Straws in the Wind - Part 93

From the Washington Post: Facing mounting pressure from the Trump administration, a lawyer for George Mason University President Gregory Washington told the board on Monday the leader had done nothing unlawful and would not apologize for his diversity, equity and inclusion policies, despite a call from the Education Department to do so. The federal agency’s Office of Civil Rights made a personal apology from Washington to the campus community part of a series of proposed steps to resolve a recent finding that the Virginia university had violated civil rights law by considering race in hiring and promotions. Washington has said the university’s policies complied with the law and were meant to expand opportunities.

Douglas Gansler, Washington’s lawyer, called the singling out of GMU from the Education Department bordering on the “absurd,” saying in his letter to the George Mason Board of Visitors that the department’s investigative process had been “cut short” after a “very incomplete fact-finding process,”

“The draft Resolution Agreement, in particular its demand that Dr. Washington apologize to the Mason community for promoting unlawful discriminatory hiring practices, would be falsely admitting to conduct that did not occur and would open GMU to further legal risk,” Gansler, a former Maryland attorney general, wrote in a letter obtained by The Washington Post...

Full story at https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/08/25/george-mason-president-refuses-apology-dei/.

From Inside Higher Ed: ...Faculty at Ohio State University can no longer make land acknowledgments—verbal or written statements that recognize the Indigenous people who originally lived on the university’s land—unless it is directly relevant to class subject matter. The new policy from the university’s Office of University Compliance and Integrity is one of many created in response to Ohio’s SB 1, a sweeping higher education law passed in March that seeks to eliminate DEI offices and scrub all mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion from university scholarships, job descriptions and more. The university has also limited student housing decorations in public spaces to “Ohio State spirit themes” and prohibited schools and departments from commenting on a wide array of topics, including the original inhabitants of the land on which the university is built.

Land acknowledgments are “considered statements on behalf of an issue or cause” and cannot be made by someone representing a unit, college or department, according to the new policy. Such statements cannot be used at virtual or in-person university-sponsored events, or written on any university channel, website, social media, signage, meeting agenda or event program. The acknowledgments are also banned from syllabi and class materials and cannot be spoken aloud in the classroom unless they are directly tied to the course, such as in a class about the history of American Indigenous peoples...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2025/09/03/ohio-state-bans-land-acknowledgments.