This is the final week of the 2023 Utah legislative session, which is scheduled to conclude at midnight, the witching hour, on Friday. While there may be many good things the Legislature has accomplished this year, it also found time for mischief. A late entry in the latter category is Senate Bill 283, a “Study of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Higher Education.”

You can probably guess where this is going. Or you can surmise where it’s headed based on its history: S.B. 283 was introduced last week with a different title, “Prohibiting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Higher Education.”

Sen. John Johnson, a Republican from North Ogden and the bill’s sponsor in both forms, said in a prepared statement that the first version sought “to ensure that public universities remain bastions of academic freedom and integrity, free from any ideological coercion.”

So what we just saw was an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, in the name of … freedom. Do you want fries with that?

Studying DEI with an eye to eliminating it is hardly better. The study bill may fail, too, but this race is not yet run. DEI is under increasing attack nationwide, by Republicans who see it as a weak point in Democrats’ armor and a symbol of wokeness. These attacks also are an effort to further tinker with publicly funded education, where Republicans have long suspected that Marxists and other malefactors reside. If two-thirds of the GOP has its way, the Marxists and critical race theorists will only work at prestigious private institutions like Harvard and Yale. And that’s a shame. A little Marxism studied in school is a healthy thing for everyone. It’s far better than learning about it in the streets.

Still, Marxism is so exotic in 2023 that it’s a red herring. So is attacking diversity. Who could be opposed to diversity? A separatist? An ethno-nationalist? Even most Republicans aren’t prepared to go full Putin or Jinping.

Equity has come to take the place of equality, because, while equality asks that people be treated equally, equity asks that people be treated fairly. It’s an upgrade. It does not necessarily mean that someone gets a bigger slice of a finite pie, or that they get your slice and you get none. In any case, it’s certainly worthy of discussion and study in schools, which is not the same thing as indoctrination, otherwise we’d all be Pythagoreans.

It seems to us that if inclusion stood on its own leg here, it should be as unobjectionable as diversity, especially when we consider that its opposite is exclusion. And we know where exclusion leads. Surely we’ve all learned that by now, perhaps in school?

Attacks like this are not even about ideas. They’re about people who want to exclude other people.

The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that he was somehow “less interested in the weight and convolutions of [Albert] Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at their best aim at letting more Einsteins bloom.

We look forward to the end of the legislative session.