Booker T. Washington, the founding president of Tuskegee University, once said “Ignorance is more costly to any state than education.” As Alabama recently became the latest state to thrust a dagger into the heart of academic freedom in the anti-DEI crusade, it’s clear the price of ignorance is rising.

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed a measure into law that not only withdraws state funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at the state’s public universities, it also restricts the teaching of the very topics needed to increase critical thinking and expand diversity of thought on college campuses.

“The purpose of this bill is to prevent compelled speech and indoctrination,” declared Republican Senator Will Barfoot, who introduced the legislation.

It’s the same cynical appeal to the “anti-woke” and racist messaging employed by MAGA Republicans in Texas, Tennessee, Florida, and four other states that adopted similar laws last year. There are at least 17 Republican-led states proposing dozens of bills to restrict DEI initiatives, with Kentucky poised to be next as red states march into a new era of separate and unequal higher education.

But there’s something ironic about Alabama passing its ban in March because it might actually hurt the state in an area that unites Alabamans more than anything else: college sports.

The best of college basketball is on display this month in the annual NCAA tournament, better known as March Madness, and Alabama had three universities competing. The law takes effect Oct. 1, just barely into football season. Imagine if the NCAA had the stomach to enforce its own rules and threatened action against the storied and beloved Crimson Tide because of a state law that undermines the organization’s principles of the advancement of knowledge and dignified treatment of students in public higher education.

Black students make up an outsize proportion of college athletes, especially in basketball and football — the two sports that bring in the most revenue, according to data compiled by the NCAA. Their unpaid labor sustains a very lucrative system for schools.

NCAA rules require member universities to educate and train staff to “create diverse and inclusive environments.” Every five years, Division 1 schools are also required to conduct a review to demonstrate how well they are abiding by the DEI goals. And schools that fail to complete the requirements risk losing out on millions in association revenue.

These rules have been years in the making because, for decades, the NCAA’s diversity record has been grim — as detailed annually in the College Sport Racial and Gender Report Card issued by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

But in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, colleges and universities started to wake up. Athletic departments pledged to confront the lack of diversity among coaches, athletic directors, and other department administrators. Many created athletic diversity and inclusion officers and assigned them to work with athletes from marginalized communities to increase their chances of excelling in their predominantly White schools.

Ajhanai Keaton, assistant professor of health and sport sciences at the University of Louisville, who studied the issue for years, recalls being “taken aback” by how athletic departments responded to Floyd's murder. “We saw T-shirts. We saw social media posts. We saw solidarity walks,’’ she said. “Even retired Alabama Coach Nick Saban walked with their athletes in racial solidarity.”

The goal of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs is to encourage reasoned debate from diverse points of view, to address the systemic barriers to equal opportunity, and to provide all students with a chance to reach their full potential. Opponents misconstrue those goals. They attach their own bigoted biases to the programs’ motives so they can wrongly claim that the policies are about assigning blame to White people and fostering guilt.

Despite the claims of right-wing legislators, college campuses across the country continue to value diversity, said Richard Lapchick, a pioneering business professor who founded The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. In the last four years, he has conducted diversity and inclusion training on 200 campuses, for most of the major professional sports leagues, and all four branches of the military.

As universities started to see progress, conservative lawmakers saw indoctrination and, continuing the dangerous march toward authoritarianism, decided to write laws to stop it.

The Alabama law goes even further than those of Florida and Texas, and restricts the teaching of what it calls eight “divisive concepts,” including ideas assigning “fault, blame or bias” to anyone and attempts to whitewash history by prohibiting the suggestion that “slavery and racism are aligned with the founding principles of the United States.”

The state is barred from funding programs where participation is determined “based on identity group”— a sweeping category that could include Black student athletic associations, Spanish and Latino student associations, and organizations at Alabama’s eight public historically Black colleges and universities.

No state money can be spent on diversity training at these athletic departments either, and state agencies may “discipline or terminate employees or contractors” found violating the act.

It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that university athletic departments unable to conduct diversity training, host student groups, and encourage inclusive behavior violate NCAA rules.

Alabama’s law is likely to be challenged in court, just as Florida’s was when it was partially dismantled.

The NCAA has used its leverage to change state policies that are bad for athletes in the past, like North Carolina’s “bathroom bill.” It should not wait for a court to block Alabama’s costly law. If it is truly committed to the “well-being and development of student athletes” as its constitution says, the NCAA should enforce its own rules and sanction teams in states that have enacted these backward DEI bans.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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