Associate professor of psychological studies Sarah Herrmann and one of her students at Weber State University were preparing to present their research at the university’s 27th annual Unity Conference, the theme of which was “Redacted: Navigating the Complexities of Censorship.”

“Everything seemed to be going according to plan,” Herrmann said. She has spent the past two years studying the impact of Utah’s HB 261—a state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion practices in higher education—on student academic performance and persistence. The Unity Conference planning committee was familiar with her work, and her student mentee had submitted a slide deck for the presentation.

But on Sept. 29, days before the conference was scheduled to begin, the student received an email directive from Joel Berrien Jr., director of Weber State’s Basic Needs Center: Remove all mentions of “DEI,” “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” from your slides and resubmit them.

“At that point, I said, ‘We can’t in good conscience present our research without using those terms, and you should remove our presentation instead,’” Herrmann told Inside Higher Ed. “But it was very strange given how close it was to the conference,” which was scheduled for Oct. 2 and 3. Other faculty, unwilling to censor their own presentations or to support a censored event, also pulled out of the conference.

Organizers decided to cancel the event on Oct. 1. “After careful consideration of concerns raised by conference planners and participants, we have determined we cannot in good conscience deliver the high-quality, meaningful experience that our community expects and deserves,” they wrote.

The irony was not lost on the faculty: The university was censoring its own conference about censorship. Nor was it lost on others. “The irony reeks,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression wrote in an X post. “The First Amendment protects faculty speech and FIRE calls out WSU for overinterpreting the law to censor.”

Until two years ago, Weber State’s Unity Conference was called the Diversity Conference. It would have proceeded without issue this year except for one complicating detail: The Unity Conference is not an academically sponsored event. It is funded and organized by the Student Access and Success division, whose programming is subject to the strict rules laid out by HB 261. Events sponsored by academic units, by comparison, are exempted from the law and would allow presenters to discuss DEI and partisanship. For that reason, university officials said, presenters must censor their slides.

Weber State leaders acknowledged that “communication could have been clearer earlier,” a university spokesperson said. “The reality is, the university is still working through relatively new legislation and how it applies differently to faculty, staff and students.”

In a note to conference presenters and volunteers last week, Vice President for Student Access and Success Jessica Oyler explained that Unity Conference programming could not discuss what HB 261 defines as “prohibited discriminatory practice,” including “claiming that sociopolitical structures are inherently power struggles between groups, or suggesting that individuals are inherently privileged, oppressed, racist, sexist, or victims based on personal identity characteristics.”

“Presentations should not describe legislation or policies in ways that take a side, such as labeling them ‘harmful’ or attributing them to a partisan ‘strategy,’” Oyler continued. “Even if the intent is to provide context, that language is difficult to reconcile with HB 261 when used in non-academic programming.”

The last-minute directives came as a surprise, Herrmann said. Only one staff member was on the conference-planning committee—all other members were faculty—and there was little mention of Student Access and Success as the conference’s sponsor.

“It didn’t live on the Student Access and Success website. There was nothing to suggest that SAS was the sponsor,” Herrmann said. “When my department chair and I met with our chief legal counsel, we realized there may have been some misunderstanding about what ‘conference’ meant. If you tell academics it’s a conference, then we’re going to show up to talk about research.”

The Weber State faculty and staff union held an impromptu teach-in alternative to the conference on Friday. About 50 people attended the event, which was moved inside due to rain. Once inside, attendees were told that content must adhere to rules laid out in HB 261, and organizers transitioned the discussion to small groups.

The Utah State Legislature has dialed up the pressure on public universities in recent months. HB 261 has been in effect for about a year and a half, and in the spring, the Legislature approved a 10 percent cut to public universities’ state-funded instructional budgets to make the institutions “more efficient,” said Richard Price, a political science professor at Weber State.

“Behind the scenes, the cuts were understood by pretty much everyone involved—at least the faculty level that I spoke to—that this was about targeting programs that are disliked by the Legislature. So, for example, we had a small queer studies program, which was closed despite the fact that it gets almost no funding,” Price said. The queer studies, ethnic studies and women’s and gender studies minors had a combined enrollment of fewer than 50 students, a Weber State spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed in May.

Price is familiar with backlash for speech at Weber State. They described themself as a blunt person who is under extra scrutiny at the university. Last year, Price gave a talk about high schools and LGBTQ+ inclusion since the 1970s, and “immediately after that talk, the staff member who organized it got emails from administration saying that my talk may have violated HB 261, even though we had cleared it beforehand.”

The university is currently thinking about how to restructure future Unity Conferences so they are housed in Academic Affairs or a specific college, a spokesperson said, which would exempt them from upholding the law’s provisions. In her email to presenters and volunteers, Oyler wrote, “The intent here is not to suggest that operating this way is ideal, as I know there are strong feelings about the legislation itself, but rather to be transparent about how we are operationalizing the law.”