In the late 1980s, Jesse Jackson famously led a bunch of Stanford students in a march, shouting, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” Universities broadly complied, hollowing out core course requirements in Western Civilization.
The result has been an understandable lament on the Right that our universities have no moral core and that they transmit no common cultural inheritance or shared intellectual framework.
But that’s no longer true, as a recent report by Speech First, titled “No Graduation without Indoctrination,” documents. The Western-minded framework that higher education once relied on has simply been replaced by a different, noxious values system.
If you went to college, you’re familiar with course requirements. Even if you’re a math major, you might need to take two courses in the humanities. Even if you’re an English major, you might need to take two courses in quantitative reasoning. Some universities require a few courses in a foreign language. And now, two-thirds of universities require you to take coursework in neo-Marxist ideology.
They don’t advertise it as such, of course. Rather, they advertise it as part of their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, or some similar Orwellian moniker. But in reviewing the course requirements, Speech First didn’t code for course descriptions that said, “It’s good to respect minorities and appreciate other cultures.” Rather, they coded for requirements that coerced students into taking course credits infected and inflected by neo-Marxist ideology.
What they found were courses such as Pomona College’s “Queering Childhood,” which “examines the figure of the Child and how this figuration is used by politics, law, and medicine to justify continued cultural investment in reproductive heteronormativity and productive able-bodiedness.” Or courses such as the University of Minnesota’s “Queer Kinship: Undoing the American Family,” which insists that “the American family only exists within U.S. mythology built on imperialism and settler colonialism.” Or, your more run-of-the-mill courses such as “Social & Racial Justice: Advocacy and Action,” which trains students to be social justice warriors who “work in teams to create a podcast about a social or racial justice issue.”
Maybe because most college students realize they have better things to do, colleges are putting their thumbs on the scales by effectively forcing students to imbibe this ideological dreck. It’s kind of a marvel how we got here. Egghead liberal academics have little intellectual or moral conviction outside of feeling that schools should teach that racism is bad. Neo-Marxist academics came along and said, “OK, we’ll label our anti-white race hatred as anti-racist so you have to teach it.” Academics, more afraid than anyone of being called racist, agreed. And, for the most part, until very recently, politicians didn’t really notice.
Fortunately, that’s changing. The red state pushback against DEI on campus has swung into full gear. Texas and Florida are leading the way, and it seems likely that within the next few years, DEI administrators will be a thing of the past in many public red state universities.
Yet, as the Speech First report shows, targeting DEI administrators does not go far enough. These administrators have helped reshape the required academic core of universities so that students can’t get out of there without taking DEI courses. And, of course, you can’t do well in a DEI course without expressing your support for DEI. Therefore, two-thirds of colleges require students to express support for DEI to graduate.
Speech First and the Goldwater Institute have teamed up to create model legislation to address this issue. Their “Freedom from Indoctrination Act” would require college trustees to root out direct and indirect DEI graduation requirements.
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And, while they’re at it, it would require them to reinsert at least a little bit of Western civilization, or at least a little bit about America. There’s no reason whatsoever why a bachelor’s degree should require training in intersectionality. But there’s every reason why we should expect our college graduates to have studied the Constitution.
Most colleges are totally enthralled to DEI ideology. And blue state leaders are likely quite comfortable running colleges as ideological training camps. But in red states, leaders must not merely push back against DEI administrators, but against every way that DEI has infected and corrupted the college experience. A great first step would be to eliminate all DEI course requirements — to allow for graduation without indoctrination once again.
Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and serves on the board of Speech First.
