What’s the Matter with the Kansas Curriculum?

How a budget bill reveals the Gramscian logic of the anti-DEI movement

A Republican state legislator in Kansas recently described the anti-DEI provisions he was pushing through a budget committee as “my least favorite subject” and “a massive distraction.” Then he voted for them anyway.

It’s a perfect snapshot of how ideological projects actually get pushed through institutions. Rep. Adam Turk, chair of the House Higher Education Budget Committee, called it a distraction while making sure it became law. Not with conviction, but with procedure.

Kansas House Bill 2434 is a nearly 400-page appropriations bill for fiscal years 2026–2028. Buried in its language are provisions that would withhold $2 million from each of the state’s six public universities unless they certify their required courses are free of “DEI-CRT-related” content (Carpenter, 2026; Quinn, 2026). The bill also caps the time tenured faculty have to complete improvement plans at one year before dismissal, freezes tuition revenue, mandates 10 percent cuts to university leadership offices, and slashes need-based student aid by $2.3 million.

This didn’t come through a standalone education bill, and it never got the hearings a freestanding policy proposal would require. It showed up as a committee amendment to a must-pass budget. When a Democratic legislator asked why curricular mandates were appearing in an appropriations document, Turk paused and said, “Debatable, I’m not sure.”

It’s exactly the kind of move Antonio Gramsci described.

Common Sense Is Manufactured

Gramsci (1971) distinguished between the “war of maneuver”—the direct, frontal confrontation—and the “war of position,” which is the slow, grinding work of planting your assumptions into the institutions people move through every day until those assumptions just feel normal. You don’t have to win the argument. You just have to make your position the default, so ordinary that nobody thinks to question it.

This is what the anti-DEI movement has accomplished in less than four years. The idea that public universities are engines of ideological indoctrination has moved from talk-radio provocations to model legislation circulating in more than 30 statehouses. And the paper trail is right there. In 2021, the Manhattan Institute published its “Woke Schooling” toolkit, a 26-page brief that coaches parents to surveil teachers and demand the removal of “objectionable” curricula. That same year, James Copeland of the Manhattan Institute issued a step-by-step primer for state lawmakers on drafting anti-CRT legislation (Farahmandpur & Wimmer, 2025). By 2023, the Goldwater Institute’s “Freedom from Indoctrination Act,” co-authored with Speech First, had refined those efforts into a turnkey template. Kansas HB 2428, the standalone bill whose language was folded into HB 2434, copies it almost verbatim.

None of this is new. As Farahmandpur and Wimmer (2025) document, conservative think tanks and political operatives have been wrapping economic agendas in cultural grievance for decades, from the canon wars of the 1980s through the manufactured “critical race theory” panic of the 2020s. What’s different now is the delivery mechanism. The Goldwater model defines “DEI-CRT-related content” as anything that connects contemporary American society to concepts like systemic racism, implicit bias, intersectionality, gender identity, social justice, cultural competence, allyship, and race-based privilege. That list isn’t an accident. It’s a catalog of the vocabulary that several academic disciplines use to map the complex mechanics of systemic power. Banning it from required coursework doesn’t eliminate an ideology. It strips out the analytical toolkit.

But here’s the trick: it doesn’t look like censorship. It looks like budget discipline. Spending restraint. Common sense.

The Budget as Institutional Machinery

Gramsci (1971) argued that hegemony operates through the institutions of civil society, including schools, churches, the media, and professional organizations, rather than through direct state coercion. The state just ratifies and enforces what already feels normal. A budget bill is the perfect vehicle for this. Nobody reads a 400-page appropriations document. Nobody marches against a line item. The policy shows up already wrapped in the most powerful argument there is: money.

Kansas Republicans have been doing this deliberately. In 2024, Governor Kelly allowed HB 2105 to become law without her signature. That bill eliminated DEI offices and staff positions but explicitly left classrooms alone. The Board of Regents president testified in December 2025 that the prior legislation did not touch on course content. That was the line. HB 2434 crosses it, but does so within a budget, so the crossing appears as an accounting entry rather than a constitutional question.

PEN America’s Amy Reid captured the strategy: the bill uses “the carrot of funding to mask the stick of censorship.” When asked how universities are supposed to prove they don’t have DEI-CRT-related curricula, Turk replied, “A lot of it comes down to ‘I promise.’”

Read that again. The way you enforce ideological compliance with undefined terms? A verbal pledge to state authorities. During the 2024 debate over the earlier anti-DEI bill, Rep. Bob Lewis, the Garden City Republican who has championed anti-DEI language in the House, compared DEI programs to 1950s anti-communist loyalty oaths (Carpenter, 2024). He meant it as an indictment of the universities. He apparently didn’t notice he was describing his own legislation.

Three Wars Become One

What’s different about this legislative session is that three separate attacks are converging. Since 2023, the anti-DEI campaign has operated on three tracks: dismantling DEI offices and staff, eroding tenure protections, and controlling curricula. Each track has its own model legislation, its own think-tank sponsors, its own rhetorical packaging. Kansas HB 2434 rolls all three into one bill.

The first track is already accomplished in Kansas. HB 2105 eliminated DEI positions and activities in 2024. Iowa’s universities reallocated over $2.1 million from DEI programs. Indiana suspended or eliminated at least 43 undergraduate programs, including African American and African Diaspora Studies and Gender Studies. The Chronicle of Higher Education has tracked changes at 439 campuses in 48 states.

The second track is accelerating. On February 5, 2026, the same day the Kansas committee voted on its budget package, Oklahoma’s governor signed an executive order ending tenure at regional universities and community colleges. Faculty at those institutions will be hired on renewable contracts tied to “teaching effectiveness, student completion, job placement, and economic alignment.” The AAUP called it an attack on academic freedom. Kansas’s approach is more bureaucratic but achieves the same end: the one-year improvement plan caps hands, provides a fast track to dismissal, compressing what used to be a deliberative process into an administrative checkbox.

The third track, curricular control, is the newest and most consequential. This strategy didn’t begin in the halls of higher education; the blueprints were first tested in the relatively quiet confines of local school boards. Farahmandpur and Wimmer (2025) document how the same playbook was first used in K-12: in 2021, Oregon’s Newberg school board banned Black Lives Matter signs and pride flags, then fired a superintendent who refused to enforce the policy. In Greater Albany, 70 miles south of Portland, the board fired superintendent Melissa Goff for pursuing equity reforms after three right-wing members, funded by Oregon Right to Life PAC, took control. Same playbook every time: capture the board, fire the leadership, rewrite the curriculum.

What was once a local skirmish has now been scaled into a state-wide financial siege. The only difference in Kansas is that the instrument is a budget line instead of a school board vote. Gramsci’s point was that the war of position wins when it occupies enough institutional ground that the opposing position becomes structurally untenable—not defeated in debate, but surrounded. When the state eliminates the offices, weakens employment protections, and restricts what can be taught, it doesn't win an argument about whether systemic racism exists. It simply makes it professionally dangerous to bring it up.

Good Sense and the Faculty Response

Gramsci (1971) paired “common sense”—the received wisdom that serves dominant interests—with “good sense,” the critical capacity that grows out of lived experience and intellectual work. Common sense tells you a budget cut is just a budget cut. Good sense tells you a budget cut conditioned on ideological certification is something else entirely.

Gamal Weheba, president of the Kansas AAUP conference and a tenured engineering professor at Wichita State, put it plainly: “The faculty determine the curriculum. Politics should not get in there.” He’s right, of course. But that appeal to professional authority is also an appeal to a principle that, as a Gramscian analysis suggests, is already losing ground.

The financial logic is a closed loop. KU estimates it would cost $1.8 million to comply with the standalone anti-DEI bill, while K-State estimates $2.1 million (Lawhorn, 2026). Meanwhile, the budget bill withholds exactly $2 million per university. This creates a calculated "compliance trap": the cost of performing the ideological purge is designed to be almost identical to the penalty for refusing it. In this ledger, there is no path that preserves the status quo. The universities are being asked to spend their own dwindling resources to dismantle their academic programs—a “lose-lose” scenario in which the only way to save money is to surrender the curriculum.

What “Victim Status 101” Actually Means

When Rep. Hoye argued that the anti-DEI language violated academic freedom, Turk responded that “Victim Status 101 has no place in higher education” and that universities “cannot have this in the way” of producing “our future citizens and workforce.”

Look at what he’s actually saying. Higher education exists to produce citizens and workers. By reframing systemic analysis as "friction" in the workforce pipeline, the legislation shifts the debate from free speech to industrial efficiency. This is where the neoliberal reduction of the university meets the conservative culture war: when education is viewed strictly as a job-training line item, critical inquiry isn’t just “woke”—it’s an expensive friction that slows down the machine. You don’t have to argue that critical race theory is wrong; you just have to argue that it’s an inefficient use of “workforce development” hours.

Farahmandpur and Wimmer (2025) trace this convergence to its roots, arguing that the right’s cultural campaigns have always functioned primarily as an electoral strategy: manufacturing a “critical race theory” bogeyman to activate white racial anxiety and score wins at the ballot box. Turk himself seems to sense this. He keeps saying DEI is a distraction, that he’d rather move on, that someone above him set the budget targets (Carpenter, 2026; Quinn, 2026). It all reads like a man carrying out a policy he knows is absurd but can’t resist because the institutional logic demands it. He’s not the author of the hegemonic project. He’s its instrument.

The Syllabus Is the Last Line Item

The offices are gone. The staff is gone. The diversity statements are banned. Tenure is being fast-tracked to dismissal, defunding, or elimination outright. What remains is the syllabus, the last document in which a professor decides what students read, discuss, and think about. Kansas HB 2434 reaches for that.

The war of position does not require every bill to pass. It requires enough institutional ground to shift the default. When the budget itself becomes a surveillance tool, the primary mechanism of control is no longer the law, but the "chilling effect" of anticipated censorship. When professors begin preemptively removing readings on systemic inequality because the political cost of keeping them is too high, the bill has already done its work, whether or not it becomes law.

Foucault (1975) put it this way: whoever controls memory controls the terms of the present. A syllabus is popular memory in institutional form. Strip out the vocabulary for naming structural inequality, and you don’t need to ban the idea. You’ve already made it unsayable. Gramsci understood that the most effective power is the kind that shows up in a line item. The question for those of us who still believe a university is more than a workforce pipeline is whether we can see the war of position for what it is before the ledger is closed.

References

Carpenter, T. (2026, February 5). Kansas House committee plunges paring knife into state’s public university budgets. Kansas Reflector. https://kansasreflector.com/2026/02/05/kansas-house-committee-plunges-paring-knife-into-state-public-university-budgets/

Carpenter, T. (2024, April 18). Kansas lawmakers dangle $36 million for public universities to secure anti-DEI commitments. Kansas Reflector. https://kansasreflector.com/2024/04/18/kansas-lawmakers-dangle-36-million-for-public-universities-to-secure-anti-dei-commitments/

Chronicle of Higher Education. (2026). DEI legislation tracker. https://www.chronicle.com/article/here-are-the-states-where-lawmakers-are-seeking-to-ban-dei-efforts

Copeland, J. (2021). How to regulate critical race theory in schools: A primer and model legislation. Manhattan Institute. https://manhattan.institute/article/how-to-regulate-critical-race-theory-in-schools-a-primer-and-model-legislation

Farahmandpur, R., & Wimmer, L. (2025). New culture wars: Weaponizing public education in the service of rightwing politics. In F. Sanjakdar & M. W. Apple (Eds.), Engaging critical pedagogy in education: Global phenomenon, local praxis (pp. 23–40). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003307570-3

Foucault, M. (1975). Film and popular memory. Radical Philosophy, 11, 24–29.

Goldwater Institute. (2023). Freedom from Indoctrination Act: Model legislation. https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/freedom-from-indoctrination-act/

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell Smith, Eds. & Trans.). International Publishers.

Kansas Legislature. (2025). House Bill 2428. https://kslegislature.gov/li/b2025_26/measures/documents/hb2428_00_0000.pdf

Kansas Legislature. (2025). House Bill 2434. https://kslegislature.gov/li/b2025_26/measures/documents/hb2434_00_0000.pdf

Lawhorn, C. (2026, February 3). Lawmakers begin to work bill that would place new limits on DEI at Kansas universities; KU estimates $1.8M cost to comply with bill. Lawrence Journal-World.

Manhattan Institute. (2021). Woke schooling: A toolkit for concerned parents. https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/woke-schooling-toolkit-for-concerned-parents.pdf

Oklahoma Governor’s Office. (2026, February 5). Executive Order 2026-06. https://www.governor.ok.gov/executive-orders

PEN America. (2026, January). America’s censored classrooms: 2025 update. https://pen.org/report/americas-censored-classrooms-2025/

Quinn, R. (2026, February 18). Kansas may cut millions from colleges with “DEI-CRT” in gen ed. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/state-policy/2026/02/18/kansas-may-cut-millions-colleges-dei-crt-gen-ed

Smith, S. (2026, February 9). Emporia State weighs fate of Social Change program as Kansas lawmakers target DEI. Kansas Reflector. https://kansasreflector.com/2026/02/09/emporia-state-weighs-fate-of-social-change-program/