In recent years, universities have begun to prioritize promulgating their highly progressive racial politics over instilling students with the appropriate academic knowledge. Colleges, particularly elite colleges, have instituted policies, course requirements, and programs designed to inculcate students with radical, left-leaning values often centered on race and racism.
While professors endorsing the idea that the nation’s infrastructure is inherently racist and berating students for supporting police is concerning, what’s more worrisome are university-level policies that propagate harmful and divisive narratives such as critical race theory and implicit bias. Most large universities have courses centered on these topics, and an increasing number of colleges require students to take such courses to graduate.
California State University, the largest university system in the United States, will require students to take a social justice or ethnic studies course; University of Pittsburgh students will be required to take a class on how to be an anti-racist and the contemporary anti-black sentiment in America; students at Emory University will need to take a class regarding structural inequality and racism; and MIT, while not requiring students to take a diversity-centered course to graduate, mandates that students attend diversity, equity, and inclusion training centered on the exploration of power, different types of oppression, and the definition of privilege before they can register for classes.
While these universities only represent a small percentage of those requiring students to enroll in social justice or anti-racism courses, they demonstrate a concerning trend in higher education of mandating that students take classes that are not only unrelated to their field of study but also perpetuate pernicious ideas of inherent and systemic racism.
Equally concerning is the fervent endorsement of critical race theory in higher education: the idea that all components of U.S. society, including the law and legal institutions, are inherently racist and function to exploit and oppress people of color. When former President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning the teaching of the highly destructive ideology in most college settings, several universities vehemently opposed the action.
The provost of Stanford University sent a universitywide email denouncing the ban, stating it “threatens to have a chilling effect” on the university’s attempts to create inclusive and diverse programs. A University of Iowa department told students the order “prohibits trainings that are crucial to progressing toward a more equitable and just society” and threatened a student with dismissal or probation for questioning the school’s statement. And University of Oregon President Michael Schill announced the school would not comply with the order, stating the ban on teaching critical race theory “will not deter [the university] from this important work.” Notably, President Joe Biden not only reversed Trump’s ban on critical race theory but is also signaling his intent to promote the ideology on college campuses.
Many of the speakers, events, and programs hosted by universities also promote highly progressive racial agendas. Ibram X. Kendi, a controversial Boston University professor and leading critical race theorist and anti-racism author, has become a popular speaker at many universities. Kendi argues the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” He has been invited to speak by many universities, including Harvard, Tulane, and Northwestern. At Tulane’s event, faculty were separated based on their racial identity. Groups included “Asian/Pacific Islander,” “Black,” “Chinese,” “Latinx,” “Indigenous,” and a special “White Anti-Racist Learning Community” group.
Other distressing events include Columbia’s “deconstructing whiteness” workshop where students examined “whiteness and white privilege to facilitate the development of an antiracist lens;” Tufts’ “Online Retreat for White Christian Folks,” which prompted “White people to search their souls;” and Purdue University’s event with critical race theorist and White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, which covered “racism and manipulation of White people” and striving to “be less white.”
Universities can serve as catalysts or incubators for activism. Indeed, students have often been on the front lines of many of the nation’s most important and admirable social movements, such as the fight for civil rights or protests over the Vietnam War. However, colleges must primarily serve as academic institutions and should not be used as instruments to promote the increasingly radical social and racial values of university faculty and administrators.
Kyle Reynolds studies public policy and economics at Indiana University and serves as a correspondent for Campus Reform.
