The Texas A&M University System’s Board of Regents took steps yesterday to impose its conservative ideology on college students by prohibiting professors from teaching certain ideas about race and gender.
They did so by making changes to the system’s policies. One change to the “Civil Rights Protection and Compliance” section of the policies they approved states:
No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO.
The use of the term “advocate” in the policy is worth noting. It is a label for an inappropriate pedagogical approach (indeed professors should teach students, not lobby them) and it associates this inappropriate pedagogical approach with teaching about race and gender, insinuating that if students are hearing about race or gender in their course, it must be because their professors are doing something illicit.
“Advocate” is also a slippery concept. If a professor covers evidence for and against some aspect of gender or race “ideology,” when discussing the evidence in its favor, are they thereby “advocating” for gender ideology? What about devil’s advocacy? Is the use of that teaching tool banned when it comes to race and gender? What about explaining an idea without condemning it?
The policy bans courses that advocate race or gender ideology as well as courses that advocate “topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” But “advocate topics” is a very odd way to speak. They probably meant “include topics” but perhaps didn’t want to say that, since to say that discussion of certain topics in a college course is banned is too transparently dictatorial.
The inclusion of those topics is prohibited “unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO.” This presupposes an impressive degree of administrative micromanagement. The idea that the administration may dictate the materials and subjects for all courses is quite a departure from the academic freedom that faculty at institutions like Texas A&M expect.
What is gender or race ideology anyway? The policy offers the following definitions:
Gender Ideology – means a concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex.
Race Ideology – means a concept that attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity, accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy or conspiracy, ascribe to them less value as contributors to society and public discourse because of their race or ethnicity, or assign them intrinsic guilt based on the actions of their presumed ancestors or relatives in other areas of the world. This also includes course content that promotes activism on issues related to race or ethnicity, rather than academic instruction.
A change to the section of the policies on “Academic Freedom, Responsibility, and Tenure” doubles down on the micromanagement:
Each faculty member is entitled to full freedom in the classroom in discussing the subject that the faculty member teaches, but a faculty member will not introduce a controversial matter that has no relation to the classroom subject or teach material that is inconsistent with the approved syllabus for the course.
The idea of the sacred syllabus was at the center of the university’s firing of Melissa McCoul earlier this year. What does “inconsistent with the approved syllabus” mean? If it simply means “not on the syllabus” are the regents really saying that faculty cannot, say, teach an unscheduled lesson with an additional reading about a current event to which ideas covered elsewhere in the course might apply? If “inconsistent with the syllabus” means something besides “not on the syllabus,” then what does it mean? Perhaps: inconsistent with the ideology the Board is hoping to impose on students through the strict oversight of syllabi creation and course content.
The Board of Regents is also recruiting students into their political movement, encouraging them to be suspicious of their professors. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
the system created a “24/7 reporting mechanism” for students to report what they consider “inaccurate or misleading course content” that does not align with the approved syllabus, as well as other course-related issues.
That ideology the Board of Regents seeks to impose on students doesn’t concern just race and gender, but the very aims of higher education. In a revealing quote about the policy changes reported in The New York Times, one of the regents, Sam Torn, said the following:
Curriculum is created and approved based on the accepted body of knowledge needed for our students to be successful in their chosen profession… It is unacceptable for other material to be taught instead.
In other words: students, your university education should be nothing more than job training.
What a message for the people in charge of a university system to send.
In isolation, this is bad; in the context of academia, in general, it’s more complicated. I’d rather have two competing illiberal power centers in academia at least checking each other than have one reining unrestrained. Obviously, it’s best to have none. Unfortunately, the sort of stuff happening at Texas A&M, at least in broad strokes, is probably a necessary step to getting there. Self-reform was neither happening nor going to happen. But why would it? Power is rarely voluntarily just given away, especially by the ideologically committed with a higher calling than process concerns. Liberalism is the enlightened compromise that only takes hold when unchecked rule is no longer an option. Those hoping for zero illiberal power centers should be propping up the off-ramps to liberalism.
I think you are suggesting that
a) there were illiberal powers being exercised unchecked in either higher ed in general or Texas A&M in particular.
b) with the current intervention, we are now closer to having two illiberal powers balancing against each other (rather than one illiberal power from the government dominating).
Please feel free to correct me if I have misinterpreted your claims. And if I haven’t, would you mind providing evidence? I’m particularly worried that with the current intervention, we won’t have two illiberal powers balancing against each other, but will be more akin to governmental domination.
One of many pieces of evidence for Claim A:
For many years, many (most? all?) academic job applicants were required to submit diversity statements. These were used to politically discriminate against conservatives and other unwoke people. Everyone knew that. The practice of requiring diversity statements didn’t stop until Republican state legislatures intervened.
This really often ends up being one of those “oh, you know the ones” situations.
As evidence for a), here is a very much incomplete list of instructors being fired, suspended, or forced out within only the last five years as a result of — what seems to me to clearly be — illiberal left-wing power exercise.
This list doesn’t include the many investigations which didn’t ultimately lead to suspension but unquestionably also had a chilling effect. It also doesn’t include various papers being forced into retraction for political reasons, such as the John Kormedy (UT Austin) case. Also doesn’t include canceled lectures, like the Christopher Trogan (U Chicago) MIT incident.
Reading through some of these, it seems they may represent less of a “illiberal left-wing power exercise,” and instead reflect a general fear (cowardice?) that comes when school administrators see potential lawsuits or other financial damage on the horizon. Not saying it’s much better, but maybe they would act this way regardless of where the accusations were coming from?
It is very easy to throw out a list like this, but based on the last hour of my life, very hard to verify it.
I couldn’t find reliable reporting on all cases, but Groeneveld was not suspended and is still at Penn; Inbar was never employed by UCLA (he applied for a job there and did not get it); and Hooven faced no offical action or unlawful behavior (her colleagues turned cold but not unprofessional towards her after a media appearance).
I think it pays to be sceptical if someone’s allegations against HR are not supported by their union. People who feel wronged are typically highly unreliable about whether they have been wronged. Not all HR investigations, for example, are meritless. Not even all HR investigations that conclude no wrongdoing are meritless.
Some results from google, trying to find sources that are not primarily on the “cancel culture” beat: IHE reports that Varkey was not renewed after student complaints about “religious preaching, discriminatory comments […] and misogynistic banter” during class. The Crimson reports that Kane “disputed the worthiness of Black students at elite institutions”. And the Forham Observer reports Trogan was disciplined after “an email” he sent in response to student complaints. Contents unknown.
It’s notable that, in some cases, the complaint really seems to be that one’s colleagues have exercised their own judgment about one’s work, commentary, or behaviour and, on the basis of that, decided that they do not wish to, or cannot in good conscience continue to, engage or collaborate. I’m not sure how Likewise expects universities to deal with this; beyond the basic expectations that come with being in the same workplace, if your colleagues don’t want to engage with your work because they don’t regard it as scholarly work or they think that it serves ends that cause harm, what is the university to do?
1. Peter Groenveld was, until 2024, co-director of Penn’s Masters in Health Policy Research program. The university abruptly announced he was leaving this role less than two weeks after graduate students leaked to the student newspaper that there had been an internal investigation into emails Groenveld had sent about under-represented minorities (the internal investigation found no serious wrongdoing on Groenveld’s part). Shortly after the newspaper article appeared, 10 faculty members followed up with a “letter of concern” hand-wringing about the “trauma” his email had allegedly caused minority students, and declaring they had no confidence in his leadership:
https://www.thedp.com/article/2024/03/penn-mshp-director-groeneveld-resigns-following-investigation-discrimination
Here are the contents of Groenveld’s email, according to the student newspaper:
“Groeneveld wrote that — while there have been some “superstar” underrepresented minority students in the MSHP program — many URM students are at “high risk for struggling with the program and ultimately not finishing.” The email listed by name three of the “superstar” students.
“I wonder if some URM applicants are being pushed toward us by external forces (e.g. fellow director expectations) and not by intrinsic interests,” Groeneveld wrote.”
There is nothing in this email that any mentally sound person would find traumatizing, or would see as grounds for dismissal. Hence, this a standard woke mobbing attack aimed at getting someone purged for daring to say anything negative about one of the left’s client identity groups. The internal investigation found no justification for punishing Groenveld, so the leak was designed to whip up a vigilante mob to go after him where the star chamber had failed. The only question mark is whether Groenveld was literally forced out by higher-ups or merely resigned under pressure. But the progressives clearly succeeded at their goal making it untenable for him to continue in the position.
—
2. Yoel Inbar is a high-profile psychologist who was on the verge of being brought on as a spousal hire at UCLA, after his partner had already been offered a position. According to Matthew Lieberman, a faculty member at UCLA:
“There was immediate and unanimous enthusiasm for bringing Dr. Inbar in for an interview. Dr. Inbar is a well-known and well-regarded moral psychologist at a top university, that on paper would have been an exciting addition to a Social area whose numbers are down significantly from their peak.”
A day after the interview, graduate students at UCLA sent an open letter attacking Inbar for his past comments on a podcast criticizing the widespread use of diversity statements in academia (this is a paradigm case of extramural political speech, which should never be considered in hiring or promotion decisions in the first place). Within two days, Inbar was informed by the hiring committee that he was no longer being considered for the position.
Lieberman claims that this decision even violated UCLA hiring procedures, which require a full departmental vote on new appointments:
https://matthewlieberman.substack.com/p/a-political-dress-and-test
Again, this is a textbook woke mobbing attack aiming to block the appointment of someone who expressed heretical political opinions. The fact that Inbar was not yet a current faculty member (although, given the circumstances, his hiring was essentially guaranteed) is neither here nor there, since he was clearly rejected for the job on the basis of political views, and not his qualifications for the position.
Progressive do not in general have trouble recognizing that declining to hire someone on the basis of their political views can be a severe violation of academic freedom – witness the left-wing furor surrounding the treatment of noted Hamas apologist Steven Salaita, or of amateur historian Nikole Hannah-Jones. Inbar’s case is just as appalling as these others, and protests that he was merely a job candidate are transparently selective and hypocritical.
—
3. Carol Hooven, an evolutionary biologist and former lecturer at Harvard, was relentlessly attacked by graduate students, faculty, and administrators at Harvard for publicly expressing (on Fox and Friends) the orthodox view that sex is biological and binary, although she also noted that she believed we should respect people’s gender identities and use their preferred pronouns. She claims that the constant stream of public abuse she endured, combined with the lack of support from her colleagues, led her to experience severe depression and thoughts of suicide:
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/why-i-left-harvard/
That being said, Hooven did resign of her own accord, so I agree that this should not be counted as a political purge like the other cases. Still, it’s clear that if (say) a black or trans faculty member were treated this poorly by their colleagues at a right-leaning university, everyone on the left would be screeching about bigotry and censorship and demanding radical changes to the institution to prevent it from ever happening again.
—
Let me conclude by thanking Queer Philosopher for investigating these claims with the usual standard of scholarship and integrity I’ve come to expect from progressives in academia. It’s also worth nothing that Queer Philosopher ignores the most egregious and straightforward cases, like Erika Lopez Prater, who was fired from her job for showing an art history class a centuries-old Persian painting that included a depiction of the prophet Muhammad.
If anyone is interested in actually knowing the truth of these matters, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression keeps a database that exhaustively records almost every attack on academic freedom that’s occurred over the past two decades:
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire?orderdir=desc&orderby=year
Hundreds of scholars have been purged for their political views in that time period (in the past, this mostly occurred due to pressure from the political left, but more recently it’s chiefly been due to pressure from the right). I think it’s fair to say that anyone who is still professing ignorance of these matters, who claims not to be aware that progressives conducted a massive, McCarthyist purge of dissenters throughout academia, the media, and the arts in the period from 2014-2023, is steeped in self-delusion.
Yeah, so:
First, you don’t dispute any of the facts I researched. So we agree that at least three cases listed by Likewise were not, quote, “fired, suspended, or forced out”. So this is an exercise in goalpost-shifting.
I agree that Lopez Prater is a clear-cut violation. This is also the AAUP’s judgment of this case (see above re “union support”).
Second, FIRE is not a credible source on the relevant details. They are an activist organization and therefore present a selection of facts that makes their case strongest. A typical pattern is that if someone is sanctioned for a bunch of things, FIRE will say someone was sanctioned for the most innocuous on the list.
One example is the Varkey case, where FIRE headlined “Longtime biology professor says public college fired him for teaching X and Y chromosomes determine biological sex”, but IHE reports “religious preaching, discriminatory comments […] and misogynistic banter”. I cannot personally determine who is right, I’m just noting the discrepancy.
Usually, the full truth (the full complaints against someone) comes out in court or not at all, and even if it does, nobody takes notice. I remain highly sceptical that any “McCarthyist purge of dissenters” happened.
Third, I’m not even quite sure where you think the goalposts are now. You give some additional facts that, I suppose, I’m meant to be outraged by. Well, I’m not. Mostly because I am sceptical that the sources you gave tell the full story (they are all deeply partisan). But also because you seem to claim that there is some hypocrisy that I don’t see. Perhaps you can explain.
Say, specifically about Hooven, what do you think went wrong there? Should faculty be forced to go beyond collegiality with someone they morally disapprove of? Or is the problem just that people acted according to a moral judgment that you don’t share?
Should people be forbidden from acting (within the confines of professionalism, lawfulness and propriety) on their moral judgment?
It’s reasonable to say Groeneveld was forced out. If Hooven was black or trans, and left after being bullied by her colleagues to the point she considered suicide, you would say she was forced out too. The fact that you’re unwilling to describe these cases using these terms is a reflection of your bias and double standards, and nothing more.
Your original reporting of these cases was also ludicrously biased and selective. You claimed that “Groeneveld was not suspended and is still at Penn” — but he was forced out from an admistrative position. You claimed that “Inbar was never employed by UCLA (he applied for a job there and did not get it)” — failing to mention that he was a slam-dunk spousal hire who was rejected specifically for his extramural political opinions.
All of these cases, except arguably for Hooven’s, involve massive infringements of academic freedom. So your attempts to cherrypick a small number of the cases that Likewise listed and portray them in distorted ways in order to raise frivolous doubts about the left’s hostility to academic freedom have failed.
FIRE is more reliable when it comes to academic freedom than any progressive news source, which lie and dissemble incessantly about these issues. It is certainly a lot more reliable than you.
Not having the support of the AAUP is meaningless, since the AAUP has also been corrupted by progressive ideology, and is no longer consistently fulfilling its mission:
https://www.thefire.org/news/aaup-continues-back-away-academic-freedom
It makes no difference whether you’re outraged or not, because no one is obliged to pretend to care about what progressives think anymore. Your day in power is over.
Call me conservative, but I prefer to get my information in form of facts reported by a reliable third party, ideally with a careful editor and fact checker behind them.
Reporting on what someone claims regarding a matter they feel personally aggreived about is rarely worth epistemic attention. Neither is breathless outrage. But that is all you seem to care about.
For what it’s worth, IHE has done exceptionally careful and even-handed reporting on such cases. If you think it right to dismiss them as “progressive news source” that’s just your loss.
What are you talking about? For Groeneveld, I cited the student newspaper at Penn. For Inbar, I cited a blog post written by a faculty member in the psychology department at UCLA. The only first-party account I cited was for Hooven, and she conceded that she resigned voluntarily. Or do you want a third-party, fact-checked source for her claim that she had thoughts of suicide after being ostracized and publicly denounced by her colleagues?
You, on the other hand, didn’t cite any sources at all in connection with any of these three cases. This is no surprise — if you had, this would have undermined the distorted and selective summaries you gave of each of the cases, since people would have been able to click on the link and see how much you were leaving out.
It’s hilarious that you think of IHE as a reliable and even-handed source. You could have at least picked the Chronicle, IHE is targeted at midwit progressive administrators.
I cited sources (I didn’t link them, but people here have google). Everything I said was factual.
Otherwise, this seems like a pointless interaction.
Here’s my all-time favorite IHE article:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/02/study-finds-gender-bias-ta-evals-too
The article breathlessly reports that a new study found a “gender bias in… course evaluations of teaching assistants” in an asynchronous online class. Half of the students were randomly assigned to a TA given a male name, while the other half were assigned to a TA given a female name, when in fact the same person served as TA for both sections. According to the article, “the study found that students in an online course who had the same TA gave that TA five times as many negative evaluations when they believed that she was a woman, as compared to when they thought she was a man.”
It’s not until the 14th paragraph of the article that you find out the difference between the groups was not statistically significant. And that “five times as many negative evaluations” means there were a grand total of five negative evaluations for the ostensibly female TA versus one negative evaluation for the ostensibly male TA.
The combination of statistical illiteracy and political bias on display here is truly mind-boggling. Try to imagine IHE writing the same article for a study which had the reverse result (or non-result, I suppose), with female TAs scoring higher than male TAs. Just try it.
What indicates that she was bullied? As QP points out, her colleagues exercised judgment about her commentary and views. It would indeed be different if a person of color were bullied on the basis of them being a person of color; are you suggesting that racially motivated bullying is akin to CH’s colleagues making a determination about her commentary and views?
Looking further into this example: It’s apparent that there are multiple levels of disagreement here. There are those who disagree with CH’s substantive comments regarding sex/gender; and there are those who disagree, due to wider contextual factors, with the where and when of them. I think even the most charitable reader is going to struggle to differentiate these levels of disagreement. Hooven obviously wasn’t invited onto Fox News just to state what is, in her view, a set of biological facts. Her commentary here is difficult to separate from the context in which it occurs and the wider implications that are being gestured at. (And one might plausibly argue that one shouldn’t do so; that such an appraisal of the content of her speech would be, at best, incomplete.)
Notably, CH’s commentary is also to found in other forums, many of them with a decidedly anti-trans bent to them (e.g., Genspect). Being charitable, that doesn’t necessarily say anything about Hooven herself, but one can at least see how there’s a pattern here that explains why Hooven’s colleagues might come to view her commentary a certain way.
And in that context, I suppose the question is, what do you expect the university to do about it? In your telling, Hooven experienced a “lack of support” from colleagues, which was purportedly instrumental in her voluntarily leaving her position. Was the university to compel her colleagues to support her? And to support her on what, specifically? On the substantive claims regarding sex/gender?—claims that, as the piece linked above discusses, might also be considered contentious? Or on the when and where of these claims; that is, on articulating them in a context where they are, whether intended to by the claimant or not, going to be weaved into a larger narrative that might also be considered contentious? I’m just struggling to see what you think the role of the university administration is here, what institutional support you think is owed, and what you think should be expected of one’s colleagues in such circumstances.
Sorry, but just as with the original response, is then the idea that we balance things out if we now then fire the other side? Because this will make things better?
So does anyone want to defend b) under the current context?
Are we closer to balance than governmental domination?
That’s precisely why God created evil, too.
It’d be helpful if you said exactly what you think is the competing illiberal power center here. Do you think it’s wrong for professors to teach classes discussing views on gender or race? What exactly is it that you are so concerned about, and that is worth sacrificing academic freedom to avoid?
So if we have a positive and a negative, we get neutral? Vow. Really? I have no interest in taking part in culture wars, but even if I accept that somehow American academia has been partisan so far (which is hard given the large number of outright conservative institutions, religions universities and what not), the solution is surely not ‘let’s give the other side a go now to balance the books’. This is just a direct road to hell that will tear democracy apart (as Hobbes has so well predicted back in the day).
“professors should teach students, not lobby them” – absolutely. But I worry that philosophers, who are generally better on this than most–don’t realize what’s going on in the rest of the humanities. Many teachers in other disciplines are absolutely teaching contested social theories as fact.
And the question of whether the classrooms are balanced on these subjects has recently been empirically settled: they are not. This study of all openly available syllabi shows, pretty convincingly, controversial views on race and gender are normally assigned without any attention paid to contrary views or prominent critics. These critics, the study clearly shows, aren’t just outside cranks, they are the highly cited scholars who disagree with i.e. Judith Butler or Michelle Alexander. Note that the study shows that philosophy classes in particular often don’t have this problem.
This has been going on in our universities for years now. Obviously A&M will do some ham-fisted, crazy things to try to correct the problem and probably make things much worse. But I have no idea how we ever thought that we could avoid this kind of result.
I took a look at this study, and while it raises some interesting questions, I’m not convinced that it identifies such a huge problem.
Is a syllabus includes Alexander and not Pfaff and Forman an issue? I am not sure. She does a great job of explaining how discretion (on the part of police and prosecutors) works in the legal system. I have students read these chapters in some classes and they are blown away. (Side note: In these contexts, I don’t teach about the Jim Crow stuff. In other classes I do teach about the Jim Crow stuff and I also teach Pfaff and Forman as correctives. Anyone interested in criminal justice should follow Pfaff on social media.)
But, actually, here’s the real problem. No one in the upper administration of Texas A&M (or anywhere else) has heard of Pfaff or Forman. They would have no idea if these scholars offered worthwhile “balance.” (They might have heard of David Horowitz or other right wing cranks.) So there is no one in admin with the expertise to do things you want to done. The most they are likely to do is require instructors to teach right wing cranks.
i find this kind of accusation troubling in many ways. it is true that “contested social theories” are being taught and that such doesn’t doesn’t always also teach opposing views.
at the same time, academic freedom supports the basic premise of allowing experts to teach material as they so chose. are we to have administrative oversight of marxist historians to ensure that they also teach whig history as well?
further, the idea of classes is that students expose themselves to multiple disciplines, and within majors multiple accounts or approaches to a discipline. any robust model of undergraduate education needs to account for this.
third, the suggestion that *college students,* who are adults, are being indoctrinated by being taught X approach or Y “contested social theory” in a single class, is, i think, deeply worrisome. the assumption seems to be that college students aren’t capable of thinking for themselves, of examining the material that they are taught, of asking questions, of rejecting ideas or views.
lastly, the paper provided is highly limited and tells us very little about broader trends. even if we accept that what it suggests is true more broadly, the statement “many teachers in other disciplines (specifically humanities by your count)” are doing the bad thing is at the very best irresponsibly stated so as to gin up outrage. you are suggesting that the “other humanities” aren’t to be trusted, have been ideologically captured writ large, and the further implication is that only external pressure will end that. i think, as a person who has worked in numerous humanities departments, that this *simply isn’t the case,* even if some people in these disciplines are engaged in what I consider to be poor pedagogy.
generally speaking, making excuses for administrative and governmental interference into the academy based on the grounds mentioned here isn’t going to end well for the free inquiry you want to highlight.
I hear biology departments are teaching “contested [biological] theories” as fact too, like evolution. And, in medicine, they’re teaching students about vaccines without any attention paid to contrary views or prominent critics, like Wakefield. And, in physics, critics of gravity dogma (i.e., Electric Universe theorists) receive no attention at all. This has been going on for years now.
Note that this isn’t often a problem in philosophy though; you’re allowed to say any old shit and so long as you do the appropriate intellectual posturing you’ll be taken as a gentleman and a scholar.
Comparing woke dogmas about race and gender to the theory of evolution, and critics of these dogmas to anti-vaxxers, is a good sign of how deep the rot and delusion has reached in academia.
What are these ‘woke dogmas’ you keep bleating on about, and which academics are supposed to be indoctrinating the poor deluded students with them? I honestly have no idea what the hell you’re on about.
Yes, yes, “corrupting the youth” and all that. Centuries old.
This is a really nice illustration of how these things work:
It is proposed that professors should not attempt to shame each member of a race by insisting that each such person is somehow intrinsically guilty. That might well sound pretty reasonable. Wouldn’t it be terrible pedagogy to shame students for something they can’t be – i.e., intrinsically guilty? After all, if a person’s guilt is inherited, then it can’t be intrinsic. And, anyway, shame is not conducive to learning. It is probably a rare professor who should feel that *this* proposal prohibits anything they might do in the classroom.
But, then, everyone knows: these “reasonable” proposals are intended to prohibit any discussion of white supremacy (except, perhaps, discussions defending white supremacy). And so: even not-particularly-bigoted administrators will tend to adopt rules implementing such prohibitions that prohibit a much wider range of behaviors than the “reasonable” proposals prohibit. Partly, the pressure to do this may well be purely instrumental (to protect their institution from enemies who may dishonestly cite the “reasonable” prohibition). But also: it is plausible that administrators generally ought to implement the policies intended by the relevant policy makers. And so the “reasonable” proposal turns into an unreasonable policy.
The actual way these “reasonable” proposals are implemented makes it clear that these “reasonable” proposals function as cover for unreasonable policies. (Is it plausible that philosophers are professionally inclined to focus on the “reasonable” proposal and not the unreasonable policy it covers?)
In case there are those who are unfamiliar-
‘Why Fascists Hate Universities.’ / Jason Stanley
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/05/why-fascists-hate-universities-us-bangladesh-india
“Attacks on voting, and democratic systems generally, almost invariably center on universities, and vice versa. The Yale Law School graduate and current Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has claimed that the 2020 election should not have been certified because of suspicion of voter fraud. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, Vance also proclaimed, echoing Richard Nixon: “The professors are the enemy…
In the United States, the Republican party has long been aware of the democratic potential of student movements. As it lurches closer and closer to authoritarianism, it will, like all rightwing authoritarian movements worldwide, seek to crush dissent, starting with university students and faculty.”
See also-
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/life-in-nazi-occupied-europe/controlling-everyday-life/controlling-education/
“The Nazis first focused on changing what students learned. They changed the core curriculum to emphasise sports, history and racial science as the most important subjects. In 1936, sport was taught for a minimum of two to three hours every school day. By 1938, this had been increased to five hours every day. Subjects such as religion became less important, and were eventually removed from the curriculum altogether.
The Nazis also adapted where the students learned from. They introduced new textbooks which were often racist, and promoted ideas such the need for Lebensraum . Any textbooks used to educate students had to be approved by the party.
The Nazis also placed great emphasis on who the teachers were. Under the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service Act of 7 April 1933, just three months after Hitler became chancellor, all Jewish teachers, and teachers with undesirable political beliefs (such as communists), were dismissed.”
Finally-
‘Accountability and ideology: The case of a German university under the Nazi regime’ / Dominic Detzen and Sebastian Hoffmann (2019)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1032373219836301
“Despite the Nazis’ criticism of academe as an ‘ivory tower’, Hitler’s regime ‘found enthusiastic support in German universities during the transition of 1933, from students and faculty alike, and Nazis were effective in weeding out Jews and left-wing critics, thoroughly and without mercy’ (Ericksen, 2012: 139). In academe, ‘everyone knew that the politicization of the German university was on the program’ (Giles, 1985: 101), so numerous academics united behind the regime. Inspired by the nationalistic sentiment, swift changes were made in the universities’ governance to ‘considerably tighten […] the bond’ between the regime and academe (Ericksen, 2012: 143). Submitting to National Socialist ideals, accountability norms were also amended. Research was no longer pursued solely out of scholarly interest but was to serve the Nazis’ agenda (Kneller, 1941).”
So it seems the threat to academic freedom never was the dreaded ‘woke’ mob or DEI.
The threat always was, and remains, fascists.
Hello Ian, I was born in Austria, so I know what you are speaking of. In “weeding out jews” the Nazi destroyed the german speaking academia. It is half-dead since.
Gerhard,
Here in the US, it’s only been about sixty years that most universities broadened significantly the composition of faculty, administration and students beyond a single preferred demographic group, a process that mirrored somewhat successful (if incomplete) civil rights achievements in the society as a whole.
What’s been happening in universities over the past thirty years is a reaction of the previously disproportionately privileged demographic group to this broadening of the academic community, claiming universities have become ‘hostile’ places where ‘heterodox’ views are suppressed.
The inherent irony in the explicit requirements of the Texas A & M speech codes is the claim that its purpose, purportedly, is to exclude something called ‘race and gender ideology’. This is nothing but the targeted imposition of a ‘race and gender ideology’ in the service of the historically dominant racial and gender demographic.
Fascists tend to lack a sense of irony, and the efforts to turn the clock back to the pre-civil rights era is not subtle.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, over the period from 2014-2023, hundreds of academics were fired or suspended for expressing their political views, chiefly due to pressure from the political left. In many cases, these firings occurred at public institutions, violating not just established norms of academic freedom but also the first amendment to the constitution. Officials at FIRE have suggested that this purge exceeds in scope and impact the purge of communists in academia that took place during the McCarthy era.
In reality, what we have here is one group of fascists complaining about another group of fascists challenging their corrupt stranglehold on academia.
wow
I mean the discussion here only shows one thing and that is that the country is literally falling apart.
Soon we will all be fascists – at least in the eyes of the Other.
What a logic.
I am sure one can argue, just look out over on the Leiter blog, that woke (the term is ridiculous btw) ‘ideology’ has violated academic freedom occasionally.
Let’s grant this for the sake argument.
This is still miles away from what is happening at Texas A&M and if you don’t see this, well, then something is wrong.
if your thinking, instead, is that since they have done it to us and so we can now do it them, this, as i’ve pointed out repeatedly here, is exactly what Hobbes predicted to be the ultimate demise of democracy.
Progressive at hundreds of universities spent a decade requiring job candidates to pledge allegiance to a specific, ideological conception of a diversity as a condition for getting hired. Trump and his cronies are only beginning to catch up to the terrible crimes against academic freedom the progressives have committed.
when I was at a University in Oklahoma, I had to sign a loyalty oath as a conditional of employment – one that traces back to the McCarthy era. Is that the kind of “progressive” ideological pledge you’re thinking of? It is still required of state employees today.
How long ago was this? The McCarthyist loyalty oaths were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court decades ago. If Oklahoma made you sign one any time recently, it was either toothless or an unenforceable relic.
It is certainly true that the widespread use of diversity statements in academic hiring is strongly reminiscent of the old McCarthyist loyalty oaths.
Edit:
Here’s the only loyalty oath I can find online for Oklahoma:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America and the Constitution and the laws of the State of Oklahoma, and that I will faithfully discharge, according to the best of my ability, the duties of my office or employment during such time as I am [name of office].”
This is a boilerplate oath of office. Asking state employees to pledge to follow the law when discharging their duties does not, as far as I know, raise any first amendment concerns. The old McCarthyist loyalty oath for Oklahoma also required state employees to swear that they had not, in the past five years, belonged to any subversive or communist organizations. This was an unconstitutional restriction on speech.
I disagree in the magnitude of the crime (and maybe also in the nature of the crime).
But this was not my point.
If you are a self-confessed defender of academic freedom, then you.fight against both. You don’t enter the discussion with the position that the progressives have also done it …
What is the point? The issue at stake is not what the progressives did in the past but what the conservatives (although no decent conservative would agree that thes people are worthy of the name) are doing now.
This is what this discussion is about.
Well, if Jason Stanley said it, it must be true.
Choosing not to acknowledge something makes it no less real.
We can certainly ask what might prompt the choice not to acknowledge what is happening.
The historical record of just such choices- the refusal to acknowledge when fascism is nakedly present, and declaring such a stance ‘principled’- is well-documented.
And yet here we are.
The irony in all this is that their philosophy department recently posted a job opening with AoS in French phenomenology and French 20th century. How could you talk about French philosophy in this context? There’s just no way. Any self-respecting academic who is also at the very least sympathetic to De Beavoir would see this is not a place to work at. The fact that they are looking for someone in that area of philosophy is tonedeaf or dubious at best.
I don’t think we should be accusing the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M of anything of the sort, or denigrating it as a place to work. And what a hire in that area signifies is their commitment to the kind of intellectual work that is precisely not tonedeaf at a time like this. I say this as a graduate of their M.A. program, and someone who gave a talk there a year ago. In the intellectual ecosystem of academic philosophy today, they have been and are home to a wide range of intellectual traditions, which is a special thing in any time or place. More power to them for continuing to maintain that stance.
As a former member of the philosophy department at Texas A&M, I can say that there are many people in that department doing lots of interesting and valuable work specifically on topics around colonialism, race, gender, and other concepts the administration is trying to silence (in addition to the people working on topics closer to my own, like decision theory, set theory, artificial intelligence, and the like). I hope all my former colleagues are finding effective ways to navigate this constantly changing landscape.
The entire upper administration of the university has changed twice in the two years since I left, as well as once just a year and a half before I left. The university is not being treated well by the state.
The case out of Indiana this week was interesting. For the sake of argument, assume the facts are as alleged: “During class, the instructor spoke on White Supremacy and showed a graphic that listed Make America Great Again (MAGA) as worse than police killing people of color and stated that MAGA is socially unacceptable white supremacy…[the professor also labeled] Columbus Day and ‘colorblindness’ as White Supremacy.”
Two questions:
Genuinely curious on anyone’s thoughts! (I’m skeptical that this content is appropriate in either case, especially the former. Even more so in the absence of alternative views being presented.)
Full details, including the controversial slide:
https://www.southbendtribune.com/story/news/education/2025/11/11/indiana-university-professor-removed-maga-white-supremacy-graphic-complaint-jim-banks-office/87166738007/
I took a quick glance at the offending graphic and it’s immediately clear that the facts are not as alleged. First, the graphic is organized into covert/socially acceptable and overt/socially unacceptable examples of white supremacy. It’s thus comparing examples in terms of their social acceptance, not in terms of which is “worse.” Additionally, MAGA is in the socially acceptable category, which is the opposite of what is stated in the quote. I’m not otherwise familiar with this case, but whoever wrote that quote appears either not to have comprehended a relatively simple graphic, or to have deliberately misrepresented it.
Further, I can’t imagine why discussing a graphic like this would be thought inappropriate in a class that is about social justice. How can you teach a class about social justice if you can’t discuss alleged examples of social injustice?
I happen to disagree with some of the ordering of the graphic regarding social acceptance, and I imagine in a university class this would generate good discussion. The view that it’s inappropriate to expose adult university students to the idea of white supremacy is simply infantilizing. Moreover, since I’m sure none of us are white supremacists, we should have nothing to worry about in its discussion.
Here is my ”public testimony” to the Board of Regents:
My name is Martin Peterson. I chair the Academic Freedom Council at Texas A&M University, but today I speak as a citizen.
The amendment to System Policy 08.01 raises important concerns about academic freedom. It is, of course, tempting to agree that no academic system course should “advocate race or gender ideology” since no serious academic course should promote any particular ideology.
Academics seek the truth.
However, when we seek the truth, we sometimes have to explore ideas that touch on controversial issues. It is not always clear what counts as “advocating” for an ideology in those contexts.
A reasonable observer might, for example, say that many economics courses “advocate” a capitalist ideology — in the sense that professors present arguments for capitalism and try to explain why capitalism generally leads to a more efficient distribution of resources than Soviet-style communism.
Advocating for capitalism in this sense is compatible with seeking the truth – there are strong reasons to think that capitalism has certain economic benefits over communism, and it is not inappropriate to inform students about those economic insights.
But if this form of “ideological indoctrination” is permitted, why is giving information about the useful distinction between biological sex and gender not tolerated? And why shouldn’t we tell students that racism is an important part of the nation’s history?
Every truth-seeking professor teaching sociology or history will be afraid of approaching central topics in their disciplines, simply because the Board has now singled out certain topics as more sensitive than others. A reasonable policy has to be content-neutral. But the one you have approved today is not.
We all know what happened to Melissa McCoul – and let me say, as a citizen, that I very much hope the university will have the courage to say that she was not treated fairly. No instructor should be fired without due process because of a media storm.
Another problem is that the policy grants administrators authority that rightfully belongs to the faculty.
A bedrock principle of academic freedom is that only faculty with proper subject-matter expertise are qualified to decide which materials fit with an approved course syllabus. Administrators do not have the disciplinary knowledge needed to evaluate course content. You earn the right to make these decisions by obtaining an advanced degree in a relevant field and publishing peer-reviewed research on the topic.
Politicians cannot control the pursuit of knowledge. Only experts should decide what belongs in the classroom. I very much hope that elected politicians in Texas, as well as the Board of Regents at the Texas A&M University System, understand the importance of protecting academic freedom in the State of Texas, even if this comes with a risk that some instructors may occasionally discuss certain topics in ways that you do not like.
Thank you.
I found the following sentence self-centered or even arrogant.
“Politicians cannot control the pursuit of knowledge. Only experts should decide what belongs in the classroom.”
What gives “experts” in ivory tower the monopoly of knowledge? Aren’t universities funded by the public, government, donors, and tuition?
I respectfully disagree. I have no problem as such with indirect influence (it stands to reason that, say, public discussion influences what we teach and research), but it is only the teacher (expert) who should decide what they teach in their classroom. I will not deny that there can be some restrictions on this and exactly where those restrictions lie is unclear, but these restrictions must be very few and very precise. The reason why experts have this monopoly of direct influence is simply because they know best. Insofar as teaching (and research) are about knowledge creation and truth, I think Martin is right. I think to dispute his view, you must dispute the idea that the aim of university education and research is truth and knowledge.
So, no, just because funding comes from elsewhere, those who provide the funding shouldn’t have this kind of influence. Nor should politicians.
Again, there can be influence of other, indirect kinds, and perhaps that can be very few, very circumscribed limits. But this is it.
Lastly, I don’t see the point of the remark about ‘ivory tower’. This is an old conservative trope about universities. First of all, lots and lots of university employees do not at all live in any kind of ivory tower. I dare say most don’t. Secondly, what if they did? Where that is detrimental to their teaching and research very much depends on their specialization, their specific area of expertise. Other than this last consideration, I don’t see any relevance whatsoever of talk about ivory towers.
The policy changes at Texas A&M University are terrible for academic freedom. Having said that, I believe that such policies will become the norm. I can’t imagine the public continuing to put up with the degree of political partisanship there is in the humanities. I also can’t imagine the humanities policing itself for political partisanship, so I expect the government to step in.
I don’t understand. If you defend academic freedom, then that also includes being partisan, isn’t it?
Anyway, this is just about consistency. I would really like to understand in what way the humanities – but then apparently the sciences not – are partisan. What makes us so terribly partisan that it is time to discipline us?
Finally, I would also like to understand in what way ‘the public’ can no longer put up with this alleged partisanship (surveys? polling?) and exactly how this justifies government action. For all I know, all you do here is pointing out that another kind of partisanship would be better and, well, the government will fix it for us (where ‘us’ obviously doesn’t include many readers of this blog).
What I said is compatible with academic freedom including being partisan, with the sciences being as partisan or more partisan than the humanities, and with the public being wrong to be concerned about partisanship in academia.
You ask why I believe that the public won’t put up with this degree of partisanship. My main reasons are the polling (especially but not only by Pew) showing the low regard academia is held in now, surveys of students by FIRE and other groups, and the criticisms of academia in the media.
i don’t think it is consistent but let’s drop this line (I think one should avoid being partisan in one’s teaching, although you should be biased toward truth).
I think appealing to public sentiment as justification is problematic for obvious reasons. It is flicker at the best of times, but in today’s climate, it is also artificially whipped up by politicians and others against the woke university and science. The consequences of these are and will be detrimental to the US. I don’t think one should be giving in to this. In other words, I can see that one should for pragmatic reasons take note of ‘public sentiment’, one should for many other reasons be rather skeptical of conforming to it. It is the balance of these that decides the response.
And I am really, really vary of the idea that the government should be tasked with adjusting academia to public sentiment. For one thing, the government is partisan pretty much all the time, so it is much more likely to pursue its own agenda instead of some kind of neutral arbiter. Generally. i think the idea that some alleged partisanship at universities should be countered by governmental partisanship is a straight road to hell.
And on this glorious day, the substitution of “bias against conservatives” for “the true, the good, and the beautiful” will finally be complete.
If you disagree with what I said, why not say what you disagreed with and why? If you have a good reason to offer, you might change someone’s mind.
The reason is that there is a decades-old propaganda campaign aimed at construing truth-telling as anti-conservative partisanship.
Introducing the historical context?
Highlighting the reality that ‘conservative’ scholarship has regularly consisted of an amalgam of a) specious claims, b) spurious grievances and c) special pleading, in the service of camouflage for otherwise odious views? (A recent example includes an attempt by NYT to host a learned debate under the heading ‘Have Women Ruined the Workplace?, which after some raised eyebrows, they retitled ‘Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?, which is, of course, just an exercise in ‘opening up discourse to heterodox notions’.)
Arguments grounded in reality? What fun is that?
Ian, can you humor me and elaborate on the point you are making by invoking the new york times article? Because i’m not sure how it helps your argument.
It’s simply a recent example of what those claiming to defend ‘heterodox’ perspectives (purportedly unfairly excluded from the woke academy) by posing ‘uncomfortable questions’ looks like in practice. In this instance, misogyny is given the patina of intellectual respectability and gravitas. That it was presented in the NYT was incidental, it was a handy prototype.
If you prefer, there’s a journal- the Journal of Controversial ideas’- which offers such blatantly political screeds as ‘Is Gender Affirming Care the Latest Example of the Politicisation of Psychiatry?’ (https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/5/3/297)
The purpose of smuggling camouflaged bigotry into ‘public discourse’, whether in the form of a dubious academic journal (which therefore must be included in citation lists and refuted or it’s proof of the great conspiracy to silence the oppressed conservatives), or presented in various media outlets, is to create the pretext for actions like those we are now witnessing at Texas A&M.
As I alluded to in my original comment above, citing the historical record from Germany in the 1930’s, this is not some novel or mysterious method. Infiltrating institutions of higher learning and commandeering media platforms provides the instruments to construct and broadcast narratives of justification for subsequent overt acts. Like removing all ‘undesirables’ from the faculty. The action to prohibit ‘racial or gender ideology’ becomes, in this narrative of justification, a necessary step to protect the university and impressionable young minds from indoctrination in the dogma that is DEI, or some such.
This is bog standard fascism, barely updated in form or content. I’ll revise that- it’s not updated in form or content at all.
Perhaps this clarifies a bit.
Thanks.
“In this instance, misogyny is given the patina of intellectual respectability and gravitas.”
Based on the tenor of your posts, I suspect—though this may be unfair—that you reach conclusions like this out of the gate; impressionistically rather than critically. Is it really fair to say that you gave the offending work a good analytical and empirical vetting before you reached the above conclusion? Or did you just assume it due to, for example, your political and ideological sympathies with feminism? If so, perhaps such interpretive reflexes reflect the very mindset that frustrates those who call for more heterodoxy; it thus helps make their point.
I think Ian has been around long enough to have become attuned to attempts to launder bigotry into the mainstream via so-called “heterodox” discourse. Could he be mistaken about this specific piece? Sure. Maybe it just looks like one of those pieces, but its content is much more nuanced or benign.
But I don’t see why Ian, or anyone here, should completely disregard prior experience and insist upon conducting a thorough “analytical and empirical vetting” of every piece that purports to be doing “heterodoxy” but facially reads as the grievances of bigots and bores.
If the worry is that a piece will trigger certain “interpretive reflexes” in the reader, then I’d also suggest that part of the responsibility lies with the “heterodox” writer, who of course also has a role to play—through their writing—in shaping how the discourse they hope to have unfolds.
‘you reach conclusions like this out of the gate’
Or, I’ve observed this same racket over many years, and continue to see the same deflections and verbal maneuvers trotted out. These are some some well-worn paths.
To add your comment, Ian, I think this piece is relevant. It’s focused on the UK, but some parts are likely to be relevant to the US context, as well as other parts of the world.
Thanks.
This seems to parallel what we see in the US-
“our data shows that far-right agitators are not as isolated, ignored or side-lined as they often claim, but part of political networks that reach into centrist political parties, including the Conservative and the Labour Party. These personal networks across the political spectrum play an important role in advancing far-right agendas. Indeed, many of the far right’s prominent actors who self-describe as ‘left behind’ white working class were in relatively powerful and privileged political positions, well-connected to members of parliament and influential in Westminster.”
And how does that relate to my claims that you were responding to?
By referencing “the degree of political partisanship there is in the humanities”, you were presupposing the conclusions of the propaganda effort.
Thankfully, one needn’t think there is “conservative bias” in philosophy to pursue an interest in the Beautiful, the True, and the Good. Nor need one expect either that an elimination of the former will naturally give way to more interest in the latter, or that pursuit of the latter will of itself dispense with the former. After all, recognizing that the self-reflective socio-historical development of these transcendental ideas, fostered through the study of philosophy, is a process continuous with our natural evolution and development as human beings doesn’t commit one to any particular political ideology – distortions of ideological thinking in the minds of some notwithstanding.
Sorry Preston, I have no idea how this relates to what I said.
No worries, QP. I was explaining that and why the issue is not one of ‘the substitution of “bias against conservatives” for “the true, the good, and the beautiful”’ — for one’s position on the value of studying the transcendental ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful, or the value of studying philosophy as the normative sciences of logic, ethics, and aesthetics (to use Peirce’s taxonomy), or the value of addressing the questions “what can I know”, “what ought I do?”, and “what may I hope” (to use Kant’s), is neither here nor there when it comes to whether one also thinks there is bias against conservatives in academia.
Indeed, one of the virtues of this way of thinking about what we’re up to as philosophers (or as stewards of the education of the young more generally) is that it strikes at a common core to human (and even non-human) cognition, more fundamental than any political stance one might take, founded as it is on reflection over the evolved and habituated capacity to take information in, synthesize it, and put it to use.
You may have misunderstood me. I certainly agree that we can, should, and in fact do study the true, the good, and the beautiful without bias.
My comment was about the propagandistic campaign to equivocate in the common consciousness the study of truth (etc) with bias against conservatives.
Happy to have a meeting of the minds. And in the interest of keeping it going, I’ll note that it was the wry undertone I was addressing, and the running together of concerns about political bias with a denial that the transcendental ideas are worth studying. I say that without prejudice as to what, in the final analysis, the polis will look like when we reach the Peircean point of view on the transcendental ideas. I genuinely think the leveraging of educational institutions for the pursuit of political goals, outside a very narrow region of common ends, is a blight on the polis no matter which group of fanatics is working the lever.
I don’t think I was denying that transcendental ideas are worth studying. I was (admittedly wryly) referencing the conservative habit to call an uncomfortable truth (or an uncomfortable good, or even an uncomfortablye aesthetic) a “bias” against them.
Finally, I am not quite sure what “leveraging of educational institutions for the pursuit of political goal” concretely looks like (can you tell me what effects that conceivably have practical bearing you conceive such leveraging to have?).
It doesn’t seem to be a ‘blight of the polis’ if our educational institutions had in them some people like JS Mill, J Dewey, WEB DuBois, etc. The philosophy of liberalism we cherish started out as a revolutionary project.
We’ll have to agree to disagree over the denotations of the terms “uncomfortable truth” and “bias” today, but we agree about the value of having people like Mill, Dewey, and DuBois in our education systems. And I wouldn’t want to diagnose any particular cases of the illicit leveraging of educational institutions for partisan political goals here, although I’ve tried to say something about the general role of the university educator in fostering a community of autonomous ethical cognition in a time of revolutionary Sittlichkeit in a 2018 essay, “Education is the Art of Making Humanity Ethical”. It’s available at my website.
Sorry for the self-citation, but that is my considered view, and I took the time to work it up there.
What would it look for the humanities to not be politically partisan?
That’s a good philosophical question, but I don’t understand why you are addressing it to me. My claim was not that the public won’t put up with political partisanship. My claim was that they won’t put up with so much.
The reason for the awkwardness of “advocate … topics” is because the originally proposed verb was “teach”. Then they changed it because, presumably, they recognized that that was too broad. But they don’t seem to have noticed that this now makes the policy senseless: “advocate topics” is meaningless, and the exception for approved courses only made sense for the old wording — why would university leadership grant some faculty the freedom to inappropriately use their position to advocate for (and not just teach about) gender ideology?
The policy, as written, appears to preclude one version of the Christian doctrine of original sin, according to which all members of the human race are shamefully fallen, perhaps even guilty, due to the actions of our ancestors Adam and Eve. Interesting!