The University notified all staff Nov. 14, including student employees, that they must complete a mandatory Senate Bill 17 compliance training by February 2025.
All UT employees must complete the virtual SB 17 compliance training every two years. The modules explain how SB 17 prohibits some campus offices and hiring practices, like requiring DEI statements. The training also clarifies that SB 17 does not impact course curricula and registered student organizations.
The UTLearn training is the University’s most recent effort to comply with SB 17, which prohibits diversity, equity and inclusion offices and practices at all Texas public universities.
Last year, the University shut down the Multicultural Engagement Center and dissolved the Division of Campus and Community Engagement, two of its many efforts to comply with the law.
The training announcement comes two weeks after UT’s Marketing and Communications administration conducted its most recent web scan identifying “DEI-related terms” on University websites. The scan found approximately 13,000 individual cases where targeted terms, including “diversity,” “safe space” and “intersectionality,” appeared across all “utexas.edu” domains, according to an Oct. 31 email to communications staff obtained by the Texan.
University spokesperson Rosen said content with these terms does not automatically violate SB 17. Less than 1% of content found has been flagged for review since UT implemented the scans in Fall 2023.
“It’s not about the words,” Rosen said in an email. “It’s about activity the words might represent if they are associated with activity that is not academic or research related.”
In preparation for the University’s next SB 17 compliance review in 2025, the Oct. 31 email also instructed all colleges, schools and units to review their web content by the end of the year using the scan results as a guide.
