Many people across the political spectrum were alarmed when they learned administrators at Texas A&M had prevented a philosophy professor from teaching the works of Plato because it violated legislative regulations designed to eliminate “woke” curricula in the state’s institutions of higher learning. Many conservatives, while generally sympathetic to efforts to eliminate left-wing indoctrination in college and university curricula, agree that legislative interventions of this kind can blur lines between reasonable guidelines designed to eliminate indoctrination and outright censorship. This episode, and some others like it, suggest that recent attempts by conservatives to push back on academic indoctrination have not been as well-thought-out as some may have hoped.
According to a 2025 report from PEN America, lawmakers in 15 states passed 21 bills designed to regulate or even censor courses taught at public colleges and universities.
“Censorship is, sadly, now an intractable reality on college and university campuses, with serious negative impacts for teaching, research, and student life,” Amy Reid, program director of Freedom to Learn at PEN America, explained.
But PEN America is guilty of throwing many different kinds of initiatives into the same “censorship” basket. Some of these legislative interventions may have reached inappropriately into the kinds of books or subjects that can be taught in the classroom. But others banned “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs or required a degree of intellectual diversity in campus hiring. That is not censorship, but a reasonable step to push back on DEI censorship and propaganda in higher education.
It is difficult, especially in higher education, for legislatures to control the academic curriculum while maintaining a veneer of academic freedom. Unlike with fourth graders, we expect (and hope) that college students can read from a variety of texts while thinking critically about the themes and messages the books contain. Whether they assign Plato, Nietzsche, the Bible, or even the deservedly maligned “1619 Project,” professors should have wide latitude in assigning works they believe will introduce students to different approaches to human nature and the world in which they live.
Conservative-leaning professors have always taught students about Marxism, communism, feminism, and other controversial subjects. Have they occasionally added William F. Buckley? Are they more likely to include Edmund Burke? Perhaps. But conservatives have rarely tried to propagandize students in regard to their point of view in the way that leftist academics have promoted their ideological doctrines in writings, lectures, and classroom presentations. It is one thing to read Marx, Freud, or Marcuse, quite another to present them as exemplars of true doctrine. Moreover, nearly every radical idea taught in “woke” programs can be traced back to the writings of some “dead white male” that conservatives have been criticized for presenting in their own courses.
But the real problem in higher education is so deeply rooted as to defy reasonable efforts to reform it. Over the past several decades, colleges and universities have organized themselves around a dubious ideological doctrine, in this case the so-called “diversity ideology,” which asserts that some groups have been oppressed throughout American history, other groups have oppressed them, and it is the task of higher education to redress those injustices. This is a comprehensive doctrine that controls teaching, curricula, appointments, and promotions at nearly every college and university in the country. It has done so for the past four or five decades.
The “oppressed” are favored groups: blacks, Hispanics, feminists, immigrants, environmentalists; the “oppressors” are white people, mostly white men. By some coincidence, the oppressed groups are also key constituent groups of the Democratic Party. The diversity doctrine also controls the delegate selection process for the party’s national conventions. It also links higher education to one of the major political parties, contributing to the politicization of colleges and universities.
Many thoughtful people wonder why college faculty and administrative leaders are wholly made up of liberals, leftists, and Democrats, while conservatives are hard to find on any college campus. This has occurred, more or less, by political design over many years and under pressure from the federal government and groups organized to promote the diversity ideology.
Conservatives are not welcome on college campuses because they do not accept the diversity ideology. Conservatives are as unwelcome on a college campus as a free-market economist in a socialist party. This happens not because professors teach the wrong books — though one could note that some books are more worthwhile than others — but because the diversity ideology is now the guiding force throughout the contemporary university. Efforts to reform these institutions will have to find ways to detach them from the diversity ideology.
What is the right balance on campus now? Liberal and left-wing academics do not ask this question because they are not interested in balancing institutions that they already control. Conservatives are uncomfortable with the question because they do not think that these institutions should be organized around ideological doctrines or interest groups in the first place.
Is it possible, for the sake of argument, to reach a rough agreement about what a college education should look like? In that world, professors are expected to present works representing different viewpoints, but they do not conduct classes as activists or representatives of ideological or partisan views, and most certainly do not promote orthodoxies that all are expected to embrace.
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The highest compliment teachers should receive is that students leave their classrooms without knowing their particular views. This was what luminaries like Thomas Sowell, Jacques Barzun, Allen Bloom, and others said they wished to see. They believed it was possible for teachers to leave students with a thorough understanding of Marxism without turning them into Marxists. This distinction seems to be lost on many in the modern professoriate. Even when students are aware of a professor’s political leanings from their statements outside the classroom, they shouldn’t expect those to be the point of lectures.
At Harvey Mansfield’s first meeting of a class on “Manliness” a few decades ago, several rabid feminists showed up ready for a fight. But they were baffled when Mansfield began the course with a discussion of how Aristotle understood courage. He may not have turned them into followers of the ancient philosopher, but that wasn’t the point.
James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
