The culture wars have a new target: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, policies, and positions. These initiatives, which rose in popularity after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, typically support people who are underrepresented in universities based on their race, ethnicity, gender identity and/or expression, abilities, and economic background.
Since 2023, 86 anti-DEI bills in 28 states have been introduced and 14 have become law.
These bills, which reflect model legislation drafted by the Goldwater Institute and Manhattan Institute, both conservative think tanks, typically prohibit DEI offices, diversity statements, the sponsorship of DEI programs, and race-based hiring. Efforts by states to ban teaching critical race theory in K-12 schools, the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against affirmative action in college admissions, and these anti-DEI bills together represent an assault on structural improvements to racial equity in the United States.
For the architecture profession, these new laws are arriving just as the field is finally welcoming more women and people of color. Put simply, “people don’t like upsetting the status quo,” said Germane Barnes, an architect and the director of the Master’s in Architecture program at the University of Miami, a private college in Florida.
AN spoke with architects and architectural educators to get a sense of how anti-DEI legislation, and the broader cultural sentiment about DEI, is affecting their work.
Uneven Impact
Texas and Florida, the second and third most populous states in the country and home to top architecture schools, have both passed anti-DEI legislation. But the effects of these measures are uneven and depend on the culture of the university and its administration. The overall impact for architecture educators is similar to the sentiments among educators as a whole. There’s a chilling effect taking place and a culture of anxiety and fear taking hold. While the laws might eliminate DEI offices, the message is clear: Don’t talk about race—or else.
“It feels like the intention is to retain power among those who have held it for a long time and to take away resources that may shift some of that power toward something that reflects more of what society is today,” said Dennis Antonio Chiessa, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Texas, Arlington. All DEI offices at his university have been dissolved.
At the University of Florida, a public college, architecture educators have seen a number of changes since Governor Ron DeSantis signed a suite of anti-DEI bills into law. Enrollment in the urban planning program, which typically welcomes many international students, dropped nearly 50 percent after a bill prohibited partnerships with anyone who lives in one of seven “foreign countries of concern.” In order to protect their academic freedom, professors have reclassified their courses to “seminars,” which denotes student participation and therefore restricts the ability for students to record classes as evidence of bias in a faculty member. One professor decided to retire one year sooner than planned to avoid the post-tenure review DeSantis instituted.
On the flip side, Marcelo López-Dinardi, an associate professor in the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University, told AN that his department hasn’t been affected by the new laws because there were no DEI programs in place to begin with. “There was no recognition of summer 2020,” he said. “So in that sense, nothing happened. For us, absolutely nothing changed, which is of course significantly embarrassing to say.”
Where there has been an impact is at the level of the university as a whole: Texas A&M conducted an audit to make sure it was in compliance with the law to not formally support DEI. In some cases, positions and programs associated with DEI were rebranded into “wellness.” But eventually, those programs vanished, too.
“The environment feels even less supportive,” López-Dinardi said. He’s more cautious about his language but has “some peace of mind” in the fact that his curriculum and research doesn’t need to change.
Dollars and Cents
While the chilling effect of anti-DEI legislation is hard to quantify, one area that is more straightforward to measure is money. Scholarships, particularly those that are intended for historically underrepresented groups, have been impacted.
A University of Florida alumni group had planned to create a scholarship to help improve diversity in the architecture program but decided to put it on hold for now and revisit it after the next gubernatorial election.
Pascale Sablan, the president of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), has heard similar stories about scholarships being canceled. In one case, she learned of an architecture firm that established a fund to encourage more women to get licensed was reported to the state’s attorney general for sexism. “The firm was given an ultimatum to either open it up to all candidates to apply for or cancel the scholarship outright, and their choice was to cancel,” Sablan said.
Chiessa is concerned about funding for affinity groups, which are key support systems for the students in the school of architecture, 50 percent of whom are Hispanic and Latino. His department funded a trip for members of the Latinos In Architecture student chapter to the Texas Society of Architects Conference in early October. “Many of our students can’t afford to do these things so we have to fundraise,” Chiessa said. “Where these policies have an impact directly on students is if the university cannot spend money or put resources to support DEI initiatives. If these affinity groups are seen as ‘DEI’ sorts of things, then it means that the university has to figure out how to navigate that.”
While private universities aren’t subject to the new laws, there is also a concern that their funding, some of which comes from the state, might be impacted. “There is a strong possibility that the more vocal our faculty are about issues related to the African American experience in this country, that the potential always exists for funding to be cut or pressure to be placed on our board of trustees, to our president, to our provost, to our department heads down to our faculty,” said Kwesi Daniels, head of the department of architecture at Tuskegee University in Alabama. The state that has passed two anti-DEI bills as of this writing. “The reality is that we live in a constant state of less funding.”
Speaking events that help fund architects’ research and passion projects are affected, too. “As a licensed Black architect who leads with her identity, I engage in a lot of public speaking, primarily at universities and colleges,” Sablan said. “A few contracts were canceled due to fears of legal issues and potential loss of state funding when I speak about diversity and address racial topics.”
Moving to Friendlier Waters
Many universities that have doubled down on their equity and inclusion efforts, or who have those qualities at the core of what they do, have seen a rise in enrollment. Germane Barnes said that his program has more Black students than ever due in part to the school’s leadership and commitment to equity. The University of Miami’s initiatives include programs like a spatial justice fellowship and a social justice prize. “These are all things that we put into the budget for at least the next five years,” Barnes said.
There are now 43 students in Tuskegee’s architecture program, up from an average of 30. Part of the reason for this is more aggressive recruitment but Daniels also speculates that the cultural climate has to do with it, too. “I can imagine there are a lot more parents who are saying, given the state of the country and the kind of conversations that have happened, that they want their child to get an HBCU education because they feel like it’s a safe environment.”
Chiessa worries that faculty who specialize in issues related to social justice might be discouraged from working in public universities, which educate significantly more students than private institutions—especially in states with high numbers of students of color. “Faculty will be discouraged from being honest about things that they’re researching or things that they’re teaching. But what is more likely to happen is that we’re going to continue to struggle to attract scholars to come to Texas,” he said.
An Ethic Deeper than Corporate DEI
As the assault on DEI programs continues, the limitations of how the phrase has been used in an institutional context are coming into focus.
Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski, co-directors of WAI Think Tank, teach at Iowa State University in a state that passed an anti-DEI law, and at Columbia GSAPP in New York, which is regarded as liberal and doesn’t have one on the books. They have found that the issues animated by anti-DEI legislation aren’t as simple as red vs. blue state; it’s about an understanding of white supremacy as a structure of power relationships that DEI can’t fully address.
“I’m more free in Iowa than in New York,” Garcia said, noting that Harvard, Columbia, and NYU ranked the lowest in a recent report about freedom of speech on campus. “Anti-DEI legislation and Palestinian censorship are related—they’re not the same but they are related at their core and in practice. There’s an assumption that conservative states that ban DEI are more restrictive, but we’re finding that’s not necessarily the case.”
In 2019, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ASCA) shifted from a DEI framework to one of equity and social justice since it recognizes the history of harm and disenfranchisement that DEI can miss. Since then, it has been “uncovering and articulating the significance for the design profession,” said Kendall Nicholson, senior director of research, equity, and education at ASCA.
This work is becoming more important in the face of rising sentiments against DEI. “A lot of the legislation has some incendiary language about race and gender but does give a caveat for content that is integral to a specific discipline or stipulated by accreditation,” Nicholson said. “And so bolstering the parts of an architecture education and curriculum that allow us to double down on this as central to any architect’s understanding of the world is where we spend our time.”
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At Florida A&M University (FAMU), a public historically black college, the anti-DEI laws haven’t affected day to day work like they have at the University of Florida due to the nature of the school. “Those mandates really don’t change the student’s experience, which is the core essence of our institution,” said Andrew Chin, dean of the school of architecture at FAMU. “The mandates attack things you can quantify and write down and offices that are created, but you can’t mandate people to not have empathy. You can’t mandate people not to care about young women, young students of color, BIPOC students, however you want to phrase it. And the caring that occurs at an HBCU will be here today and tomorrow. It’s why students are here.”
Equity and inclusion are part of the National Architecture Accrediting Board’s requirements, which means that architecture schools will have to incorporate these elements into their curriculums in order to meet their obligations. However, just how in-depth educators go might depend on the culture of the institution.
“The real travesty is not at the HBCUs, it’s at the predominantly white institutions,” said Daniels. “Because students of those institutions are going to be robbed of the opportunity to know the contributions of all Americans. They’re going to be robbed of the opportunity to engage in discourse.”
And this discourse is what’s required to advance architecture and keep the field relevant. “We know that architectural design with input from diverse perspectives yields better outcomes for clients and communities,” said AIA president Kimberly Dowdell. “It is therefore vital that we continue to attract and retain a diverse pool of talent, ensuring that all qualified individuals feel empowered to pursue a career in architecture and contribute to shaping our collective built environment.”
To see what this looks like in practice, Daniels offered an anecdote from his program, where a Tuskegee faculty member is exploring places of active conflict around the world, including Gaza, Somalia, and Haiti—areas where race is inextricable from the issues at hand. “They’re able to approach architecture from the standpoint of people that are dealing with oppression,” Daniels said. “How do you design for people in environments like that?”
Diana Budds is a design journalist based in Brooklyn, New York.