An Extinction Event?

CSU's Ethnic Studies Mandate Meets Dear Colleague

Like all academic leaders I spent the last ten days reading the Trump Administration’s Department of Education Dear Colleague Letter, wondering what it might mean for the higher education sector and my own scholarship.

One prediction: we may see the end of state-mandated general education ethnic studies or diversity requirements, which currently exist in California, New York, Wisconsin, Oregon, Minnesota, and several other states.

A second prediction: quiet relief, though you won’t hear anyone in the California State University (CSU) system say this out loud. With AI partnerships announced earlier this month, CSU is undoubtedly preparing to replace most of its general education (GE) courses with AI in some form. The CFA thinks this is the extinction event.

I have been a vocal critic of the CSU Ethnic Studies mandate, AB 1460, since it was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020. It is an expensive, watered-down obligation for hundreds of thousands of students, exploitative of faculty, structurally antisemitic, and damaging to serious scholarship in growing fields such as Native American languages. The whole thing has been a discriminatory mess that needed to end long before the Trump Administration’s blunt instrument.

In education, scaling means petrifying

The entire CSU GE system is currently designed for delivery of stable, pre-packaged content rather than teaching students how to participate in the vital work of creating new growth in knowledge. All of the GE mandates are like 1970s biology textbooks: expensive and obsolete from the day they are published, given the rapid pace of genetics discoveries. It is later than everyone thinks.

The CSU does not incentivize faculty to be serious researchers within their disciplines. If you have a heavy GE load (which most faculty do), your job is not keeping current in your field but creating introductory courses that focus on student learning outcomes, graduation rates, and social mobility metrics, with emphasis on broad skills such as communication, problem-solving, and civic engagement. All good, but faculty who dedicate their careers to publishing in specialized journals and doing cutting-edge work may find that their work holds little weight in a budget crisis.

I have been watching at a distance while my former institution, Sonoma State, part of the CSU system, is imploding, with faculty layoffs and loss of whole departments, including philosophy, where there are (soon were!) top faculty such as John Sullins doing world class research. It was no longer possible for Sonoma State to deliver the growing GE burdens and actually educate its students. (The CSU was on my mind when I first made the argument that GE courses make less and less sense in the AI era.)

The idea to require an ethnic studies course came from former professor-turned-California politician, Shirley Weber, based on studies that claimed that students of color and white students benefit from taking ethnic studies courses. The goal was to build an “inclusive multicultural democracy.” The requirement was intended to “build character as students learn how people from their own or different backgrounds face challenges, overcome them and make contributions to American society.”

Weber should have remembered that research-focused professors don’t love teaching introductory classes full of students who may not want to be there. As a dean overseeing Ethnic Studies at the time, I watched as AB 1460 morphed from aspiration to a GE mandate, dreading the conversations I would need to have with promising young scholars we had recruited. “Your teaching load will increase from 3-3 [three classes each semester] to 4-4, all large GE courses with heavily regulated learning outcomes requirements, with no increase in salary.” “You’ll be lucky to teach an upper-level seminar in your field every other year.”

Research replaced by activism

I watched as the CA mandate veered sharply into theoretical and activist territory, with terms like “white supremacy” and “settler colonialism“ replacing research. There were requirements to “actively engage with anti-racist and anti-colonial issues,” as well as to “critically analyze the intersection of race and racism.” The mandate was expanded for high school students and became international in scope, including the teaching of Palestinian history without any training in Middle East studies. Partly in response, the expansion of the mandate to the UC system has been delayed.

The Trump administration is likely to see the CA mandate as discriminatory, giving preference to certain racial groups and teaching students “that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not.” Early on in the process, parents and students asked about the inclusion of other populations – Arab Americans, Armenians, Muslims, Sikh Americans, Jews. The answer was no.

So how exactly would the guidance, drawing on the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, challenge California’s ethnic studies mandate?

These are my non-lawyer thoughts. First, requiring California college students to complete a course focusing on four “historically defined racialized core groups” important to California’s history that explicitly excludes other ethnic groups (Sikh, Jewish Americans, Arab Americans, and Armenian Americans) as well as white Americans, may be seen as an impermissible race-based classification. The letter specifically condemns policies that “distribute benefits or burdens based on race” and warns against using racial balancing as a justification for course requirements. The approach of requiring students to study some ethnic groups and not others may be interpreted as a kind of racial balancing.

Second, AB 1460 keeps students from their diplomas until they complete specifically racial coursework requirements.

Third and more broadly, the February 14 directive poses a direct challenge to the entire premise of California’s current Ethnic Studies framework, which explicitly requires students to “analyze and articulate concepts such as race and racism, racialization, ethnicity, equity, ethno-centrism, eurocentrism, white supremacy, self-determination, liberation, decolonization, sovereignty, imperialism, settler colonialism, and anti-racism.”

And other states? The ethnic studies requirement for the University of Wisconsin (UW) system seems to present a similar level of legal risk. Since the late 1980s, the UW system has mandated that all undergraduates complete a 3-credit ethnic studies course that must focus on historically underrepresented U.S. racial/ethnic groups. (This requirement was established as part of UW’s “Design for Diversity” initiative.) Because course content is explicitly tied to racial minority groups, it could be interpreted as an impermissible racial classification under the Department of Education’s new guidance, which condemns educational policies that center race as a criterion for coursework, even if not explicitly tied to admissions. If federal scrutiny increases, Wisconsin could face the same federal funding threats as California, especially because its requirement has been in place for decades, making it a target.

Minnesota also carries legal risk, though slightly less than California or Wisconsin. The Minnesota Transfer Curriculum (MnTC) requires all public college students to complete coursework in “Human Diversity, Power, and Justice in the United States.” While this category is broader than California’s or Wisconsin’s ethnic studies mandates—because it includes discussions of class, gender, and broader social inequalities—it still prioritizes racial and ethnic diversity as a primary focus. If courts determine that Minnesota’s learning outcomes for diversity courses implicitly favor certain racial narratives over others, the requirement could be deemed race-based decision-making, putting the state at risk.

I suspect Utah is not as immediately at risk as California or Wisconsin, but it could face legal scrutiny depending on how its general education diversity requirements are framed and enforced. Utah’s public higher education system requires students to complete a diversity-focused course, but the requirement is broader and less explicitly race-based than those in California or Wisconsin. The University of Utah requires students to complete at least one course in “Diversity (DV),”which includes courses on race and ethnicity but also gender, disability, and other forms of social difference. In other words, unlike California’s mandate, Utah does not explicitly require students to study particular racial groups, which may help it avoid the prohibitions of the scrutiny February 14 memo.

Florida has taken a preemptive stance. Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation in 2023 that prohibited state colleges and universities from requiring diversity courses or DEI programming, effectively nullifying any broad-based diversity mandate.

Ultimately, all states with ethnic studies or diversity course mandates will likely face pressure to reconsider, revise, or eliminate these requirements. The February 14 memo says even neutral-sounding policies could be deemed unlawful if they are motivated by racial considerations.

AI replaces GE but not serious scholarship

To return to the issue of where AI fits in. The irony of the Dear Colleague letter arriving just after the CSU-AI announcement isn’t lost on those of us who have spent our careers publishing new histories about overlooked lives, documenting oral traditions, and analyzing newly excavated primary sources. I’ve been writing about specialized knowledge and how every faculty member needs to make the case for knowing more than AI knows. I know what AI doesn’t know in my field.

I know well that my field is under real political pressure. I have had concerns about broad state bills that might prevent the teaching of some of my own scholarship, including my 2017 anthology Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers, co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Some of these amazing women write about “divisive concepts” that some state lawmakers want to prohibit. Several of the poets I’ve written about have published poems that are brilliant and yes, divisive. It is very important to me that scholarship on race and racism in America be free from legislative overreach.

So for me, serious academic work is the best defense against politics and the only real path forward in the AI era. This is why I was opposed to AB 1460 and why I am raising the broader question of how long state systems should force hundreds of thousands of students to pay for general education that could soon be delivered by AI.