A since-deleted viral post on BlueSky from a PhD student at the University of Texas-Austin alleges that, as part of their compliance with the new anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion bill SB 17, the university will be flat out banning the usage of terms like “LGBTQ” and “anti-racist” on the university’s website.
The original claim comes from an email coming from someone at the university who claims to have received an email stating that the website will be surveilled as part of a compliance measure during their yearly audit. Dozens of terms are listed as being surveilled, including “gay,” “BIPOC,” “trans,” “marginalized,” “bias,” “ally,” “social justice,” and “decolonize.”
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“As part of the University’s ongoing compliance efforts regarding Senate Bill 17 (codified at TEC 51.3525), we are distributing our latest report showing the results of a scan for DEI-related terms that appear on utexas.edu domains. The scan, which covers all utexas.edu websites (roughly 400 unique utexas.edu domains), reports “hits” (positive search results) for various DEI-related terms and phrases that could be associated with content prohibited by SB 17. The attached report shows approximately 13,000 individual “hits,” i.e., instances where one or more targeted search terms appeared on a UT website,” says an alleged quote from the report.
The university is also removing terms like “race” and “equity” from course titles, according to Dallas News. However, in spite of written quotes to the contrary, the university denies that these changes are related to SB 17, the DEI ban in question.
It is currently unknown how much further the censorship will go.
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