Efforts to overturn Civil Rights Movement continue in KY, now at K-12 level | Opinion
Ongoing efforts to overturn the 1964 Civil Rights Act — one of our country’s finest achievements — continue apace at the federal level and here in Kentucky.
Some of us are worried about whether our population has enough to eat or whether they will have health care in the next few years, but bold social injustice warriors like Rep. Jennifer Decker, R-Waddy, whose father once knew oppression as a white man, and Sen. Lindsay Tichenor, R-Smithfield, are more concerned with keeping us safe from those imaginary monsters of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Decker had so much fun with House Bill 4 last year that Tichenor decided to try it out at the K-12 level.
Senate Bill 26 “is about fairness, transparency, and equal treatment under the law,” Tichenor said in a statement. “Every student and educator in Kentucky deserve to be treated as an individual—not sorted, labeled, or advantaged based on characteristics they cannot control.”
Sure thing, senator. This no doubt got a lot of applause from the “Brown v. Board of Education was judicial overreach” crowd.
HB 4 — which banned DEI in higher education — is having totally predictable results. We know this thanks to the University of Kentucky student paper, the Kentucky Kernel. Reporter Sidney Miller exhaustively detailed how a university of open inquiry has been turned into an Orwellian swamp where middling bureaucrats play Whac-a-Mole with words and ideas, using their highlighters to change “dangerous” words as determined by the brain trust leading Frankfort and the federal government.
It would be truly hilarious if it weren’t so sad. One of my favorite bits was how a lecture title was changed from “Invisible, Empowered, Erased: Women Farmers Across the Globe” to “Women Farmers Across the Globe.” Or “Maoist Mulan” was changed to “The Asian-American 60s.” Another goodie was a talk titled “Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap.” According to the anonymous faculty member, the Kernel said, the event’s title was renamed and advertised as “DC’s Economic Disparities in Historical Context.”
It’s like in Harry Potter when the Ministry of Magic is taken over by death eaters, or, I don’t know, like any history of any autocratic country anywhere in the world, where governments try to control language and thought.
Apparently, the deans offices as guided by UK Marketing requires any advertising posters to be pre-approved. If not approved, then they must be changed. But no one in the Kernel article would exactly take credit for the changes.
This is on top our own stories about, which show, under pressure from the feds, UK is forcing departments to drop affiliations with national professional organizations because the American Historical Association might have used the words “inclusive,” or “African-American,” back in 1996.
As one professor told the Kernel, the university can’t have an actual list of banned words because that would be censorship, but imagining what words would be on such a list leads to self-censorship by faculty and staff. Most of the quotes in the article were anonymous because tenured faculty have been told they should not speak to the press. In one case, the Kernel reprinted a memo from Sociology Chairman Ed Morris, where this point was made explicitly:
“It has come to my attention that a reporter for the Kentucky Kernel has been contacting members of our department asking for an interview to discuss ‘recent regulations’ and how our department may have been impacted. I strongly advise you to NOT speak with this reporter on these issues,” the memo said.
“While this is a legitimate request and we should all support student journalism, there are just too many risks to discussing these issues in the current environment. This could potentially lead to unforeseen consequences for you and our department.”
The thought police hit K-12 schools
This is happening even though House Bill 4 is not supposed to affect curriculum or research.
Tichenor says her bill will not hamper classroom instruction either, but this kind of silencing is happening at UK with faculty who still have enormous job protections.
What do you think will happen to a young high school teacher? Do you think they will risk telling their students about important parts of U.S. history like the Civil Rights or suffrage movements when they could just ignore it?
I wasn’t too bothered by the legislature forcing universities to get rid of some administrative bloat by axing DEI offices in higher ed. If there are any school districts with DEI bureaucracies, which I doubt, then by all means, drop them.
But as I’ve said many, many times, at least DEI efforts come from good intentions, whereas efforts to dismantle them come from bad ones: the remnants of America’s original sin, still hissing and snarling through history at the idea that giving rights to some people takes rights away from others.
This story was originally published January 7, 2026 at 12:13 PM.
