). This study calls for more work toward the third university, providing an empirical companion to a recent “critical historical reimagining of justice possibilities” (Jayakumar and Vue 2025) in higher education.
Epistemic Oppression and Forms of Knowledge Exclusions
In our study, we draw on Kristy Dotson’s (2014) theory of epistemic oppression, which names systemic, persistent infringements on individuals’ or groups’ abilities to contribute to the shared knowledge base (Dotson 2014). Epistemic oppression operates within epistemic systems at the individual, group, and structural level: knowledge-based exclusions can happen to people (individual), at the level of shared knowledge resources (group), or at the level of the epistemic system itself (structural). We use concepts from epistemic oppression to conceptualize anti-“DEI” legislation as a racial project, illuminating its consequences for targeted policies and practices and for participants’ experiences working in its wake. We demonstrate how the criminalization of efforts to mediate knowledge-based exclusions at the individual, group, and structural levels codifies dominant knowledge systems, with implications for labor, learning, and epistemic justice in higher education.
The various types of epistemic oppression can be understood by examining how knowledge exclusions work, whom they harm, and what interventions are required to change them (Dotson 2012, 2014; Pohlhaus 2020). Dotson employs an order of change model from organizational development (Bartunek and Moch 1987) to categorize examples of epistemic exclusions (e.g., first-, second-, and third-order exclusions). We define each of these below and connect them to the study’s focus.
The Role of “DEI” Policies and Practices in Addressing First-Order Knowledge Exclusions
We conceptualize “DEI” programming as efforts to mediate first-order exclusions, which occur when a person (or group) is excluded from full participation in an epistemic system because their knowledge is not deemed credible. Kristy Dotson (2017) offers the example of a Black woman who recounts an experience she attributes to racism, and while her audience believes racism is real and that something happened, they deny that racism is what happened in this case. The listener wields epistemic power by refusing to grant the speaker credibility. As such, the speaker’s epistemic agency, their ability to know and contribute to shared epistemic resources—in this case, the ability of a Black woman to shape the bounds of what racism looks like—is undercut, harming the speaker. This form of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) can lead to testimonial smothering, silencing oneself because one knows they will not be believed. While testimonial smothering involves silence, the silence is coerced and therefore reproduces societal knowledge deficits and reaffirms the speaker’s marginalized epistemic position.
To address first-order exclusions, listeners would need to be less biased or distribute credibility among people more equitably. Thus, attending to first-order inefficiencies within the existing knowledge system requires a reform. “DEI” programs, like anti-bias trainings and dialogues across difference, can address this form of epistemic exclusion by helping individuals recognize and value others’ knowledge. When successful, such trainings and dialogues more equitably distribute credibility. As such, the epistemic system operates more efficiently because minoritized peoples’ knowledge is valued, and the social system is better understood by all. Yet, anti-“DEI” laws, like SB 17, prohibit the use of state resources to support such trainings and “DEI”-related programming (e.g., affinity networking groups, resource centers, professional development) that reduce credibility deficits across Texas. The prohibition of these initiatives, as our findings illustrate, reinscribes first-order knowledge exclusions.
The Role of Critical Scholarship in Addressing Second-Order Epistemic Exclusions
Relatedly, we conceptualize the work of scholars who study race and racism as potentially mediating second-order epistemic exclusions that result from deficiencies in our shared knowledge resources. Miranda Fricker (2007) offers the example of women who experienced sexual harassment before the term’s emergence in the 1970s. In these cases, women struggled to communicate intelligibly with dominant knowers. Like those harmed because their knowledge was not deemed credible (first-order exclusions), these women’s ability to know within or be known by the social world (i.e., their epistemic agency) is eclipsed because the concept that captures their experiences is missing. But when those words or concepts become part of the shared knowledge base, they help reduce exclusions from within the system.
Attending to second-order epistemic exclusions thus requires revising existing shared epistemic resources. In the context of this study, faculty who study racism and/or advance critical theories (e.g., Critical Race Theory, decolonial and Black feminist theories) identify and introduce ideas validating marginalized populations’ experiences. Across disciplines, faculty members advance such intellectual knowledge (e.g., knowledge judged rigorous and valid via peer review), which is also frequently informed by situated knowledge (e.g., what one knows through lived, embodied experience) (Anzaldúa and Moraga 1983; Collins 2002; Smith 1999). In this study, former “DEI” administrators hold important situated knowledge, as their personal and professional experiences provide unique insights into the lives of minoritized students. We examine how “DEI” legislation threatens and undercuts both intellectual and situated knowledge, imposing a second-order knowledge exclusion.
Labor Exploitation and Double-Binds in Addressing Knowledge Exclusions
The process of addressing first- and second-order knowledge exclusions can itself also create harm through epistemic labor exploitation. That is, by generating knowledge for dominant knowers, the epistemically marginalized undertake the labor of explaining oppression (Pohlhaus 2020). In this study, we draw on the concept of epistemic labor exploitation to describe how “DEI” bans strip former administrators of the ability to contribute their expertise in official, compensated roles, even as their knowledge is needed. As a result, they face pressure to continue contributing their expertise informally and without compensation, creating new forms of coerced epistemic labor exploitation. We also highlight how faculty and students experience coerced epistemic labor exploitation as they are forced to take up work abandoned by the state of affirming and validating knowledge and experiences.
Acknowledging this coerced epistemic labor introduces another important concept from epistemic oppression we employ to name participants’ experiences: the double-bind (Dotson 2017; Frye 1983). A double-bind represents a situation where any possible action renders the actor complicit in their own subjugation within the system. In a double-bind, a person can still act. They can read a situation rationally, weigh the options, and decide what to do, but their agency is eclipsed by whichever choice they make. The concept of the epistemic double-bind illuminates participants’ labor experiences as their universities ban and (further) constrain their efforts to mediate epistemic oppression. If they comply with this oppressive regime by taking a new job or self-censoring, they become complicit in the university’s oppression. If they continue to share knowledge that affirms marginalized peoples’ experiences and understandings, they risk sanction (e.g., being fired, demoted, losing credibility/authority), thereby weakening their power within the system they hope to change. If they leave, they lose access to power their university position confers. Regardless, their knowledge of oppression and their validation in the social world are denied. Importantly, we find the double-bind to be a useful way to view our participants’ cognitive, career, or identity dissonance, while centering the oppressive structure—not the individual—as the problem.
The Role of Anti-“DEI” Legislation in Third-Order Knowledge Exclusion and “Bad Magic”
Unlike first- and second-order epistemic exclusion, third-order knowledge exclusion occurs at the level of an epistemic system. To understand this last level of knowledge-based oppression, we must recognize that epistemic systems encompass not only what we know but also how we organize and value that knowledge. Epistemological systems have governance structures (Berenstain, Dotson, Paredes, Ruíz, and Silva 2022); they are informed by beliefs, take shape through assumptions and norms, and are organized with outcomes in mind (Berenstain et al. 2022). Using language her grandmother might appreciate, Dotson calls the work of these governance structures “magic,” as they “conjure” conditions through their very structure (Berenstain et al. 2022:290). Self-reflexive epistemic systems teach knowers to recognize the “magic” and understand the limits of what and how they know. In contrast, unreflexive epistemic systems, like most Western epistemologies, produce what Dotson calls “bad magic”: they obscure their governance structures to sustain the illusion that their way of knowing, being, and doing is the only way. When an epistemic system is unreflexive, knowers within that system cannot see the conjuring of bad magic. What seems “natural” is actually epistemic oppression.
We contend that anti-“DEI” laws represent the legislation of bad magic. These laws censor and harm, but they also reveal the hidden conjure work of epistemic governance structures. By legislating limits on what can be known, these laws expose that systems of knowledge are structured, not just “natural” and a priori. This revelation plants seeds of epistemic reflexivity and opens the possibility of engaging other ways of knowing, organizing knowledge, and seeking understanding beyond hierarchy, exclusion, extraction, and violence.
Research Design and Methodology
This paper presents findings from a critical case study (Pasque, Khader, and Still 2017) at one public university in Texas that brings together multiple data sources (e.g., documents, interviews, and observations) to examine our phenomenon of interest: the consequences of an anti-“DEI” law for faculty members and former “DEI” administrators whose work addresses structural inequity. As scholars employed by a public university in Texas, we are embedded in the broader context of knowledge production and dissemination under conditions of state suppression. As such, we draw from Frisco (Shange 2019) methods which foreground researcher reflexivity and power in contested spaces shaped by racial capitalism.
Critical case study design aligns with our theoretical framework of epistemic oppression by engaging critical topics (e.g., higher education racism and inequity), drawing from Black feminist epistemologies and enacting methods that name power and work toward social change (Pasque et al. 2017). Critical case studies share qualities with traditional case study methods (e.g., Yin 2018) but trouble their tidy boundaries. For example, while our case is temporally bounded—from June 2023 (when SB 17 was signed into law) to March 2025 (1 year after implementation)—we acknowledge that historical legacies of enslavement and settler-colonialism shape the present (see Gordon n.d. for historical contextualization at one Texas public university). Our study is both in and of these contexts (Harney and Moten 2013), while reaching toward liberatory futures.
From April 2024 to March 2025, we interviewed 45 participants (23 faculty members, 22 former “DEI” administrators). We purposefully selected (Maxwell 2013) faculty whose scholarship engages race or racism, scholarship that underpins “DEI” initiatives. To identify participants, we reviewed faculty profiles and course descriptions from Spring 2023 to Spring 2024, including faculty who served on diversity, equity, or inclusion-focused committees and self-identified as scholars of race or racial equity. In addition, we interviewed former “DEI” administrators—staff or faculty with administrative appointments whose roles focused on addressing structural inequity. In Table 1, we outline participants’ demographic (race/ethnicity) and college/school affiliation by role.
Participants’ Self-reported Race/Ethnicity and College/School Affiliation by Role.
The first author conducted most interviews using semi-structured protocols (Maxwell 2013), with support from co-authors. Interviews were conducted virtually, lasted about 60 minutes, and explored participants’ experiences with SB 17 and the consequences for their work. Many participants expressed unsolicited gratitude for the opportunity to process and be heard. Data also included approximately 23 hours of observations and 27 documentary materials (collected July 2023 to December 2024). We attended relevant events, including faculty council meetings and community gatherings addressing SB 17 and related threats to academic freedom. We recorded structured field notes and expanded them analytically through weekly team meetings and memo writing. Documents included public policies, statements, websites, and private communications shared by participants.
Our analysis combined inductive and deductive coding (Saldaña 2021), guided by our conceptual framework, epistemic oppression. The first author developed a codebook capturing epistemic and affective harms (e.g., knowledge invalidation, labor exploitation, emotional dissonance), refined in collaboration with the second author. After various rounds of inductive coding, we added deductive codes for agentic responses. The first author coded all data in Dedoose and developed draft themes by reviewing excerpts across data types. These themes were refined collaboratively with the second author. We allowed participants’ reflections on their past experiences and motivations to inform our understanding of the present. Centering relationality and trust, we shared findings with participants for feedback (Patel [2015] 2016).
Authors’ Positionality on Research and Method
We are scholars within the “first university,” striving toward the “third university,” aware of the contradictions we inhabit. We acknowledge the settler-colonial framing of research as something done on people by credentialed experts. While we value rigorous and situated knowledge, we most deeply value knowledge that honors humanity. As scholars of race and racial equity in education who hold different racialized and ethnic identities (White, Latinas), we write from within the very conditions of epistemic exclusion we study. Our positionalities shape how we interpret this moment and this research, as we too navigate the delegitimization of our knowledge, labor, and physical presence in academia. These positions are irreconcilable (Tuck 2010)—and we embrace that tension, enacting relational research oriented toward liberation (Patel [2015] 2016).
Findings
We present our findings through four interrelated themes. First, the law’s implementation at the university shuttered programs and erased language that legitimized equity work, invalidating both the intellectual foundations of “DEI” and the situated knowledge of marginalized communities—an example of first-order exclusion, where the withholding of credibility delegitimizes entire knowledge traditions. Our second theme outlines how the law’s prohibitions and exemptions enclosed knowledge and restricted access and circulation, reflecting second-order exclusion by limiting who can engage with and share knowledge. Third, we demonstrate how these changes impose heavy care and cognitive burdens on participants, undermining the quality of knowledge work through inefficiencies (first-order exclusion), reinforcing conditions that marginalize their knowledge contributions, and exacerbating systemic knowledge deficiencies (second-order exclusion). Fourth and finally, we illustrate how these consequences led faculty and staff to wrestle with the dissonance of navigating the relational distrust and a painful sense of complicity. Their dissonance reveals an epistemic double-bind where faculty members and staff struggle to find agentic responses that do not further their epistemic oppression, revealing the structural conditions that constrain the very possibility of knowledge, a form of third-order exclusion. Some participants enacted modest refusals and adaptive approaches that signal movement toward liberatory knowledge practices.
Shuttering of Programs and Policies Invalidates Intellectual and Situated Knowledge
The shuttering of “DEI” programs and policies ultimately invalidates, within the institution, the intellectual knowledge that underpinned their creation, as well as the situated knowledge of minoritized community members whose lived experiences shaped their foundations. Through this anti-“DEI” law, the state is denying the credibility of both scholars of race and people whose lives are shaped by racialization—a first-order exclusion just like the Black woman in Dotson’s story.
Program Closures Delink and Devalue Intellectual Knowledge
When “DEI” offices are closed and “DEI” roles are eliminated, campus community members receive the message that the knowledge underpinning these efforts—and the lived experiences of those they were designed to support—are no longer legitimate or valid. Faculty members experienced this delegitimization of their scholarship when they were compelled to halt “DEI”-related work, as Mayur, a tenured professor, shared, and “purge any record of having done it to the best of our ability from our websites and public-facing discourse.” Danai, a faculty member, explained that her department had to scrub its website of terms like “intersectionality” and “post-colonialism,” which are grounded in robust knowledge bases. These actions, sealed by signed affidavits that participants described as a “loyalty oath,” illustrate how the erasure of non-academic programs (e.g., “DEI” offices) functions as a devaluation of the scholarship itself, an “attack on the intellectual concepts,” as expressed by a civil rights lawyer at an American Association of University Professors (AAUP) event we attended.
Delinking this knowledge from institutional practice obscures the historical and structural roots of inequity, even as those inequities persist. After affinity-based support services were replaced with universal ones, Aria, an administrator, expressed concerns that “very real racial discrimination, aggression, inequality, alienation” experienced by students of color are being reframed as “issues of wellbeing that are totally individualized.” As Riley notes, this erasure is occurring in a state that “doesn’t acknowledge that inequities exist,” as reflected in a letter written by SB 17’s primary author labeling “DEI” as “discriminatory,” negating the inequities that prompted the policies. This institutional delinking of knowledge from policy seeks to deny marginalized people the power to share and act on knowledge that challenges dominant ideas about history and society, creating first- and second-order exclusions that harm individuals and eclipse their ability to know or be known by the social world.
The consequences of program closures extended beyond institutional structures to individual academic trajectories, pressuring scholars to obscure or reframe their work (e.g., projects pursued, knowledge shared). One faculty member, Ansara, was advised to edit their annual review materials and faculty digital profile to downplay equity-related work, signaling a shift in what is deemed legitimate academic labor. Feeling “silenced,” “disrespected,” and “discounted,” Ansara described the shift’s emotional toll as years of rigorous intellectual inquiry recategorized as “propaganda.” Similarly, Nadia recounted the irony of receiving a prestigious national diversity fellowship while fearing the professional consequences of publicizing it. For administrators like Abramma, whose dissertation focused on critical race theory and students’ racialized experiences, the devaluation was existential, prompting her to erase her scholarly identity online to maintain job prospects. By reframing work and deleting precise words that illuminate social inequity, participants are forced to reproduce the conditions their scholarship aims to undo, reinscribing a first-order exclusion.
Institutional Invalidation of Situated Knowledge
The closure of equity-focused centers and programs created a profound loss of validation and belonging for participants and students—a first-order epistemic oppression signaling their knowledge and identities lacked state and institutional credibility. Esila, an administrator, experienced the elimination of her job—like the Black woman in Dotson’s story—as a rejection of her worldview, “I’m a first-generation college graduate, a child of immigrants. I thought, ‘So, you basically have dissolved the division where I feel my own identity is.’” As Efren noted, “The fact that [centers] closed sent the message, ‘You’re not wanted.’” Milla, an administrator who worked in a shuttered equity-oriented STEM lab explained: “The reason I went into this work was a direct result of my experiences as a woman in [STEM].” She worried about how the loss of terminology and spaces that “validated” students’ experiences would harm their ability to learn.
Zacarias’s program for minoritized students in business “celebrated their identity,” creating a learning environment in which they felt “safe.” With its elimination, students were forced to “put on a mask . . . and be someone else to make it in the system.” Administrators like Vincent worried about students “left to fend for themselves” without the “identity-based groups [where they can] . . . talk about an experience,” and faculty member Nekoda noted that “students . . . still want to have the conversations . . . and they don’t know where to turn.” Minoritized students, particularly those in STEM fields where they are already underrepresented, began “wondering if this is the right environment for them,” Soraya shared, illustrating how first-order knowledge exclusions can lead individuals to question their legitimate place within the system.
Importantly, the law disproportionately affects those whose lived experiences and professional commitments are rooted in equity work. The bill’s author, in a press release and public hearing, repeatedly stated that “merit” means “equity” and that conditions post-SB 17 would ensure that all could “achieve personal excellence”—a statement that flies in the face of our participants’ experiences. Participants revealed how it unevenly harmed and devalued individuals whose identities and intellectual labor were intertwined with the dismantled initiatives. “I’ve been Black a long time,” Herman, a faculty member, said, “I know what microaggressions and micro-harassment look and feel like,” and the closure of programs rejected his situated knowledge. Akerke highlighted how the law made “people who do equity work more vulnerable,” even tenured faculty, by legitimizing coordinated attacks on their work. Their observations underscore how the devaluation of situated knowledge isolates those most affected and serves as a form of first-order knowledge exclusion.
Prohibitions and “Carveouts” Enclose Targeted Knowledge
The law broadly targets “trainings,” while outlining exceptions for teaching and research, which participants referred to as “carveouts.” These provisions effectively enclose specific types of knowledge, reinscribing second-order knowledge exclusion by cordoning off scholars’ work, restricting knowledge dissemination, and limiting engagement with broader communities. Moreover, despite the “carveouts,” faculty and staff reported institutional failures to protect permissible knowledge work, exacerbating already harmful restrictions on knowledge sharing.
Knowledge Severed From Community
While the law exempts “research” and “teaching,” the prohibition on “trainings” confines knowledge to narrow spaces (e.g., classrooms) and forecloses its extension to the larger community. As a legal advocate highlighted during a statewide faculty union convening in the fall of 2023: “Professors are in this awkward situation where [they] can teach about white privilege but can’t have trainings about white privilege.” Participants, for example, described how elements of their scholarly work were deemed prohibited “trainings.” Describing the implications for professional development opportunities in medicine, Mikari noted: “If the person keeping you alive does not believe your ethnicity and gender are part of your life experience and therefore part of the health condition that you are in now . . . what does that do to you?” Community-engaged partnerships were also severed. Mayur explained, “Since Jan. 1, we’ve been denied five [community] partnerships we’ve had for years,” including co-sponsoring “a workshop focused on Latino families” or “a film about the Latino experience.”
Other faculty reported concerns about their research partnerships with academic organizations outside the university. Florian’s coalition lost “more than half of their partners because [they feared] not being in compliance” if they continued their affiliation. Similarly, Decima faced school districts “too scared to work with me because of topics I teach.” These examples illustrate how the artificial distinctions between “teaching,” “research,” and “training,” reinscribe second-order knowledge exclusions, limiting the circulation of knowledge outside the university and maintaining weak knowledge resources in society, thereby reproducing racial inequities.
Constraints on Permissible Teaching and Research
Although the law’s exceptions technically protect teaching and research, faculty and administrators characterized institutional actions as “over-compliance” that amplified fear and constrained permissible work. Several participants, for example, referenced new university processes, such as “voluntary pre-submission grant evaluations” and syllabi reviews to ensure compliance with the law. We also received emails describing these processes, which sent mixed signals about whether research and teaching were actually protected. For example, after hearing “the university had begun to question what was on people’s syllabus [to] make sure there isn’t anything that violates DEI,” Mikari wondered: “You said it’s not gonna touch research and teaching, [then] why are you asking?” Yudaí noted, “The sense that I get . . . is caution, caution, use caution for everything. Run everything . . . by legal.” Research was similarly chilled, as Akerke described: “[Grant] funding for equity work is being impacted, which disincentivizes faculty to apply.” Preston observed:
As scholars, we can read the law and understand it, interpret it and see, this is not out of law . . . but legal would come back and recommend not doing [something] more [based on] appearance than the actual law.
Similarly, vague and veiled communication instill fear. Heidi and her colleagues recounted a meeting with a high-ranking college administrator who sent “mixed” messaging “about what we could and couldn’t say” around topics like curriculum, research, and pedagogy. This created “mass fear,” prompting them to ask, “What does this mean for the work we do?” Moreover, frequent Freedom of Information Act requests buried equity-centered faculty and administrators without institutional support or protection. “It felt like every person for themselves,” Adele commented. “No one felt they could confidently reassure anyone, so no one wanted to give false hope or reassurance, but that also just felt unsettling.” This pervasive caution narrows the boundaries of what faculty feel safe to teach and research. In a public coalition meeting, one advocate who had worked with legislators to secure the exceptions admitted that if faculty foreclose permissible work out of fear, “all these carveouts will be in vain,” highlighting how institutional leadership inaction intensified knowledge suppression and reinscribed second-order epistemic oppression.
Invalidations and Enclosures Create Labor and Cognitive Burdens that Encumber the Production of Knowledge
The invalidation and enclosure of intellectual and situated knowledge create labor burdens and coerced labor commitments, diverting time and energy from the research and teaching faculty were hired to do and further constraining their epistemic agency. Faculty and staff also reported “demoralizing” labor conditions that imperil the quality of knowledge-based work.
Labor Burdens Displace Knowledge Work
Participants described how new labor burdens reduced time for core knowledge work. Instead of focusing on scholarship, participants reported spending “an enormous amount of time creating the conditions to ensure that work is immune from baseless attacks,” as Herman explained. Others expressed frustration at the opportunity costs. Milla, an administrator with a research appointment, explained: “Just thinking about how much better my time could have been spent serving students and doing research is infuriating.” The closure of centers compounded these challenges, forcing faculty, like Ansara, to “be as agile as we can to try to find other . . . sources of income for our students who were depending on [paid work with a center that has now closed].” In fact, email requests from student groups seeking “academic support and protection” after the institution removed its support illustrate the additional labor that shifted onto faculty.
Students, too, absorbed additional responsibilities to affirm identities and sustain community in the absence of institutional support, at the expense of learning time. At a public event hosted by the AAUP, presenters noted, “students have taken on a lot of the work without access to university resources.” Etan, a faculty member, commented: “Students have done a lot of the heavy lift.” Taking care of each other increased “pressure, anxiety, and stress on students when their energy should be directed towards getting an education,” said Esmee, an administrator. Riley concurred: “A lot of our underrepresented student populations carry [the] responsibility of caring for themselves and their peers when the university will not. They’re back to being the only ones in their corner.” While caring for one another is vital and even beautiful, it also displaces time that could have been spent on knowledge-based work.
“Demoralizing” Conditions Imperiled the Quality of Knowledge-Based Labor
Participants further described how fear and uncertainty create “demoralizing” labor conditions that undermined the quality of knowledge-based work. Participants reported feeling as though their work had become “criminal,” with constant anxiety about surveillance and compliance stifling their ability to do knowledge work. For instance, Alvis, an administrator with a faculty position, cited his desire to avoid becoming “the target of a pressure campaign.” “I’m old enough,” he said, “to know people who had that experience in a different era and it wasn’t great then; it seems more intense and dangerous now.” Preston agreed, explaining that faculty members “don’t feel secure in their work.” He has constantly heard colleagues ask, “‘Can I do this? Am I going to get in trouble for this?’” Faculty precarity also disrupted long-term planning around knowledge projects. For instance, George, a faculty member, noted: “It is not good to be working under such uncertainty. We need to have a horizon to organize our research, our studies.”
Many faculty participants described self-censoring to avoid risk. Instructors like Maci worried about being reported: “Yes, stuff in the classroom is protected, but . . . watch your back. You don’t know who’s in the room.” Ansara noted: “I am very careful about exactly what I say. I always assume that I’m being recorded or reported.” Kenrick admitted to censoring himself, fearing a student might label his large lecture course “woke indoctrination” and expose him online, noting, “It’s happening to colleagues in real time.” Non-tenured instructors like Nadia felt especially vulnerable: “I will continue to teach all of those courses . . . but I [don’t] feel safe.” Others, like Danai, described the law as “a silencing” that lingers “in the back of your head.” For some, the cumulative effect was profound, with Mayur noting: “Faculty are perhaps more demoralized than any faculty I’ve ever been a part of in now 15 years as a professor,” a sentiment we heard frequently at union meetings and on coalition calls. Describing their unstable work environment, a colleague of Mikari’s commented: “Aren’t we all ‘just interim’? That phrase just blew my mind.” Mikari reflected, “that’s the way we now live in our jobs.” The precarity and suppressive environment hindered the quality and quantity of their knowledge work, reinscribing existing knowledge deficits around systemic oppression, and representing a second-order epistemic exclusion.
The (Im)Possibility of Agency in the Double-bind
Participants shared how navigating the invalidation and enclosure of knowledge, while laboring under constrained and exploitative conditions, produced deep dissonance. As university leadership succumbed to political pressure, participants described growing relational distrust and a sense of complicity prompting them to question the institution’s values—and their place within it—revealing an epistemic double-bind. Staying in their roles meant being restricted from doing work that validated how they understood the world, while being coerced into reproducing epistemic oppression. But if they left, they lost the legitimacy their positions afforded them and relinquished power with respect to their knowledge, while also imperiling important relationships with students and mentees during an especially precarious time. Yet some of those who stayed, at least for now, saw possibility in the double-bind, sharing acts of resistance and refusal that underscore the enduring power of knowledge and the endless possibilities for engaging it.
Dissonance in the Double-Bind
In the wake of anti-“DEI” legislation, faculty and staff described deep distrust and dissonance as they watched the institution construct compliance with the law. For Sasha, who was laid off during mass firings, this meant “a remnant feeling of hurt, grief . . . It just feels strange . . . to still be walking across campus with this feeling.” Others, like Edgar, spoke of diminished loyalty, feeling less “invested in the university or its mission.” To many participants, the university’s identity—and their relationship to it—had fundamentally changed. Etan explained that there used to be “a spirit [at the university], a certain aura here,” that he could no longer access as a Black man. “It’s sort of crappy to be here some days,” he lamented. Participants like Decima observed a profound change: “My sense of [the university] being a beacon of free thought . . . was fundamentally shifted to [it being] another arm of [state leadership].” Danai named the alignment explicitly: “The political project of [the university] is to comply with this very right-wing racist push . . . The university is the state.” These realizations left many wondering about their place. Abramma asks herself every day: “Am I okay working here knowing that my values . . . are at odds with those of the institutional and state leadership?” Nekoda echoed, “Are we selling out by still being here?” Ivo worried about “whether or not I’m even a safe person [for minoritized students] given my affiliation with the university.”
Others described a sense of complicity, revealing their understanding of being in the double-bind; they recognized that contributing their labor in this oppressive space (re)produces inequity. As Mikari put it, “I am an agent of the university.” He resigned himself: “Now I go to work . . . I care about each student . . . but there isn’t anything strategically transformative . . . We’re about the status quo.” Kenrick commented that withdrawing from equity work violated his “nature,” but he did so for “self-protection,” sacrificing who he is and what he knows for safety. And Ansara said: “I am, from moment to moment, quite ashamed to be involved with an organization that is complying as much with these constraints.” Participants’ experiences navigating their role as “agents” of an actively oppressive university revealed an epistemic double-bind: they could either reproduce inequity through their labor (i.e., do the work of the state) or risk losing professional credibility and the limited space to validate non-dominant knowledge. Yara encapsulates this tension in the double-bind as she described questioning “why I stay,” reflecting:
I know I’m a fighter. I don’t shy away from a challenge. [But the experience of a colleague who left the university] shows me . . . that, at some point, [walking] away, maybe that’s the strong response.
Dissonance Drives Learning and Differently Doing (for Some)
In limited cases, participants resisted exploitative conditions through small but meaningful refusals, like rejecting leadership roles or symbolic affiliations. Etan, for instance, declined extractive commitments: “I’ve been asked [to move into leadership]: ‘Absolutely not.’” He also explained: “I know a ton of people who won’t wear [the university’s] gear . . . Even diehard . . . folks . . . their ethos has changed.” At an equity-focused conference, we learned that staff members, whose expenses to attend such conferences were no longer covered, took personal days and used their own funds to still participate. Faculty, like Conrad, used their position to sustain students and communities: “I can use the covering that I have as a professor . . . to crack open a way for a student to do their work that will be beneficial for their community,” including redirecting grant resources, noting: “I ain’t bringing no more money back through here . . . The only reason I might do it is to support students.” For others, like Yara, resistance meant re-centering research: “I chose to face this through my research and be empowered in that way”; or Heidi, for whom it meant prioritizing art in her research and her classrooms with in-serve teachers, “creating space for creation [because] you should have access to these tools when you’re learning.” Andre appreciated the clarity the state’s violence brought him. “I feel at peace,” he said, “I think the state telling me who they are in these very deliberate ways is refreshing.” It provided time to “tinker and toil,” slow down academic work, “stow away in the archives,” and just engage with and create knowledge. These acts, while modest, signaled both refusal of oppressive conditions and pursuit of alternative ways of teaching and knowing.
Some faculty and staff expressed a renewed commitment to equity and liberation, even if they were unsure exactly how to pursue it. They refused to have their knowledge invalidated, standing firm and laboring to affirm it. Andre, for instance, noted:
People committed to this work need to pivot. . . . Social justice has never been an open invitation. It’s always done within agitation. If the work requires you to be a little bit quiet and a little more stealth, then engage that.
For some, like Adele, staying at the institution, “even though it sucks and it’s scary . . . feels very purposeful.” Similarly, Akerke framed Texas as a critical site of struggle: “If you really care about this work . . . [Texas] is one good place. It’s hard . . . but we’re at the front lines.” Nikolai, a faculty member with experience in labor struggle, applauded the efforts of the AAUP in Texas, noting that critical next steps involved all faculty “figure[ing] out collectively, amongst themselves, how to build coalition” to protect knowledge work. Faculty also sought ways to extend their knowledge work beyond the university. For instance, some faculty participated in an equity-oriented educational event hosted off campus by a coalition of diverse stakeholders, bringing together a multigenerational community.
Interviewees like Nekoda, Kenrick, and Heidi, partnered with community organizations or alumni networks and continued liberatory projects. “We’re going to do it because we know it’s right”, Kenrick noted. Faculty members like Conrad described the university as “synonymous with slavery . . . with colonization . . . with extraction” and thus shifted his efforts from “tearing down” campus oppression to cultivating community with outside partners. As he noted: “a large degree of our work that we have to do to build things up has to be outside of this institution.” These strategies reflect both persistence and adaptation in the face of structural constraint.
Discussion and Conclusion
In this study, we examined how anti-“DEI” laws constrain knowing, learning, teaching, and being in higher education for former “DEI” administrators and faculty members whose scholarship challenges the conditions of racist oppression these laws seek to maintain. We contribute to the sociology of race and ethnicity by illuminating how state legislation restructures epistemic systems to reinforce racial hierarchies, delegitimize knowledge on a racialized basis, and constrain racial justice work in higher education. We conceptualize anti-“DEI” legislation as a specific form of state-based epistemic oppression effectuated through the higher education system. Our findings reveal that by criminalizing “DEI,” institutions reinscribe first-order knowledge exclusions by invalidating the intellectual and situated knowledge of university members. At the same time, these laws impose second-order exclusions by enclosing and restricting the circulation of knowledge, limiting with whom and where it can be shared, and encumbering its very production. Working under such conditions structurally constrains the very possibility of knowledge—a third-order exclusion—as revealed through the feelings of dissonance that, while devastating, hold liberatory potential.
Foundationally, the dismantling of “DEI” initiatives and the elimination of “DEI”-related roles represent more than administrative restructuring—they are racialized acts of knowledge erasure, as our data illustrate. “DEI” programming operationalizes some insights from scholarship exposing how social structures organized around race, gender, sexuality, and other social categories produce unequal outcomes; outlawing these efforts structurally invalidates the knowledge underpinning them. When those in power render certain knowledge unknowable or unworthy of recognition, they simultaneously obscure the identities and knowledge of those who hold it and infringe on their ability to shape knowledge in the world. In contrast, individuals whose situated or intellectual knowledge aligns with dominant ways of knowing are affirmed in their experiences, able to live, learn, and labor in institutions that reflect and reinforce their worldview. And yet, due to the erasure of opportunity to learn about how the world works for minoritized neighbors, everyone suffers epistemic oppression because when knowledge is denied, everyone is harmed. The pain is more immediate and rawer for those who do equity work, but no one is safe from harm in a society structured by selective censorship. We are all harmed by first-order epistemic exclusion because this oppression renders certain experiences—and people—unknowable.
While anti-“DEI” laws, like SB 17, technically allow faculty to continue researching and teaching, prohibitions on “trainings” and “programming” confine faculty’s ability to conduct this work within narrow academic channels. This narrowing represents second-order epistemic exclusion, as it limits faculty members’ ability to extend scholarly knowledge, via trainings and partnerships, to communities and organizations that could use it to improve policy, services, and everyday life—especially for minoritized communities long denied access to public goods. These confinements reflect a larger effort to control what kinds of knowledge can be known, as faculty working on racial justice or systemic inequity face heightened scrutiny from state officials, campus leaders, and a vocal public. This surveillance discourages specific kinds of inquiry and narrows the scope of intellectual pursuits—a process barreling ahead as public universities across the state launch curriculum-wide audits and shutter or consolidate entire departments dedicated to non-dominant knowledge (Ahmed et al. 2026; Connelly 2026). As a result, scholars must weigh their ethical and educational responsibilities against the risks of pursuing suppressed knowledge, all while contending with the dissonance between their lived understanding of structural racism and state violence, and the institutions that deny these realities and knowledge. This tension reveals a state-imposed epistemic double-bind: faculty must decide whether to remain under tight institutional constraints or leave to preserve their intellectual integrity, even though it means losing access to a key site of knowledge production and influence.
The dissonance participants experience is emotional, professional, and deeply rooted in their being, reshaping how they see themselves and understand the world. Importantly, their knowledge is not changed or lost by the state’s actions; it is and can be expanded. For some participants, we witness a shift in consciousness, an awakening to the limits of oppressive institutions to support liberatory work and an ability to discern how the “first university’s” (paperson 2017) system of knowledge production, particularly in the aftermath of anti-“DEI” legislation, creates “bad magic,” compelling universities to reproduce a censored and narrowed approach to thinking (Berenstain et al. 2022). The “magic” is bad because anti-“DEI” legislation demands the complete erasure of knowledge that challenges prevailing ways of knowing, enacting violence against those whose perspectives and knowledge are outside the mainstream areas of influence and power. Seeing bad magic opens a generative space for reimagining their scholarly and political commitment. Thus, the double-bind, marked by tension and contradiction, becomes a site of possibility—a movement toward the “third university,” where decolonial and liberatory knowledge can be cultivated outside dominant institutional logics (paperson 2017).
We are inspired by those in the double-bind who refuse censorship and erasure and seek new ways of knowing, relating, and learning grounded in epistemic reflexivity and justice. Even with institutional constraints, some participants align themselves with the undercommons (Harney and Moten 2013), a space, both physical and metaphorical, where they can enact new modes of study divested from academia’s racial capitalism and committed to minoritized students, solidaristic communities, and expansive knowledge (Meyerhoff 2019). Their classrooms center creativity, resonating with Dotson’s (2024) framing of philosophy as art, as a way of crafting old knowledge in new registers to facilitate understanding. They join education study groups (Gilmore and Kelley 2022) and collectively organize in refusal of knowledge enclosures (Jayakumar and Vue 2025), prioritizing knowledge and knowing in defiance of an oppressive epistemic landscape. They engage in a reflexive, self-aware form of study as collective action, marked by refusal to abandon knowledge and knowers, alongside refusal to accept oppressive university conditions (Patel 2021). “DEI” programs and policies provided momentary, limited affirmation rather than true epistemic justice and possibility; as they disappear under state law, our findings inspire us to create something better.
Study as collective action, however, requires organizational forms to take shape (Gilmore and Kelley 2022). There is a growing wave of organizations reaching for liberatory consciousness. For example, Higher Education Labor United (HELU) has established a “wall to wall, coast to coast” industrial union structure modeled after collective action at Rutgers (Gavigan 2025). Recently, the AAUP explicitly acknowledged how state and institutional violence—such as the genocide in Palestine—enacts scholasticide and epistemic erasure (Quinn 2024). As such, AAUP has begun to align its leadership and mission toward unequivocally defending knowledge production in the context of political and social oppression (Kamola 2024; Scott 2025), publicly showing—and modeling—solidarity.
These shifts and developments, alongside our findings, suggest that more people are recognizing the limits of the first university, grounded in neoliberal ideology and the rejection of differently lived experiences, and of the second university, whose place of critique falls short of transformative change. Together, this work demonstrates that we do not have to accept the constraints of our higher education system or the epistemically oppressive knowledge systems it upholds. And even without a clear path forward, we can still pursue alternative ways of living, being, and knowing that affirm all of us. The struggle we must take up, then, is not to preserve higher education as it exists, but to pursue expansive knowledge, purposeful validation, and collective liberation.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (G-2023-21077) and the Trellis Foundation (15301). The findings of this study represent the perspectives of the authors alone.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.