Wyoming Senators voted on Friday to terminate funding for the University of Wyoming’s Gender and Women’s Studies program. Lawmakers had concerns state money was being used to fund “biased” educational and extracurricular programs.
You can read about Iowa State’s Women’s & Gender Studies program in articles below:
GOP Sen. Cheri Steinmetz of Wyoming introduced the amendment and said she had “lost sleep” reading some of the course goals, which included giving students an understanding of queer, feminist and social justice theories to be applied to “service and activism.”
The amendment passed 16-14.
“This is an extremely biased, ideologically driven program that I can’t see any academic legitimacy to,” Senate Education Committee Chairman state Sen. Charles Scott (R) said Friday. “I think we’ll hear complaints about how we’re interfering in the internals of the university, but I think what we’re really doing is sending them a message that they need to clean up their act in terms of the quality of the instruction that’s being given.”
Oklahoma had a bill introduced last year prohibiting public universities from requiring students to enroll in courses “addressing any form of gender, sexual or racial diversity, equality or inclusion curriculum,” which fall outside course requirements for their major.
