TITLE:
Florida Diversity Equity Inclusion Senate Bill 266, Critical Race Theory Stop Woke Act, and House Bill 7: A Comprehensive Analysis to Address Race Consciousness in Higher Education Shared Governance
AUTHORS:
Jean Edouard
KEYWORDS:
HB 7, S 266, DEI, CRT, CoP, Stop Woke, HE Shared Governance
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.1,
January
15,
2026
ABSTRACT: Critical race theory (CRT), “Stop Woke” Act House Bill (HB7), and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) S 266 impede the progress of inclusiveness in the United States (U.S.), Higher Education (HE). This article comprehensively analyzes and draws on policies and practices, such as HB 7, which prohibits any training that fosters CRT, and Senate Bill (S 266), which limits DEI initiatives that educational practitioners utilize. It examines the barriers in the paradigms of shared governance to maintain a structure of shared governance that conceptualizes the interests of marginalized students. Higher education institutions recognize the aim of equity in fulfilling their mission to meet the students where they are. The article analyzes drawing on data from empirical study findings, Court Cases related to HB 7 and S 266, this article provides a framework of community practice (CoP) that engages all educational stakeholders through social justice and equity-minded approaches that would help to improve HE shared governance. This article underpins social justice and equity-minded frameworks through the implications of strategies to enforce the concepts of race consciousness in higher education, such as critical race theory (CRT) and DEI, despite policy and practice barriers.