The Review: Indoctrination nation

On the "totalizing moralisms" of the left and right. 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](. Back in 1992, in Oregon, a homophobic ballot measure was introduced promising to withhold public funds from any institution thought “to promote, encourage, or facilitate homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism.” Moreover, the measure proposed that the state’s Department of Higher Education “shall assist in setting a standard for Oregon’s youth that recognizes homosexuality … as abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse and that these behaviors are to be discouraged and avoided.” As Linda Ray Pratt describes in her contribution to Higher Education Under Fire, a 1995 collection of essays edited by Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson (an [excerpt]( from the editors’ introduction appeared in our pages), the American Association of University Professors sponsored an ad campaign excoriating the backers of the measure for pushing “their own political agendas on our kids.” They accused the right-wingers behind the ballot measure of wanting to indoctrinate students — as indeed they did — and they framed their opposition as a matter of insulating both parental and instructional autonomy from nefarious political forces: “We urge you to protect your right to run our local schools and insure academic freedom in university classrooms. Vote ‘No’ on measure 9 and keep local control of our schools.” The ballot measure failed. But the recent legislation in Florida constraining both secondary and college instructors descends directly from it. Florida’s SB 266, for instance, which goes into effect on July 1, requires that “general-education core courses may not distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics … or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.” As Brian Leiter [wrote]( on his blog, “As state-mandated ideological indoctrination goes, this is remarkably brazen.” For their part, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies frame their censorial curricular campaigns as revolts against what they depict as an environment of coerced left-wing orthodoxy on campuses. Indeed, “indoctrination” has become the watchword of conservative attacks on higher education today, just as it was in the early 1990s. In 1992, in the Oregon case, the AAUP had the wit to assume the mantle of libertarian righteousness against the totalitarian specter of state censorship, effectively turning the tables on charges of indoctrination from the right. But then as now, the higher-ed landscape affords both conservative and liberal critics plenty of evidence that narrow political orthodoxies have indeed been inappropriately institutionalized. Higher Education Under Fire contains several liberal and left contributors looking askance at such orthodoxies. Joan W. Scott’s essay in particular, “The Rhetoric of Crisis in Higher Education,” applies with astonishing relevance to our own moment. “There are those,” Scott writes, “on the right and left, determined to impose totalizing regimes of truth about the necessary and unitary meanings of class, race, sex, and gender. And there are the self-appointed mediators — of every rank and status — who offer ‘diversity workshops’ with pious lessons.” She laments “totalizing moralisms, the policing of words and actions of community members, the shaming and/or ostracism of dissenters, and the attempt to use personal guilt as a way of producing understanding of one’s own errors.” This highly psychologized species of bureaucratized activism has grown rather than diminished in power and institutional scope in the nearly 30 years since Scott’s essay. There is simply no way to account for the current right-wing legislative assault on higher education without acknowledging that fact. The backlash might have been foreseen — indeed, it was foreseen. In their prescient contribution to Higher Education Under Fire, “A Critique of Critical Pedagogy,” Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff write that “the time has come when some serious efforts at left self-criticism have to be ventured, even if they give some aid and comfort to the enemy.” Otherwise, both the activist program and the schools themselves become vulnerable to the depredations of the right. Jay and Graff’s position, encapsulated in Graff’s slogan “teaching the conflict,” will seem common-sensical to many professors. Hot-button topics with major political and ideological stakes “should denote a set of problems to be explored and debated, not a new truth which teachers and students should uncritically accept.” Common-sensical, but nevertheless something that felt, in 1995, necessary to say. Jay and Graff remind their readers that “as long as education is an institution in an overlapping system of democratic processes, the school cannot and should not enforce a program that commits everyone to a predetermined worldview.” Scott’s “totalizing moralisms” within the university have, at least in the eyes of the opponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies, moved from the classroom to the administration, where they have not failed to attract the ire both of many liberal and left professors and of Republican legislators. Indeed, bills like Florida’s SB 266 not only take aim, probably unconstitutionally, at classroom teaching, but also at DEI-training programs, where they might have more likelihood of passing legal muster. SPONSOR CONTENT | Carnegie Mellon University [The Future of Science]( 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. The perceived collaboration between DEI administrators and student activists committed to the heckler’s veto or other forms of speech suppression — Yale Law and Stanford Law afford two infamous recent cases — has in the last year become an obvious point of concern for university leaders, who are perhaps belatedly heeding Jay and Graff’s warning that “theorizing the practice of entire institutions of higher education means thinking from the viewpoint of conservatives, liberals, and others with whom we work, not just from the viewpoint of radicals.” As James E. Ryan, president of the University of Virginia, [wrote]( recently in our pages, in an essay otherwise devoted to defending the moral urgency of DEI programs: If faculty, staff, or students are required to assent to propositions that are debatable, as opposed to self-evident, such trainings would run the risk of crossing the line from education to enforced orthodoxy. If applicants have to describe how they are going to further DEI, it raises concerns that they will feel pressure to state particular beliefs in order to get hired. And if faculty are required to report on how their teaching or research efforts have promoted DEI, it risks infringing on academic freedom. Ryan’s language here is a topical and DEI-specific variation on Jay and Graff’s formula: “The definition of categories such as the disenfranchised and the dominant, oppressed and oppressor, should be a product of the pedagogical process, not its unquestioned premise.” A corollary trend: In the last few months, as our David Jesse has [written]( college presidents and other upper-level administrators have issued a series of declarations about the inviolability of free speech on college campuses. Stanford Law dean Jenny S. Martinez’s [statement]( is the most formal and elaborate. In a section called “Academic Freedom, Free Speech, DEI, and the Role of University Administrators,” Martinez specifically addresses the relationship between free speech and DEI administration. For Martinez, “the commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion actually means that we must protect free expression of all views.” And she continues by forcefully delimiting the jurisdiction of diversity administrators: “When a disruption occurs and the speaker asks for an administrator to help restore order, the administrator who responds should not insert themselves into debate with their own criticism of the speaker’s views and the suggestion that the speaker reconsider whether what they plan to say is worth saying, for that imposes … institutional orthodoxy and coercion.” In the clash of “totalizing moralisms,” the left has student activists and diversity administrators, and the right has the state. The tools are asymmetrical, and for that reason many critics of DeSantis’s crusade purport to think that all discussions of events like those at Stanford Law are distractions from the authoritarian machinations of the right. Whether that’s true tactically or politically remains to be seen. Analytically, it strikes me as insupportable. If you want to understand what’s happening in legislatures and electoral politics in Florida, in Texas, in North Carolina, and in other red and purple states, you have to look hard at what’s happening on campus. Next week, I’ll turn to some of the other essays in Higher Education Under Fire, specifically those dealing with higher ed’s fiscal crises and their relationship to partisan politics. For now, check out Joan W. Scott’s “[The Rhetoric of Crisis in Higher Education]( Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff’s “[A Critique of Critical Pedagogy]( Linda Ray Pratt’s “[Going Public: Political Discourse and the Faculty Voice]( and James E. Ryan’s “[DEI: The Case for Common Ground]( ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Strategic-Leadership Program for Department Chairs] [Join us in June]( for a virtual professional development program which will provide the space, time, and tools to help department chairs take on the challenges and opportunities of the role. Through workshops, high-level seminars, and individual development plans, chairs will think strategically about their departmental and institutional impact. [Register today!]( The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [DEI: The Case for Common Ground]( By James E. Ryan [STORY IMAGE]( There’s more room for agreement than might appear. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [The Hypocrisy of English-Only ‘Decolonization’]( By Eric Adler [STORY IMAGE]( How dare colleges preach diversity while slashing language study? Recommended - “The cold and malnourished Soviet scientists on Kulik’s expeditions, meanwhile, descended into drunken brawls and affairs with locals.” In the New York Review of Books, [Sophie Pinkham writes about the mysterious]( 1908 Tunguska explosion, by way of Andy Bruno’s new book on the subject. - “Locke suggested that matter might be capable of thought, paving the way for other thinkers to consider that consciousness itself might be an emergent property of matter. (Although Locke’s suggestion sparked horror among many of his peers, it arguably holds similarities to the much older Christian tradition of traducianism.)” In the blog for the Journal of the History of Ideas, Carolyn Mackie [on the shifting grid of body/soul dualism]( from antiquity to the present. - “Historians, like all scholars working with narrative, think in metaphors of which they are often unaware themselves. These figures determine how we tell our stories about the past.” In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael S. Roth [writes about a new collection]( of Hayden White’s essays. - “To prepare well, we will have to find an alternative to the blind enthusiasm and lazy fatalism that have too often characterized American discussions about technology.” The editors of Commonweal [on the threats of AI](. And check out the Review’s recent [forum]( on the topic. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | Adelaide University [Pushing the Boundaries of Agriculture in Space]( Discover how this University is sustaining a long-term human presence in space through plants. FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Restructuring a University - The Chronicle Store]( [Restructuring a University]( In 2022, Henderson State University declared financial exigency after realizing it could no longer avoid hard choices. 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