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On the last Friday of February, the University of Kentucky’s Willy T. Young Library saw dozens of students and some faculty gather to protest Kentucky House Bill 4 and Senate Bill 164. 

According to an email from Kentucky Students for DEI, this was the last in a string of eight organized rallies supporting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) held throughout the state’s public universities. 

House Bill 4 (HB4) would ban Kentucky’s public colleges and universities from spending on DEI efforts and require these institutions to close DEI offices. Republican Rep. Jennifer Decker from Waddy is the bill’s lead sponsor. She argues that DEI is discriminatory. She sponsored a similar bill last year that was not successful.

The summary of HB4 states it would “prohibit a public postsecondary education institution from providing differential treatment based on an individual’s religion, race, sex, color, or national origin; from influencing the composition of the student body or scholarship recipients [on the aforementioned basis of identity].” The bill also restricts any funds being spent for the purpose of DEI. 

HB4 was passed by the house on Wednesday, March 5, 2025. According to the Kentucky Lantern, the bill needs approval from the Senate before the veto period begins on March 15 to ensure the Republican supermajority in the General Assembly would have time to override a  likely veto from Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.   

Senate Bill 164 (SB 164) does the same thing as HB4, but applies to local government and public agency workplaces.

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The rally began with speeches from organizers and representatives from the UK’s United Campus Workers Union, the Latino Student Union, the Youth Communist League, the Asian/Asian American Association, and OUTlaw, the J. David Rosenberg College of Law’s LGBTQ group.

Logan Robertson, a primary organizer of this statewide “Day of DEI” and president of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is from Eastern Kentucky. He has had several grandfathers who worked in coal mines, including his mom’s father who became disabled from working in the mines at 20 and died at 40. He said his family was poor, even for the area. 

He sees the gutting of DEI efforts as a way to limit access to education for working-class and marginalized people. “The richest people, society’s greatest oppressors, seek to make us working class people unable to afford going to college and obtain higher education, while they seek to keep our marginalized communities out of higher education. I learned about revolutionary movements across the globe, people of different shades and backgrounds fighting for a common good against oppressive, capitalist governments, like that of the Cuban revolution, Palestinian resistance, the ongoing South African revolution, the Mexican revolution, and those leftists movements of our own country– Indigenous and African American resistance, the civil rights movement, the Latino United Farm Workers movement, and United Miners of America and Eastern Kentucky, who committed themselves to the largest armed revolution in U.S. History,” Robertson said. “Education is truly the power we have as a people [and as] the working class. Knowledge is power; the more you learn about injustice, the more you’ll fight against it.”

Grace Yi, president of Students for DEI, was the police interaction liaison at the rally. Yi helped start Students for DEI in August of 2024 when UK President Eli Capilouto announced ahead of any legislative action that the Office of Institutional Diversity would shut its doors, and diversity training and diversity statements for staff and faculty would no longer be required. “If we are to be a campus for everyone, we must demonstrate ourselves and to those who support and invest in our commitment to the idea that everyone belongs – both in what we say and in what we do,” Capilouto wrote in a press release about the closing. 

“The University of Kentucky could have tested out alternative ways to encourage faculty to create inclusive environments, considering President Capilouto called our faculty diversity training ineffective. But they didn’t! They did not solve any of the structural issues for [which] DEI was meant to be a temporary bandaid. We’re still bleeding; there’sstill a scar leftover from redlining policies, the disenfranchisement of minorities, and severe gender inequality in the workforce. I mean, 140 years after the Chinese Exclusion Act, we are still scapegoating immigrants for taking jobs and carrying out mass deportations,” Yi said in her speech at the rally. 

“All bills like HB4 do is rip off this bandage before any marginalized communities have actually had the chance to heal.” Yi said that there has been progress, “but women are still underpaid and underrepresented in fields like STEM, our LGBTQ+ communities and immigrants are once again being criminalized, and Latino, Black, Indigenous, and many South East and South Asians still experience higher rates of poverty and police brutality,” Yi said, challenging claims that DEI is discriminatory. “So, no, DEI is not reverse discrimination because many of the barriers that marginalized communities face still exist. To remove our counter solution would be to deprive them of equal opportunities and a place in our nation. DEI policies have existed since the Johnson administration, resulting in the civil rights movement. DEI has since been expanded to supporting first-generation college students, accommodating people with disabilities, and maternity leave, but instead, we’re told to associate it purely with race because turning marginalized communities against each other keeps us from realizing that no one is equal until everyone is equal.”

Before the rally started, Lexington Police officers began surrounding the library. “There’s more cops on the first floor than students… they’re stationed at every corner of the library,” one student said, not long before the rally began. 

“As police liaison, I was honestly expecting more. During a pro-Palestine protest earlier this year, a ton of cops showed up, and they blocked the pathways to the library. But seeing the police-to-people ratio, I was a bit relieved that it was not more,” Yi said. 

In her opinion, from speaking to faculty members who have been involved in protests and with administration, Yi said she believes police presence “keeps students from wanting to show out because they’re afraid that something will happen… Their presence itself is supposed to keep students from doing something crazy, but I think what it almost does is make students feel like the administration doesn’t trust us or that we aren’t allowed to show out. There is this idea that their presence is supposed to keep us from being brave enough to come out to protest.”

A banner signed by students at Bowman’s Statue with their country’s flags and messages in support of DEI will be archived at the University of Louisville by a lead student organizer of the rallies throughout the state. 

To contact your senators about HB4 or SB 164, call the legislative messaging center at 800-372-7181, call your senators’ office directly, or email them. 

 

About the rally’s attendance, Yi said she was “really happy. It was really incredible to see it happen. I really hope that everyone who came together really showed that as a group, that hundreds of students really do oppose this in Kentucky,” she added that if the university did not bring back DEI, or if the bill passes, students have made it clear they oppose it,”There are people who do support progressive causes here and I hope that people who may have been feeling helpless, or that people aren’t doing anything, or feeling like [it’s] a lost cause, I hope they were able to see this group show up and just find a community of support and find that there are people who believe in the same things as them, who support them, who will accept and tolerate them in Kentucky and that was just the most incredible part of seeing the crowd. There’s this group, there are faculty members here, there are students here, there’s organizations here, and we will come together and support you.” 

Yi said, “A huge thank you to anyone who came out and showed their support, and to any of the faculty who were willing to risk it, because I know there’s a lot of faculty who feel like their courses and their jobs, and what they’re allowed to teach is on the line. I’m just thankful for the community’s support.”