A Democratic curriculum for blue states, a Republican curriculum for red states? ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. The incursion into academic freedom represented by such Republican attacks on public-university curricula as Floridaâs âStop WOKE Actâ has an answer, of sorts, in Democratic legislation in New York State that, as The Chronicleâs Eva Surovell [reports]( would ârequire all 89 campuses in the State University of New York and City University of New York systems to establish courses in ethnic studies, womenâs studies, and social justice. The legislation would also require students to complete at least one three-credit course in one of those disciplines to graduate.â New York Senate Bill 1452 offers no definitional criteria for âwomenâs studiesâ or âsocial justiceâ courses, but its understanding of âethnic studiesâ is curiously restrictive: âFor the purposes of this section, âethnic studiesâ shall mean an interdisciplinary and comparative study of race and ethnicity with special focus on four historically defined racialized core groups: Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latina and Latino Americans.â So youâre out of luck if you want to count a course on, say, Arab-American encounters with the U.S. surveillance state after 9/11, or the postgenocide Armenian networks that extend from Massachusetts to Southern California, or the role of Hasidic Jews in the culture, politics, and urban geography of Brooklyn â to name a handful of the potentially infinite series of topics one might have assumed would qualify as âethnic studies.â (Never mind that ethnicity is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Nothing in the text of the bill explains why acceptable topics of ethnic studies are all U.S.-based, a restriction that does not apply to womenâs studies or social justice courses.) This legislative intervention could seem weirdly arbitrary â why just these topics, and why now? The obvious answer is that Republicans have made ethnic studies and related fields into political symbols of the universityâs leftward tilt; by the binary logic of partisan politics, therefore, Democrats have taken them up as a cause. Will Creeley, the legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told me that bills like SB 1452 are what happen when politicians realize that âuniversities are really interesting political signaling grounds.â But as written, he said, the bill is probably kosher, since it merely demarcates required fields of study without either prescribing or prohibiting specific attitudes or arguments in the classroom. He compared it to red-state bills like South Carolinaâs Reach (Reinforcing Education on Americaâs Constitutional Heritage) [Act]( which requires courses on the American founding. While Reach is surely meant as a signal to conservative voters, thatâs fine so long as the South Carolina legislature doesnât âreach into the classroomâ and tell professors that they canât, for instance, excoriate the Founders as racists or génocidaires. But âthe possibility for overprescription is very high,â Creeley told me. What begins as political signaling to a partisan electoral base could end up as political indoctrination inside the classroom. It might be better if legislatures abstained on principle from topical interventions into university curricula. Otherwise, they risk heedlessly accelerating the political polarization of attitudes toward the university. The text of South Carolinaâs Reach Act is pretty benign, but the billâs very existence has a propagandistic character evinced by that loaded â vague yet resonant â word âheritage.â Speaking of vagueness and resonance: While the proposed New York State billâs definition of ethnic studies strikes me as peculiarly narrow, more symptomatic from the point of view of ideological signaling is the radical underspecification of the definition of âsocial justice,â left entirely undefined. Thatâs possible only because everyone already knows that the phrase is code for a suite of progressive policy commitments with strong partisan coloring. There is no doubt that, to the extent that partisan political actors are exerting corrupting pressure on the mission of the university, Republicans are largely to blame. That is true even if you consider undesirable such Democratic regulatory efforts as the ramped up Title IX enforcement called for by the Obama administrationâs 2011 Dear Colleague letter. may be plenty of left-wing political pressure in our colleges, but it hasnât mostly been coming from the state. If bills like New Yorkâs 1452 catch on, that could change. Scholars should be very, very wary of these efforts. They risk degrading education to a partisan political contest: a Democratic curriculum when Democrats are in power, a Republican curriculum when Republicans are in power. Nothing is more alien to the universityâs mission. NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. Correction In last weekâs newsletter, I erroneously named Holden Thorp, editor in chief of the Science family of journals, as the author of an essay about Natureâs endorsement of Joe Biden for president in 2020. The essay was written by the editorial board of Nature, and Thorp had merely expressed his support for it on Twitter. The error has been corrected. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [The Right-Wing War on Accreditation]( By Jarrod Kelly [STORY IMAGE]( Republicans are irate that their plans to remake higher education are being stymied. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [Stanford Law Studentsâ Infantile Protests]( By Andrew Koppelman [STORY IMAGE]( Their hypersensitive activism will not make them good lawyers. THE REVIEW | OPINION [Ideological Signaling Has No Role in Research]( By Christopher J. 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- âAlthough she did not â contrary to scuttlebutt â have intercourse with a chicken in his militantly provocative Pink Flamingos (1972), her sex scene in that film is one of the most discomfiting in cinema history.â In The New York Review of Books, Negar Azimi [on the actress and writer]( Cookie Mueller, whose collected works have recently been published by Semiotext(e). Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [The Future of Advising - Buy Now]( [The Future of Advising]( Good advising is widely seen as central to student success, but it is one of the most misunderstood and under-supported divisions on campus. [Order your copy]( to learn how university leaders can improve advising systems to help close equity gaps, and ensure students effectively navigate their path to a degree. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2023 [The Chronicle of Higher Education](
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