Arizona’s Honor Colleges Mandate DEI For Students
By Staff Reporter |
The honor colleges at all three of the state’s universities are mandating courses educating students on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).
The Goldwater Institute detailed two of the three colleges in a newly released investigatory report, “Desert Brain Drain.”
The three honors colleges in Arizona are Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University (ASU), which has about 7,500 students enrolled; the Honors College at Northern Arizona University (NAU), which has about 1,500 students enrolled; and the W.A. Franke Honors College at University of Arizona (U of A), which has about 4,500 students enrolled.
The Goldwater Institute found through public records that one of ASU Barrett Honors College’s required courses, The Human Event, hid a majority (85 percent) of its syllabi from the online catalog. ASU waited nearly a year to respond to Goldwater’s records requests on the hidden spring 2025 syllabi, and in its response, it redacted the names of the professors associated with the courses with the hidden syllabi.
Those records did reveal that 70 percent of the hidden syllabi from the spring 2025 catalog contained DEI content focusing on the alleged systemic oppression of certain identities related to race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Among the topics advanced by these hidden syllabi were the critical race theory concept of anti-racism, land acknowledgements, explorations of sexuality, decolonization, secularization, globalization, and transgenderism — with some content being graphic.
The W.A. Franke Honors College at U of A requires students to choose among the courses offered within its Honors Seminar, many which focus on DEI subjects similar to those presented by ASU Barrett Honors College required courses. Several courses focused on deconstruction of personal identity within the context of social justice, breaking down the idea of the self through the recognition of personal identities — race, gender, religion, class, and “social violence” — and recontextualizing the fractured and rebuilt self on political activism.
Although NAU Honors College was not included within the Goldwater Institute’s report, their primary required course (HON 190: Honors Colloquium) contained similar explorations of identity-based systemic oppression.
The spring 2026 semester came with two class options for the mandatory course, taught by professors Perry Davidson and Dina Yordy.
Davidson’s class requires students to read three novels challenging religion and embracing secularism: the classic work, “The Great Gatsby,” “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” in which a lesbian leaves the Pentecostal community she grew up in, and “So Far From God,” in which characters serve to display criticisms of Catholicism and patriarchal structures while exploring decolonization and political activism.
Yordy’s class requires students to read three works as well: “The Piano Lesson,” a play about a Black family’s history with slavery and systemic racism, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” a novel about the persecution of a family by the intolerant religious townspeople, and “Home,” a novel advocating for the social justice understanding of homes through discussions of homelessness and immigration.
Timothy Minella, Goldwater Institute’s Director of Higher Education, argued in a press release that DEI shouldn’t be a requirement for Honors degrees at public universities.
“This isn’t just an Arizona problem,” he said. “Taxpayers and lawmakers across the country should pay attention to what’s happening in their universities and not sit idly by while activist professors indoctrinate our next generation of leaders on the public dime.”
Although the Arizona legislature has not been successful in its attempts to ban DEI in higher education, President Donald Trump did issue a series of executive orders last spring to cut off federal funding for entities advancing DEI. Those orders have been challenged and even struck down in court.
In an effort to circumvent these judicial challenges, the General Services Administration recently announced a proposed rule change blocking federal funding for schools implementing DEI.
Goldwater’s full report can be found here.
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