What Florida's Illegitimate "Stop WOKE Act" Ruling means for Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

What Florida's Illegitimate "Stop WOKE Act" Ruling means for Texas

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 18, 2026

The federal courts have now said plainly what many educators, students, civil rights advocates, and defenders of academic freedom have been saying for years: the state cannot turn the university classroom into an ideological command center.

As reported by Politico, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit struck down key higher education provisions of Florida’s so-called Stop WOKE Act, the 2022 law championed by Governor Ron DeSantis to restrict how race, gender, white privilege, systemic racism, sexism, and related concepts could be taught in public colleges and universities. The ruling is a major blow to one of the signature laws in the anti-DEI, anti-“woke,” anti-academic freedom playbook.

The court’s language is striking. Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee, called Florida’s theory a “breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse” in the very classrooms where students are supposed to wrestle with difficult ideas (Atterbury, 2026). The court also stated that, “If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it" (Atterbury, 2026).

That language matters. It refuses the cynical argument that because professors at public universities are paid by the state, their teaching becomes government speech. In other words, the state cannot simply say: “We pay your salary, therefore we own your mind, your syllabus, your interpretation of history, and your professional judgment.”

This is not a small legal technicality. It is a profound defense of the university as a space of inquiry.

The Stop WOKE Act sought to regulate not simply what could be said, but which perspectives could be made available to students. It targeted concepts involving racism, sexism, privilege, unconscious bias, and systemic inequality, while imposing serious institutional and employment penalties. 

The Legal Defense Fund noted that violations carried potentially severe consequences: universities could lose access to state performance funding, while individual instructors could face dismissal. The ACLU’s case describes the law as a classroom censorship measure that severely restricted educators and students from learning and talking about race and gender in higher education classrooms.

This ruling therefore speaks beyond Florida. It speaks to a broader authoritarian impulse in state policy: the effort to use legislative power to chill teaching, narrow curriculum, punish dissent, intimidate faculty, and erase the histories and lived experiences of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, LGBTQIA+, women, immigrant, and other marginalized communities.

For Florida, the decision is a repudiation of a governing strategy that has treated public higher education as a battlefield for culture war politics. The state’s attack on “wokeness” has not been about intellectual openness. It has been about control—control over language, history, curriculum, faculty governance, hiring, student support, and institutional mission.

Florida has become a testing ground for this politics, from the Stop WOKE Act to the hostile takeover of New College of Florida. The goal has been to remake public higher education not as a democratic public good, but as an instrument of state ideology. The Eleventh Circuit ruling interrupts that project and reaffirms that the First Amendment still has something to say when politicians attempt to police the boundaries of knowledge.

For Texas, the ruling should be read carefully.

Texas’ SB 17 is not identical to Florida’s Stop WOKE Act. SB 17 focuses primarily on banning diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, programs, required DEI statements, and certain DEI-related activities at public institutions of higher education. The University of Texas at Austin describes SB 17 as a law that prohibits public institutions from engaging in specified DEI activities, effective January 1, 2024. The enrolled bill itself amends the Texas Education Code to regulate “diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions of higher education.”

Still, the family resemblance is unmistakable. Florida’s law and Texas’ law emerge from the same national movement. Both are premised on the idea that state legislatures should decide which institutional commitments to equity are permissible, which histories may be taught without fear, which student supports may exist, and which words become suspect.

The consequences of SB 17 were already severe within months of its implementation. On May 14, 2024, then–University of Texas System Chancellor J. B. Milliken testified before the Texas Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education that UT institutions had closed 21 DEI offices, eliminated 311 full- and part-time positions that had previously focused on DEI, and canceled 681 contracts, programs, and trainings. Milliken estimated that more than $25 million had been saved or redirected to other university purposes. These figures came from Milliken’s legislative testimony—not from a separate UT System report—and were documented in the official Senate hearing and contemporary reporting by KUT (Fogel, 2026).

The Florida ruling does not automatically invalidate Texas’ SB 17. But it does send an unmistakable warning: when state policy crosses from governance into viewpoint discrimination, when it chills academic speech, when it punishes institutions or educators for making certain ideas available to students, it enters dangerous constitutional territory.

This is especially important because anti-DEI laws rarely operate only through their text. They operate through fear. They invite over-compliance. They encourage administrators to preemptively close programs, cancel events, rename offices, erase webpages, avoid words, discipline faculty, and interpret the law more broadly than required in order to avoid political retaliation.

That is how censorship works in practice. It does not always arrive as a direct order. Sometimes it arrives as a memo, a compliance training, a legislative hearing, a threat to funding, or a phone call from someone who “just wants to make sure” the university understands the political climate.

The Eleventh Circuit’s ruling pushes back against this climate of fear. It reminds us that public universities are not simply agencies of the state. They are institutions with a democratic function: to cultivate inquiry, foster debate, preserve knowledge, produce research, and educate students capable of thinking critically about the world they inherit.

That democratic function is especially urgent in states like Florida and Texas, where demographic change, racial inequality, attacks on public education, and struggles over curriculum are deeply intertwined. The fight over DEI is not only about university bureaucracy or so-called "viewpoint diversity." It is about whether public institutions will tell the truth about our histories and prepare students to build a more just future.

The deeper question is who gets to decide what students are allowed to know?

If politicians can ban disfavored ideas in the name of “anti-discrimination,” then anti-discrimination law itself is turned upside down. Rather than protecting people from exclusion, it becomes a weapon for suppressing conversations about exclusion. Rather than expanding freedom, it narrows the intellectual life of the university.

That is why this ruling matters. It reasserts the university as a place where difficult ideas may be confronted rather than prohibited, where professors exercise professional judgment rather than serve as instruments of the state, and where education prepares students for democratic thought—not political obedience.

For Florida, the ruling is a devastating rebuke to the DeSantis administration’s effort to govern higher education through ideological prohibition.

For Texas, it is a cautionary signal that laws targeting DEI, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, race-conscious inquiry, and academic freedom may face serious constitutional scrutiny when they attempt to control speech, viewpoint, curriculum, or the conditions under which faculty and students pursue knowledge.

And for the rest of us, it is a reminder that higher education must be defended not only as a workplace or a credentialing system, but as one of the remaining public spaces where democracy can still be practiced.

This decision does not end the struggle. Florida may continue to litigate. Texas lawmakers may continue to expand their attacks. Other states may refine their strategies. But the ruling gives educators, students, civil rights groups, faculty organizations, and communities a powerful language of resistance.

A university worthy of the name cannot be built on state-mandated silence.

It must be a place where students can ask hard questions, where faculty can teach with integrity, where histories of racism and resistance are not erased, and where the freedom to learn is understood as inseparable from the freedom to teach.

That is the meaning of this ruling. And that is why it matters far beyond Florida. 

There's a lot more to the policy context, of course, with other bills like SB 12 and SB 37 at play, the former restricting instruction, programming, student support, and educator conduct in K–12 schools, and the latter impacting faculty governance, changing controls curricula and academic programs. The cumulative effect is a vertically integrated system of ideological control stretching from prekindergarten through graduate education.

References

Atterbury, A. (2026, July 7). “Breathtaking assertion of power”: Appeals court slams door on Florida “Stop WOKE” law championed by DeSantis,Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/07/florida-desantis-stop-woke-law-ruling-00988728

Fogel, B. (2024, May 14). Are public universities doing enough to comply with Texas’ DEI ban? Lawmakers will decide, KUT 90.5. https://www.kut.org/education/2024-05-14/are-public-universities-doing-enough-to-comply-with-texas-dei-ban-lawmakers-will-decide

Pernell v. Commissioner of the Florida State Board of Education, Nos. 22-13992, 22-13994 & 23-10616 (11th Cir. July 7, 2026). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/23-10616/23-10616-2026-07-07.html

Texas Legislature. (2025). Senate Bill 12, 89th Legislature, Regular Session: Enrolled version.

Texas Legislature. (2025). Senate Bill 37, 89th Legislature, Regular Session: Enrolled version.

Texas Senate, Subcommittee on Higher Education. (2024, May 14). Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education [Video recording].

‘Breathtaking assertion of power’: Appeals court slams door on Florida ‘Stop Woke’ law championed by DeSantis

The decision from a divided 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit is a devastating, possibly final blow to the so-called Stop WOKE act touted by the DeSantis administration.



Florida’s Legislature approved the “anti-woke” legislation touted by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022. The state, though, has been blocked from enforcing the policies ever since. | Lynne Sladky/AP

By Andrew Atterbury

07/07/2026 02:25 PM EDT|Updated: 07/07/2026 05:35 PM EDT

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Florida’s anti-woke law restricting how lessons on race and gender can be taught in colleges and universities — policies championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis — violates the free speech rights of professors, a panel of appeals court judges ruled Tuesday.

The decision from a divided 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit is a devastating, possibly final blow to the so-called Stop WOKE Act touted by the DeSantis administration. The judges affirmed a 2022 decision that labeled Florida’s rules as “positively dystopian,” doubling down by arguing the law is “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse” in the very classroom space where students are supposed to “puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”

“If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it,” Judge Britt C. Grant, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote in the opinion.

Grant was joined by Judge Charles R. Wilson, a Bill Clinton appointee, in the ruling. But another Trump-appointed judge, Barbara Lagoa — a former Florida Supreme Court judge picked by DeSantis — wrote a striking dissent of the decision, contending the First Amendment “does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement.”

“This panel is not free to rewrite precedent simply because we dislike where it leads,” Lagoa wrote.

Florida’s Republican-led Legislature approved the “anti-woke” legislation, H.B. 7, or the Individual Freedom Act, in 2022. The state, though, has been blocked from enforcing the policies as it has been fighting in court ever since.

Directly inspired by DeSantis, the law expanded Florida’s anti-discrimination laws to prohibit schools and companies from leveling guilt or blame to students and employees based on race or sex. As such, it targets lessons over issues like “white privilege” by creating new protections for students and workers, including that a person should not be instructed to “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” due to their race, color, sex or national origin.

The other portion of Florida’s law restricting what DeSantis called “woke” workplace trainings faced a similar fate after also being rejected by an 11th Circuit panel. And, notably, it was Grant who wrote that opinion, decrying the DeSantis-backed policies as “the greatest First Amendment sin” for penalizing certain viewpoints on the job.

Tuesday’s higher education ruling was triggered by two lawsuits that have been fighting the Stop WOKE law for years. One of the lawsuits was filed by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit free speech group, on behalf of a University of South Florida professor, student, and student group, while the other was brought by the ACLU, ACLU of Florida and Legal Defense Fund on behalf of students and educators.

Both challenges alleged that the legislation pushed by DeSantis violates their freedom of speech, evidenced by how it could restrict lessons on critical topics, claiming it’s a discriminatory classroom censorship law that severely restricts how race and gender can be taught and talked about in schools.

“This ruling sets a strong precedent that higher education cannot be limited to the whims of politicians,” Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, said in a statement Tuesday.

FIRE, meanwhile, also celebrated the decision and its implications for higher education:

“Today’s important decision means that college remains a place where professors and students are allowed to debate controversial topics — even if politicians disagree with them,” said Greg H. Greubel, FIRE senior attorney.

The DeSantis administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the ruling. State Attorney General James Uthmeier, though, did throw praise at Lagoa.

“Barbara Lagoa may be the best jurist in our country,” Uthmeier said on social media. “She should be on SCOTUS.”

Proving the Value of Higher Education Requires Defending It, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 3, 2026

Proving the Value of Higher Education Requires 

Defending It

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 3, 2026

Allison Schrager’s recent Bloomberg Opinion column posted below, “Colleges Face a Choice: Prove Their Value or Risk Losing Students,” responds to Yale University’s report on public trust in higher education by arguing that colleges and universities must restore public confidence by demonstrating clearer value to students and families (Schrager, 2026). On the surface, this is a reasonable concern. Higher education is expensive. Admissions practices can be opaque. Students and parents worry about debt, employment, and whether a degree is worth the investment. Universities should take these concerns seriously.

But the problem with Schrager’s framing is that it treats mistrust as if it were primarily an institutional failure of higher education itself. That is only part of the story. As I argued in my earlier TexasEdEquity critique of the Yale report on this blog, the crisis we are facing is not simply a crisis of trust in higher education. It is a restructuring of higher education itself (Valenzuela, 2026). 

The question is not only whether universities can prove their value to the public. The question is whether the public will still be allowed to have universities worthy of trust.

Schrager writes that colleges need to prove their value or risk losing students. She is especially concerned about first-generation students who may already be uncertain about whether college is worth the time, money, and risk. That concern is real. As someone who has spent my career focused on educational equity, Mexican American and Latina/o schooling, and the public mission of universities, I share it. First-generation students deserve institutions that support them, challenge them, graduate them, and prepare them for meaningful lives and livelihoods.

Yet a narrow “return on investment” framing can unintentionally reinforce the very forces that are diminishing higher education’s democratic purpose. If the value of college is reduced to wages alone, then fields that cultivate historical understanding, critical thought, civic imagination, ethical judgment, cultural knowledge, and democratic participation become vulnerable to attack. If universities are judged only by immediate labor-market outcomes, then education becomes training, students become consumers, faculty become service providers, and the public university becomes a credentialing arm of the economy.

That is too small a vision. And not at all becoming of the University of Texas at Austin, one of only two of the state's flagship institutions.

The value of higher education is not simply that it helps people get jobs, though it often does. Its deeper value is that it helps people navigate complexity in an ever-changing world. It teaches students to read closely, reason carefully, evaluate evidence, ask better questions, understand historical context, communicate across difference, and participate in democratic life. These are not luxuries. They are survival skills for a society facing climate disruption, artificial intelligence, democratic backsliding, economic inequality, racial conflict, public health crises, and disinformation at scale.

Indeed, employers themselves continue to say that they value precisely these capacities. The Association of American Colleges and Universities has repeatedly found that employers want graduates who can think critically, communicate effectively, adapt, solve complex problems, and work across difference (Finley, 2023, 2025). These are not narrow technical competencies. They are liberal learning outcomes. They are also democratic capacities.

So when Schrager suggests that “less elite” schools may need to become “less academic” and provide more job training, we should pause. Students from working-class, first-generation, rural, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and immigrant communities do not deserve a thinner education than students at Yale. They do not deserve only training while elites receive philosophy, history, literature, political theory, art, science, and critical debate. That would reproduce the very hierarchy higher education should challenge: broad intellectual formation for the privileged, narrow workforce preparation for everyone else.

The problem is not that public universities are too academic. The problem is that they are being pressured to abandon their academic and democratic missions in order to survive political attack, austerity, and market discipline (Valenzuela, 2026; also see Wray, 2024).

This is where Schrager’s institutional affiliation matters. Schrager is identified as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. That does not disqualify her from writing about higher education, nor does it mean every point she makes is wrong. But it does require context. 

The Manhattan Institute is not a neutral observer of higher education’s trust crisis. It has been directly involved in campaigns to reshape public universities, including through model legislation aimed at abolishing DEI bureaucracies, ending mandatory diversity training, restricting diversity statements, and eliminating identity-based preferences (Manhattan Institute, 2023). Inside Higher Ed reported that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-DEI higher education agenda drew from Manhattan Institute model legislation developed with Christopher Rufo and others (Moody, 2023).

This matters because the language of “restoring trust,” “rigor,” so-called “viewpoint diversity,” and “academic excellence” can operate in two very different ways. It can be a good-faith call for better universities. Or it can be a political vocabulary used to justify state intervention, program elimination, curricular control, anti-DEI laws, donor influence, and the disciplining of faculty and students whose work challenges inequality.

We are seeing the latter across the country.

In Texas, Senate Bill 17 eliminated DEI offices in public universities. Senate Bill 37 has expanded state authority over curriculum, governance, and faculty life. Programs in Mexican American and Latino Studies, African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and related fields have been threatened, consolidated, renamed, or politically scrutinized. Across the country, public higher education is being told to prove its value while the very conditions that make it valuable—academic freedom, shared governance, critical inquiry, inclusive access, intellectual breadth—are being undermined.

That is why the Yale report, while useful, is incomplete. Others have similarly noted that the report gets some things right—especially around institutional effectiveness, public confidence, transparency, and the need for universities to respond more seriously to legitimate public concerns (Rudawsky, 2026). It names real concerns: costs, admissions, grade inflation, administrative growth, free speech, and public skepticism. 

However from the vantage point of Texas, the deeper issue is power.

Higher education is not simply being misunderstood. It is being remade. And much of that remaking is being carried out by political actors, ideological organizations, donors, and think tanks that have long viewed universities as sites to be captured or disciplined.

Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains helps us understand this longer history. MacLean traces how radical libertarian networks, including those associated with Charles Koch, sought to limit democratic capacity by reshaping law, policy, education, labor, taxation, and public institutions in ways that protect concentrated wealth from democratic demands (MacLean, 2017). One does not have to accept every claim in MacLean’s book to see the relevance: higher education has long been a battleground over whether democracy will serve the public or be constrained on behalf of market power.

Katherine Stewart’s work is equally illuminating. In Money, Lies, and God, Stewart documents an anti-democratic movement that brings together Christian nationalists, billionaire networks, disinformation campaigns, and far-right organizations seeking to transform American democracy from within (Stewart, 2025). Her reporting shows that the assault on public institutions is not random. It is organized, funded, and ideologically motivated. Universities, public schools, libraries, school boards, courts, and state legislatures are all part of the same terrain.

Seen in this light, Schrager’s question—how can colleges prove their value?—needs to be turned around. Higher education should absolutely be accountable to students, families, taxpayers, and the public. But we must also ask: Who is defining value? Who benefits when value is reduced to salary? Who gains when the humanities, Ethnic Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical social sciences are framed as politically suspect or economically wasteful? Who profits when public universities are weakened and privatized? Who gains when democratic education is replaced by workforce sorting?

A university’s value cannot be measured only by wages or return on investment. A university also proves its value when it helps students recognize propaganda, understand history, analyze policy, question authority, read the law, evaluate scientific evidence, work across difference, and imagine alternatives. It proves its value when it prepares students not only to enter the economy, but to shape it. It proves its value when it produces teachers, nurses, engineers, artists, organizers, lawyers, scientists, public servants, writers, parents, neighbors, and citizens capable of democratic judgment.

This is why Ethnic Studies is central, not peripheral, to the university’s value. Mexican American Studies, African American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and related fields teach students to understand how power works historically and structurally. They connect knowledge to community, memory, identity, policy, and justice. They help students see that democracy is not only a set of institutions, but a practice of belonging, critique, participation, and repair.

In a state like Texas, this is especially urgent. Texas is young, diverse, multilingual, and multiracial. Its future depends on students who can navigate complexity, understand multiple histories, communicate across communities, and participate in democratic life. To dismantle or weaken the very fields that prepare students for this future is not academic reform. It is civic disinvestment.

To be clear, universities should not dismiss public concerns. They should address affordability, debt, student support, admissions transparency, administrative growth, uneven teaching quality, and ideological narrowness where it exists. They should strengthen academic rigor and protect open inquiry. They should make clearer to students and families what a college education offers.

But they should not accept a market-only definition of value. Nor should they allow organizations that are actively working to narrow public higher education to present themselves as neutral arbiters of trust.

If higher education wants to regain public trust, it must do more than prove its economic payoff. It must tell a better truth about what it is for.

Higher education is for work, yes. But it is also for democracy. It is for complexity. It is for memory. It is for ethical judgment. It is for public reason. It is for learning how to live with others in a plural society. It is for asking not only, “What job will this get me?” but also, “What kind of world are we building, who benefits from it, who is harmed by it, and how might it be otherwise?”

The crisis, then, is not simply that universities have lost public trust. It is that trust is being weaponized by forces that want to shrink the democratic mission of higher education. The answer is not to make universities less academic for most students and more intellectually expansive for elites. The answer is to make the full promise of higher education available to all students.

That means defending affordability, access, academic freedom, shared governance, Ethnic Studies, the humanities, the sciences, professional education, and the civic purposes of the university together.

Colleges do need to prove their value. But their value cannot be proven by surrendering to the very forces that are trying to undercut them.

Their value will be proven by defending the university as a democratic public good.

References

Association of American Colleges and Universities. (2025, December 11). New national survey finds strong employer confidence in higher education: Findings show clear alignment between liberal education outcomes and evolving workforce needs, AAC&U. https://www.aacu.org/newsroom/new-national-survey-finds-strong-employer-confidence-in-higher-education

Finley, A. P. (2023). The career-ready graduate: What employers say about the difference college makes. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/research/the-career-ready-graduate-what-employers-say-about-the-difference-college-makes

Finley, A. P. (2025). The agility imperative: How employers view preparation for an uncertain future. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/research/the-agility-imperative

MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Viking.

Manhattan Institute. (2023, January 18). New issue brief: Abolish DEI bureaucracies and restore colorblind equality in public universities. https://manhattan.institute/article/new-issue-brief-abolish-dei-bureaucracies-and-restore-colorblind-equality-in-public-universities

Moody, J. (2023, February 6). DeSantis debuts a new conservative playbook for ending DEI. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/academic-freedom/2023/02/06/desantis-debuts-new-conservative-playbook-ending-dei

Rudawsky, D. (2026, April 28). What Yale got right, and what the trust crisis still demands, Institutional Effectiveness Weekly, 37. https://donrudawsky.substack.com/p/what-yale-got-right-and-what-the

Schrager, A. (2026, May 4). Colleges face a choice: Prove their value or risk losing students, Bloomberg Opinion. https://www.statesman.com/opinion/columns/article/universities-trust-enrollment-decline-opinion-22232350.php

Stewart, K. (2025). Money, lies, and God: Inside the movement to destroy American democracy. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Valenzuela, A. (2026, April 28). The wrong crisis: What the Yale report misses in the age of manufactured mistrust. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-wrong-crisis-what-yale-report.html

Wray, A. (2024, March 27). How these 10 states’ anti-DEI laws will impact college campuses, Reckon.
https://www.reckon.news/justice/2024/03/how-these-9-states-anti-dei-laws-will-impact-college-campuses.html

Yale University. (2026). Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Yale University.

Colleges face a choice: Prove their value or risk losing students 

By Allison Schrager, Bloomberg Opinion | Austin American-Statesman, May 4, 2026


University of Texas students walk through campus last year. If the U.S. values economic mobility, the whole system of higher education needs to regain the trust of the public, Allison Schrager writes.

Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman

Last week Yale University took the first step on the road to recovery: It admitted it had a problem. That problem is a lack of trust — and the damage that Yale and other top schools have done isn’t to themselves, it is to the entire system of U.S. higher education.

But if universities want to offer a truly rigorous education that is open to good-natured debate, students and faculty of different political backgrounds will need to feel more welcome. Without substantial change, U.S. universities may squander what little trust they have — and the country will be worse off.

America’s elite universities, which produce world-class research and attract top scholars from around the globe, should be a source of pride. But most Americans mistrust the U.S. higher education system, and last year Yale’s president assigned a committee to study the reasons why. The resulting report identifies several culprits: high tuition costs, opaque admissions practices, a politically monolithic culture, and a weak commitment to academic rigor and open debate.These perceptions, the report concedes, are not entirely wrong. The irony here is that even if Yale does nothing to change, it will probably be fine. Elite students and scholars will still want to go there. Donors will still give them money. The consequences will redound for people who go to schools not named Yale or Harvard.

Anyone who would consider a top school like Yale won’t decide against college altogether because of the flaws and excesses detailed in this report. I worry more about the first-generation students who are ambivalent about going to college in the first place, uncertain about whether the investment is worth it and whether they can stick with it.

RELATED: If UT wants to restore public trust, leaders must earn it

In the last 60 years, getting a college degree became part of the American Dream. Technology and the economy changed in ways that rewarded graduates with higher earnings. The result was that many more people — not just the children of the elite but first-generation students too — went to college.

In the last few years, however, this trend has started to reverse. Now about 62% of high school graduates enroll in college or university, down from 70% several years ago.

There is no single reason Americans have turned on higher education, although one big one is that a degree does not pay off like it used to. If you graduate from a four-year degree program at most schools, the odds are still very good that your degree will confer higher earnings over your lifetime. But it is no longer a sure thing. And as tuition got more expensive after 2000, the college wage premium also stagnated. It seems like college is no longer such a good deal.

Still, given the positive expected value, economics alone can’t explain falling enrollments. One reason could be that the mission of many elite universities is muddled. Back when only a small fraction of the population went to college, it could be just a place to read great books, have fun, and stay up late in your dorm room debating Marxism. When it was over, you got a job in banking or law. Elite universities were especially good at providing that experience, and graduates were rewarded with higher pay.

ALSO READ: UT’s restructuring blurs rich differences into a single ‘Other’

But once more people started going to college, the experience had to provide more transparent economic value. In theory, less elite schools could have become more like trade schools, but this didn't happen (perhaps because the less elite schools are largely staffed by graduates of elite schools). Also the incentives were never there to change because the U.S. subsidizes all college degrees, even if some pay off more than others.

What if the mission was just academic excellence? In that case, almost all universities — and especially elite ones — failed. Most students don’t go to elite universities, but these schools get outsized attention. So it’s hard not to notice how the supposedly best and brightest students don’t care about their classes, don’t get real grades, and often seem comically immature when trying to be taken seriously. Then students had the nerve to demand the government forgive their loans, an unpopular stance with many Americans.

If these elite schools can’t deliver on their most basic mission, what does that say about the system as a whole? The financial returns to a degree have been falling for years, but the decline in enrollments and erosion of trust is relatively recent, and coincides with many of the controversies that have erupted on elite campuses.

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America’s higher education system is already shrinking and will probably shrink further, especially if it continues to be hard for graduates to find jobs. Some colleges are closing, and universities are focused on degrees that offer a higher earning potential and are cutting departments that are less popular.

These falling enrollments may well be justified. At the same time, for all its problems, college remains an important contributor to economic mobility. It still usually produces higher earnings, and it brings together people from different economic backgrounds.

If the U.S. values economic mobility, the whole system of higher education needs to regain the trust of the public. If more marginal schools want to survive, they will need to be less academic and provide more training in skills that translate into jobs. More elite schools can restore trust by returning to a focus on academic excellence rather than trying to solve all of society’s problems.

Yale’s report does have some good ideas that other universities are also trying, such as curbing grade inflation, making admissions more transparent, reforming university governance and cutting administrative bloat. Fixing the perception of political bias will be harder, especially since most academics lean left.

But if universities want to offer a truly rigorous education that is open to good-natured debate, students and faculty of different political backgrounds will need to feel more welcome. Without substantial change, U.S. universities may squander what little trust they have — and the country will be worse off.


Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

Invited Testimony of Dr. Angela Valenzuela Texas House Democratic Caucus Special Hearing on Free Speech, December 9, 2025

Friends,

Yesterday I had the honor of testifying before the Texas House Democratic Caucus Special Hearing on Free Speech. Because of time constraints, I delivered a much shorter version of my remarks. What follows is the full testimony I had prepared—one that more completely traces the constitutional, historical, and political stakes of this moment.

I should add that Attorney Richard Martinez, who, among others, litigated the Gonzalez v. Douglas case mentioned below, reviewed my testimony and gave it a thumbs up. 😊

I’m grateful to share it with you here, and I invite you to listen to the entire hearing at this link. The testimonies were outstanding.

-Angela Valenzuela

Invited Testimony of Dr. Angela Valenzuela

Texas House Democratic Caucus Special Hearing on Free Speech
Testimony by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
December 9, 2025

Chair, Vice Chair, and Members of the Committee:

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Angela Valenzuela, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin and Director of the Texas Center for Education Policy and a member of the National Academy of Education. 

I speak today as an educator, a scholar of public schooling and higher education, and as someone who has spent decades studying educational barriers facing minoritized youth.

In my remarks, I want to focus specifically on the prohibitions on the teaching of race and gender found in Senate Bill 37—and also embedded, in different form, in the Trump Administration’s Compact for Higher Education. 

I will first frame the moment we are living through, and then turn to the precedent-setting Gonzalez v. Douglas case in Arizona, which challenged the dismantling of the Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. That case, I would argue, has direct bearing on the constitutionality of SB 37 and similar prohibitions in higher education, particularly where there is evidence of discriminatory intent or viewpoint-based discrimination or censorship.

We are living through a coordinated backlash against DEI, Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and public education itself. This moment is not about “protecting students” or “ending indoctrination,” as proponents claim. It is about enforcing ignorance and preserving racial and gender hierarchies. At the highest level, it is about erasure and control, controlling the narrative and imposing limits to community self-awareness and empowerment.

That erasure extends beyond policy. It echoes across our shared cultural memory—shaping what is preserved, what is honored, and what is pushed into oblivion. The attacks on Ethnic Studies, the banning of books, the silencing of educators who dare to speak truth—all reflect a calculated project to reorder memory itself. 

The troubling intent is not simply to stifle dissent, but to render entire histories incomprehensible to generations yet to come. In this context, ignorance is not an accident; it is carefully manufactured, fortified, and deployed to uphold the existing order—not least by preserving the incumbencies of those in power, as the recent fight over mid-decade redistricting makes clear.

The constitutional lessons from Arizona are not abstract. They map directly onto the policies Texas has now enacted.

In Texas, Senate Bill 17 prohibits DEI offices and programming in public universities. Senate Bill 37 eviscerates faculty governance across the entire higher education system, replacing longstanding traditions of faculty oversight with politically appointed boards and administrators beholden to partisan interests. Together with earlier laws like Senate Bill 3, Texas’s anti–Critical Race Theory bill that constrains the teaching of race and history in K–12 schools, these laws form an interlocking architecture of repression (see Intercultural Development Research Association, 2021).

The effects are concrete. UT Austin alone suffered at least $47 million in cuts to research due to federal funding rollbacks—cuts that have damaged work across race, gender, immigration, public health, and mental health. Projects like Dr. Danielle Clealand’s research on Black Cuban immigrant histories are being erased (Valenzuela, 2025). 

This is epistemic violence pure and simple. It is a purge of inconvenient truths. And yet, even in this landscape of "organized forgetting"—or what I term in my own work, either "subtractive schooling," or the "politics of erasure," we still have the U.S. Constitution.

I want to turn now to an important precursor to our current moment: Arizona’s ARS § 15-112, the law used to dismantle Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program. That law prohibited courses that “promote resentment,” “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” or “advocate ethnic solidarity.” These vague, ideologically charged provisions became the blueprint for today’s curriculum wars.

We now see unmistakable echoes of ARS § 15-112 in Texas.

Texas Senate Bill 3 uses nearly identical language in its ban on teaching concepts that might cause students to “feel discomfort, guilt, or psychological distress” because of race or sex—an interpretation so broad that it suppresses discussions of racism, structural inequity, and collective historical experience. Senate Bill 17 bans identity-based programs and affinity centers in higher education, mirroring Arizona’s prohibition on courses “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.” And Senate Bill 37 continues this trajectory by restricting what can be taught in college classrooms about race, gender, and social identity—precisely the kinds of restrictions that were struck down in Gonzalez v. Douglas.

In other words, Texas has not adopted Arizona’s Ethnic Studies ban in one statute. It has adopted it in pieces, across multiple laws. The through-line from ARS § 15-112 to Texas policy is unmistakable: constrain what can be taught, surveil the curriculum for “divisive concepts,” eliminate identity-affirming programs, silence collective narratives, and enforce an atomized, decontextualized vision of the individual student. That is exactly the logic Arizona used, and it is exactly the logic Texas has now replicated.

Gonzalez v. Douglas

I had the honor of testifying in the Arce v. Douglas case—now formally known as Gonzalez v. Douglas. Teachers and students sued the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction and members of the Arizona State Board of Education after the elimination of the successful Mexican American Studies program in Tucson. The argument of "viewpoint diversity" was central to the case, but not in the distorted sense we hear today from conservatives who allege—without evidence—that their perspectives are excluded from the college curriculum.

Teachers and students argued that the state targeted their curriculum precisely because it foregrounded Mexican American perspectives, histories, and intellectual traditions (Cabrera et al., 2014). The entire effort was motivated by racial animus and a political agenda to "organize forgetting."

The federal court agreed, holding that Arizona had engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination motivated by hostility toward Mexican Americans (Gonzalez v. Douglas, 2017).

The court ruled that teachers have a right to teach, and students have a right to learn, a curriculum that reflects their experiences and intellectual traditions. Gonzalez v. Douglas stands as a precedent-setting case underscoring this point. 

While a state may legislate restrictions on teaching and research, the mere passage of a law does not guarantee its constitutional survival. As Gonzalez demonstrated, when a state suppresses particular perspectives or academic fields—especially those tied to the histories and identities of marginalized communities—it invites serious First Amendment scrutiny and is unlikely to prevail.

In summary, Senate Bill 37, like Arizona’s ARS § 15-112, is vulnerable to a First Amendment challenge because it targets specific viewpoints and identities for suppression.

Some day, Ethnic Studies courses will simply be called “a good education.”

Thank you for your time.

References

Cabrera, N. L., Milem, J. F., Jaquette, O., & Marx, R. W. (2014). Missing the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson: Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson. American Educational Research Journal, 51(6), 1084-1118. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831214553705

Gonzalez v. Douglas, 269 F. Supp. 3d 948 (D. Ariz. 2017). https://www.thefire.org/sites/default/files/2018/01/22133613/Gonzalez-v.-Douglas-Memorandum-of-Decision.pdf

Intercultural Development Research Association. (2021). What Texas’ classroom censorship law means for students & schools. IDRA. https://www.idra.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/What-Texas-Classroom-Censorship-Law-Means-for-Students-and-Schools-IDRA-2022.pdf

Valenzuela, A. (2025, May). UT loses $47M in research grants under Trump Administration; more than 60 projects cut: The ideological purge of public research [Blog post]. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas.  https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2025/05/ut-loses-47m-in-research-grants-under.html

© 2025 Angela Valenzuela. All rights reserved.
This blog post may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations in academic, journalistic, or critical reviews with proper attribution.

The Courage to Imagine Anew: Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and the Defense of Higher Learning, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Courage to Imagine Anew: Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and the Defense of Higher Learning

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

October 29, 2025

In these uncertain times, I find myself returning to the classics—not for comfort, but for clarity. They remind me that turmoil is not new, that every age must wrestle with its own angels and demons. As an English literature major and Spanish minor, I learned to live among these voices of the past and to listen for the echoes of our present in their words.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1968) is one such companion. Written in the wake of England’s failed republican experiment—after the execution of King Charles I, through the brief, flickering hope of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and on the threshold of the restoration of the Stuart monarchy—it speaks to the ache of disillusionment and the stubborn endurance of faith. An anguished Milton wrote in the ruins of a republic that had promised liberty but delivered repression.

The poem’s power lies not just in its Biblical scope but in its political imagination: a meditation on what happens when institutions of knowledge, justice, and conscience are corrupted by ambition and fear. Satan’s rebellion against Heaven becomes a haunting allegory for power unmoored from morality—a warning about how even noble ideals can be twisted into tyranny when pride replaces principle.

We are living through a similar unraveling. Across the United States, and acutely here in Texas, the assault on higher education feels like a slow-motion reenactment of Milton’s epic fall. Legislation like Senate Bill 17 and Senate Bill 37 strip universities of their moral and intellectual autonomy—erasing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and eliminating faculty governance under the guise of “neutrality.” In truth, these policies are not about neutrality at all; they are about control. They mirror Satan’s own delusion in Paradise Lost: the belief that power justifies itself, that domination can masquerade as Divine order.

The recent waves of faculty dismissals in Texas, the silencing of critical inquiry, censorship campaigns, and the hollow rhetoric of “viewpoint diversity”—about which I have blogged (Valenzuela, 2025)—all echo Milton’s vision of a paradise undone by deceit. Yet Milton also reminds us that knowledge cannot be banished, nor truth extinguished; even in exile, the spirit of inquiry endures. It is in that spirit that we must resist—not with despair, but with the steadfast conviction that education itself is an act of freedom.

Our universities—once sanctuaries, however imperfect—for the free exchange of ideas are being recast as instruments of ideological conformity. Project 2025, with its blueprint for dismantling public institutions, bears the same logic as Milton’s fallen angels—an architecture of chaos disguised as reform, where destruction is framed as renewal and submission is sold as freedom.

And yet Paradise Lost does not end in despair, but in a quiet, hard-won grace—one that I encourage us to lean into. When Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, they do not turn against one another or the world that has cast them out; instead, they walk hand in hand, “through Eden took their solitary way.” Their loss is real and profound, but so is their potential. Exile becomes not an ending, but the beginning of a new human story:

“Some natural tears they dropp’d, but wip’d them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.” — Paradise Lost, Book XII

In that moment, Milton reminds us that exile can also be the beginning of resistance—that even as institutions crumble, new communities of conscience can rise. We, too, walk that road now. As scholars, educators, and citizens, our task is not only to lament the loss of paradise but to rebuild it—to reclaim the moral and intellectual commons that sustain democracy itself.

What is at stake in this moment is more than academic freedom—it is the survival of an educated democracy. Across states and systems, educators are rising to defend the university as a public good, not a partisan instrument. The broader defense of education is, at its heart, a defense of truth, inquiry, and the capacity for moral imagination. Like Milton, we must see beyond the ruins toward the possibility of renewal, for if paradise is lost through arrogance and deceit, it is restored through wisdom, solidarity, and an expansive vision of what a good and virtuous education can be.

In doing so, we walk in the footsteps of Milton—across centuries of struggle and renewal—and honor his enduring question: not whether paradise can be restored, but whether we have the courage to imagine it anew. For the record, whoever said a Humanities or Liberal Arts degree is esoteric—or that our Western literary canon is worthless? Hardly so, even as its exclusivity has remained an issue. It has always been about survival—about learning to think, to write, to question, and to dream our way through the darkness of despair toward the light of freedom.

In times such as these, when truth itself is politicized and education reduced to utility, the humanistic tradition reminds us that freedom begins in the mind—and that imagination, not ideology, is the truest measure of a free and open society.

References

Milton, J. (1968). Paradise lost & paradise regained, Signet.

Valenzuela, A. (2025, Aug. 26). The fight for higher education: A minority perspective on both the liberal University and President Michael Roth. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas.

Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity: The problems with arguments for intellectual pluralism, by Lisa Siraganian, Academe, Fall 2025

Friends:

Lisa Siraganian’s recent piece in the Fall 2025 issue of Academe is a powerful read. It unpacks the problems with the right’s argument about an alleged lack of “intellectual diversity” on college campuses—including the misguided notion that certain ideas, like scientific racism or the heritability of IQ, deserve revival under the banner of balance or fairness. 

Not that these ideas cannot or should not be taught in the classroom, but rather that in the process of being taught, they must be interrogated, historicized, and critically examined for the harm they have caused and the ideologies they continue to sustain. The role of the university is not to resurrect discredited theories in the name of balance, but to help students understand why they were discredited—and what their persistence reveals about power, prejudice, and the politics of knowledge.

There is much to chew on in Siraganian’s essay, but her sixth thesis stands out for me: the warning that “viewpoint diversity” has been used to attack higher education and stifle academic freedom. Here in Texas, under laws like SB 17, SB 37, and SB 2972, we’ve seen how rhetoric about “free inquiry” and “neutrality” becomes a weapon—used to surveil, silence, and punish those who speak out against injustice. What begins as a call for balance often ends as a mechanism of control.

Siraganian reminds us that what happened in Hungary—where universities were restructured in the name of “pluralism”—is not far removed from our own political climate. Here, too, the language of “diversity” and “freedom” is being twisted into a tool of repression. As educators, we must see through this inversion of meaning and defend the university as a democratic space—one where truth-seeking, critical dialogue, and community uplift are not liabilities, but our core mission.

To me, this is what transformational resistance and the wisdom of praxis look like in action: the courage to confront coercive power with truth, to teach through freedom rather than fear, and to reclaim education as an act of collective liberation. Beneath the rhetoric, it’s clear that proponents of “viewpoint diversity” are seeking not open exchange but ideological conformity—a “snitch system” injurious to both scholarship and democracy itself.

I invite you to read Siraganian’s full essay and reflect on what it means for our campuses, our students, and the future of academic freedom in Texas.

-Angela Valenzuela

Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity: The problems with arguments for intellectual pluralism.

By Lisa Siraganian | Academe | Fall 2025

Among the various eye-popping demands the Trump administration made of Harvard University in its infamous April 11, 2025, letter was the bullet point on “Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring.” By August 2025, the letter stated, Harvard had to commission an outside party “to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” The term viewpoint diversitywas not defined; perhaps its meaning seemed obvious. In addition to other requirements to increase the variety of different perspectives, the letter commanded that any Harvard unit deemed deficient in such diversity must be “reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty” to counterbalance the viewpoints of those already employed. Presumably Harvard’s current faculty were imagined to be viewpoint-homogeneous.

Why didn’t “viewpoint diversity” require definition? Probably because the movement—whether under the label of viewpoint or intellectual diversity or ideological and intellectual pluralism—was old hat to the letter’s authors. In 2002, conservative activist David Horowitz reworked the AAUP’s long-standing definition of academic freedom to advance his “Academic Bill of Rights,” a declaration promoting “intellectual diversity” and “intellectual pluralism.” That short manifesto kicked off a revolution. It first developed in conservative circles for decades, drafted as proposed laws introduced both in the US Congress and in various state legislatures. Echoing Horowitz’s position, the “Bill of Rights” of the conservative University of Austin, launched in 2021, explicitly vows that the university “aspires to intellectual pluralism.” Most recently, the same language appeared in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the blueprint the second Trump administration relies upon. Its chapter on eliminating the Department of Education asserts that postsecondary educational institutions receiving federal funding must “embrace intellectual diversity.”

In what follows, I offer seven theses against viewpoint diversity in any of its guises. If its supporters are as open to competing perspectives as they claim, if viewpoint diversity means committing oneself to a robust debate about truth and values, then the movement should be open to responding to and refuting the following theses challenging its premises and fundamental arguments. The options, in the end, come down to the following: To promote viewpoint diversity is to be thrilled to have my views in the mix, even if you think they are wrong, because either (a) they contribute to more viewpoint diversity (the more views you have, the more viewpoint diversity there is), or (b) they provide more views to choose from to figure out which view is the most true. In the first position, you end up not caring about whether a particular view is true or good, because you care about viewpoint diversity intrinsically: What matters is having the greatest possible variety of views. In the second position, you instrumentally value a diversity of views; having viewpoint diversity only matters until you can figure out which view is the best or most true, at which point all the other views can be rejected.

I’ve restricted my discussion here to higher education, both because that is the AAUP’s ambit and my own and because that is the current terrain of most of these debates. But the movement is not limited to attacks on colleges and universities. Project 2025 recommended that the Environmental Protection Agency review and reorganize science advisory boards that lack such viewpoint diversity. In addition, what follows are not entirely my original arguments, and many of the theses necessarily overlap. But, as the second Trump administration continues to weaponize “viewpoint diversity,” the most serious deficiencies and problems with the concept have not yet been adequately detailed, addressed, or refuted. All of these problems must be addressed if the call for viewpoint diversity is serious, self-consistent, and offered to higher education in good faith.

The basic logic of the argument works like this. A pronouncement is made (as self-evident fact) that colleges and universities have become overwhelmingly politically liberal and that such political homogeneity “inhibits the pursuit of truth.” Frequently, the ideas of political philosopher John Stuart Mill are invoked, such as his observation, in On Liberty, that competing opinions in politics should be able to be “expressed with equal freedom,” because individuals do not have “sufficiently capacious and impartial” minds to see the entirety of truth for themselves. A situation in which the brightest and most curious thinkers feel they have to hide their true convictions would be a very bad state of things indeed. Such self-silencing, fretted Mill, deprives the world of “the open, fearless characters, and logical, consistent intellects who once adorned the thinking world.”

For advocates of viewpoint diversity, such as the founders of Heterodox Academy (the conservative nonprofit created in 2015), freeing conservatives from their alleged self-silencing is a crucial step in reforming higher education. Homogeneous academic groups, they say, risk becoming “monocultures” and are vulnerable to “blind spots and groupthink” (or “ideological capture,” as the letter to Harvard from the Trump administration put it). Viewpoint diversity is pledged to liberate the muzzled, not only politically but throughout their professional, academic lives. To “insist on viewpoint diversity,” Heterodox Academy announces in its manifesto for university reform, is to challenge “norms that promote self-censorship or discourage dissent.” Politically heterogeneous academics will be able to think fearlessly and to Make Universities Great Again.

We are trained as scholars to reflexively recoil from hegemonic views wherever we spy them. Tyranny of the majority is a legitimate concern, and we should conscientiously challenge any view on which we substantively disagree in our field of expertise. But however seriously one worries about “groupthink” in academia, viewpoint diversity is not the answer. It only offers us another quota system. The following theses are presented, then, as an invitation to viewpoint diversity’s inquiring intellects to defend their convictions openly, fearlessly, and logically (to paraphrase Mill).

Thesis 1. Viewpoint diversity functions in direct opposition to the pursuit of truth, the principal aim of academia.

Proponents of viewpoint diversity are making a version of the both-sides argument—that is, they intuit that a plurality of opinions is better for students and faculty committed to pursuing the truth. They often invoke the rhetoric of ecological biodiversity, along with Herbert Spencer–style social Darwinism and a sprinkling of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s “marketplace of ideas.” Advocating for “the world’s first truly inclusive university system,” John Tomasi, president of Heterodox Academy, advances a version of perspectival pluralism: “Think of the university as a kind of garden: When the students arrive there at eighteen, . . . they step into a world now that’s new for them, where they can become more unique, more individuated, than ever before in their lives, because the garden is meant for that, to encourage that kind of growth, that kind of diversification. A university, like a garden, should be full of surprises.”

The implication is that current university culture has become a monoculture of sterile ideas; the Edenic garden of free-thinking biodiversity has been lost. A university “fundamentally committed to truth” would want the most varied garden possible to form “more unique” students. Or, to quote Chairman Mao, “Let one hundred flowers bloom.”

But those two aims—the pursuit of truth and the value of different opinions—do not work together seamlessly. Indeed, they are directly opposed, as the literary scholar Stanley Fish described precisely in 2004. Acknowledging that he was consulted by Horowitz on the Academic Bill of Rights, and that he even agreed with much of it, Fish draws the line at viewpoint diversity: “It is precisely because the pursuit of truth is the cardinal value of the academy that the value (if it is one) of intellectual diversity should be rejected.” As he goes on to explain, “The truth of academic matters is not general but local.” What does this word or statistic or datum mean in this given text or dataset or context? One can often answer these local questions with certainty. Such certainty may at some future moment be challenged, as when new evidence is uncovered, or when new methods initiate a new paradigm. That’s as it should be: higher education working as promised.

In that sense, the logic of viewpoint diversity contains its own extinction, if truth really is the goal. Consider that a researcher in 1952, trying to figure out how DNA is structured, would need to survey all the theories and viewpoints on DNA structure up to that point before making an evidence-based opinion. DNA’s structure was still (just barely) a live question. But by 1954, our researcher wouldn’t need to study the theories of the triple-helix model, or the side-by-side model, at all, because by 1953 the double-helix model had been convincingly established. Our researcher could safely reject the triple-helix or side-by-side models—or simply ignore them, not even stopping to sniff at those particular diverse garden flowers—because the local question about DNA’s basic structure had been answered. Academics do this all the time because we are pursuing local truths. If we are even half-decent teachers, we are instructing our students how to do it too. On any particular topic, viewpoint diversity might be useful to initially survey competing theories, and once a consensus of the truth of that matter has been established, viewpoint diversity on that topic is rightly, habitually, dismissed.

Scholars in my field of literary studies are sometimes nervous about such claims. Consequently, and regrettably, we have too often avoided making some of the strongest arguments against viewpoint diversity. Conservatives like Allan Bloom even suggested that humanists, contaminated by post-structuralism, closed the minds of our students to the idea of objective truth. But even if we sometimes disdain the language of truth, avoiding truth in the humanities is impossible. As philosopher of science Susan Haack wrote decades ago, “everyone who believes anything, or who asks any question, implicitly acknowledges—even if he explicitly denies—that there is such a thing as truth.” However it is qualified or danced around, the pursuit of truth remains as foundational to higher education faculty as it ever was. And viewpoint diversity opposes that pursuit. 

Thesis 2. Viewpoint diversity can work only as an instrumental value.

Although viewpoint diversity does not have the pursuit of truth as its highest value, its advocates are certainly pursuing something. Promises to advance democratic society typically appear in this vacuum, along with the push to restore civic engagement. Horowitz was ahead of (or, more accurately, helped create) the curve here, writing that helping students “become creative individuals and productive citizens of a pluralistic democracy” is the central mission of the university. Higher education leaders have taken up that argument. Since 2024, my university, Johns Hopkins, has partnered with the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on the Civic Thought Project, leading to a May 2025 conference and a joint initiative to boost intellectual diversity through a JHU-AEI Fellowship Exchange Program.

But the problem, once more, is that such citizen-fashioning is a bad fit with seeking local academic truth. Even conservatives have recognized this point. As law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen wrote over a decade ago, “Intellectual diversity is a subordinate, instrumental value. It is not of value for its own sake. . . . Sometimes intellectual diversity furthers the search for Truth, and sometimes it does not.”

The arguments in support of viewpoint diversity often move instantaneously from truth aims to such secondary, external aims. Harvard Professor Tyler J. VanderWeele argues that universities like his own should endeavor “to hire faculty who hold disfavored or controversial views” that remain influential and “have not been clearly refuted.” These newly added scholars “might allow us to find some common ground on divisive issues.” Certainly, scholars should and do studythe views of the estimated fifty million US adults who are QAnon believers, those who agree with the disfavored and influential but bizarrely still not “clearly refuted” view that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and that the January 6 insurrectionists are “really patriots who are being held hostage by the government.” If hiring a faculty member holding QAnon beliefs helps the rest of us “find some common ground” with QAnon members on the January 6 convictions—and Trump’s pardoning of 1,500 of the convicted—that would be an unbelievable political triumph. But it would not be a scholarly or academic triumph. It would not even address the truth or falsity of QAnon beliefs—all false, for the record.

Thesis 3. Viewpoint diversity assumes a partisan goal based on unproven assumptions.

Closely related to thesis 2 is the partisan and political nature of viewpoint diversity as a goal, which initially was implied more than stated. Critics of viewpoint diversity had long noted that only certain perspectives seemed to be desired, but no standard or justification was articulated for why some ideologies and not others were favored. It was simply assumed that no Maoists, anarchists, Trotskyists, or Holocaust deniers need apply. As mentioned above, this past spring, Johns Hopkins chose to enter into a well-publicized exchange program with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute—not, for example, the socialist Hampton Institute. But more often, recently, this political agenda is proudly announced by its proponents: “Viewpoint diversity means wanting more conservatives,” writes Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield in The Crimson, adding that if his university “wants to prevent further trouble with Republicans, it needs to change its attitude” and start welcoming them openly.

This partisan goal has certain built-in hypotheses that are rarely defended. These assumptions include the contention that cultural prejudices, ideological orthodoxies, and unconscious biases are hiding out in academia’s alleged viewpoint monoculture. The conjecture here is that disciplinary knowledge is beset by confirmation bias and orthodoxy, rather than disciplinary knowledge establishing premises in order to examine beliefs, including biases and orthodoxies. Another fundamental assumption is that academia is overwhelmingly leftist and that conservatives are consequently silenced (suffering the tyranny of the political majority). That possibility has been challenged by economists David Hummels and Jay Akridge, who note that “well-known examples of left-leaning scholarship, programs, and behaviors represent a small fraction of the overall activity on a campus.” Data show that the plurality of faculty are moderates, they write, and a majority aren’t registered as members of either political party.

And then there’s the claim (which surfaced in the Manhattan Institute’s recent diatribe against higher education) that conservatives have been “virtually eliminated” from the “prestige institutions.” On a Federalist Society podcast, Georgetown University law professor Nicholas Rosenkranz made a related version of this point, contending that “conservatives are on average dramatically under placed [sic] relative to their credentials.” But, again, presuming that any of these assumptions could actually be proved true, choosing to rectify them would address a partisan complaint about the political representation of campus faculty and the cultural capital that conservatives hold in higher education. It would not resolve, or even address, an academic issue, dilemma, or debate.

Thesis 4. Viewpoint diversity undermines disciplinary and specialized knowledge and standards as well as the autonomy of academic reasoning and scholarship.

This thesis captures another way of conceptualizing the first three theses. Put most bluntly: Viewpoint diversity is anathema to academic freedom. Louis Menand makes this argument in “The Limits of Academic Freedom” (1996): “When we talk about the freedom of the academic to dictate the terms of his or her work, we are also and unavoidably talking about the freedom to exclude, or to limit the exposure of, work that is not deemed to meet academic standards. . . . In being free to regulate itself, the profession is free to reject what does not intellectually suit it.”

This is why the triple-helix view of DNA structure can be ignored, and also why, as the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure correctly observedover two decades ago, no chemistry department is obligated to hire “a professor who teaches the phlogiston theory of heat, if that theory is not deemed a reasonable perspective within the discipline of chemistry.” Rejecting intellectually unsuitable ideas is what specialized knowledge and the autonomy of academic reasoning, and thus academic freedom, are all about. Disciplinary standards are settled upon by the collective expertise of the discipline.

For proponents of viewpoint diversity, this bothersome point has led to support of what is, effectively, an interdisciplinary solution imposed from above. AEI recommends that in order to give conservative academics “a home in which to grow,” rather than feeling isolated in their particular departments or disciplines, “trustees and administrators should work with them to form new academic units” such as the schools of civic thought (mentioned in thesis 2). Often these civic thought centers recruit a core group of faculty members from various other disciplines and give them primary appointments in their new unit; these faculty members are sometimes supplemented by cross-appointments or affiliations with like-minded professors from across the university. This strategy rapidly accelerates the usual evolution of a new discipline from its interdisciplinary sources in several fields, as with the long development of, for example, environmental studies, media studies, biophysics, and law and society. Of course, whereas the push for new disciplines comes from academic scholarship itself, all of these civic thought endeavors are creations of wealthy donors, politicians, and conservative think tanks.

Thesis 5. Viewpoint diversity is incoherent.

In addition to its fundamental tensions with the pursuit of truth, disciplinary autonomy, and academic freedom, viewpoint diversity is internally inconsistent in predictable ways. As Stanley Fish (again) correctly pointed out years ago, the glitch in pluralist arguments has been apparent at least since John Milton’s Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England(1644). There, Milton clarified that in tolerating expansive, unregulated publication he (obviously!) did not mean to condone the writings of Catholics, whose work and ideas should be extirpated. As Fish writes of this text, free speech is “never a value in and of itself but is always produced within the precincts of some assumed conception of the good to which it must yield in the event of conflict.” Viewpoint diversity arguments have the identical problem. There is always some background conception at work, some assumption about what makes a good, valuable university, some categorical definition that permits (for example) the University of Austin to “aspire to intellectual pluralism.” That background assumption, like Milton’s extirpation of Catholics, gives the lie to the commitment to a diversity of viewpoints. Its proponents are simply advocating for diversity in a particular direction and type that differs from the current reality and status quo. Once again, you cannot simultaneously defend rigorous arguments in support of the university’s striving for truth and support rigorous arguments for ideological (or intellectual or viewpoint) diversity. The two aims directly conflict.

Thesis 6. Viewpoint diversity has already been used, both in the United States and abroad, to attack higher education and stifle academic freedom.

After Indiana’s Senate Enrolled Act 202 went into effect last year—a law requiring faculty to teach “intellectually diverse ideas”—Indiana University received nearly fifty complaints against faculty. Those investigated included Professor Ben Robinson, who is Jewish, who said that “he discussed being jailed for civil disobedience while protesting at an Israeli Consulate” for a lesson on the master-slave dialectic and the prisoner’s dilemma. As another faculty member at Indiana observed, the point seems to be to create “a snitch system” to empower anyone to accuse faculty of violating the new law.

To see the long-term results of this strategy we need only look to Hungary. As Tamas Dezso Ziegler writes, the Viktor Orbán regime argued that academia had become “the hotbed of liberal thought, and the state must fight this by restructuring these institutions, thereby defending pluralism and ‘conservative’ opinions.” These arguments led to the restructuring of universities, attacks on the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the expulsion of Central European University from the country. Ziegler sums up the situation in Hungary: “While part of the rhetoric could belong to a liberal contestation of academic freedom status quo (demanding more free speech and more pluralism), its effect is deeply authoritarian and illiberal (limiting free speech and diversity).”

In the United States, the existence of civic thought centers promoting viewpoint diversity has not deterred the Trump administration or right-wing groups from attacking higher education or even from attacking specific universities (including Harvard) that are aggressively boosting the movement. From that perspective, it’s hard to see even the partisan, pragmatic argument for supporting viewpoint diversity. 

Thesis 7. Viewpoint diversity is an argument made in bad faith.

In 2003, Horowitz observed that “diversity” is one of the university’s “most cherished values.” And he explicitly advocated using the rhetoric of diversity against his political opponents: “I encourage [students] to use the language that the left has deployed so effectively in behalf of its own agendas. Radical professors have created a ‘hostile learning environment’ for conservative students. There is a lack of ‘intellectual diversity’ on college faculties and in academic classrooms. The conservative viewpoint is ‘under-represented’ in the curriculum and on its reading lists. The university should be an ‘inclusive’ and intellectually ‘diverse’ community.”

The scare quotes needed in 2003 to signal that discrimination was contemptible “leftist” language are no longer required. Now we are told that conservatives really are discriminated against. Nonetheless, the bad faith remains. As economists Hummels and Akridge note, “advocates for mandated viewpoint diversity in hiring and curriculum base their argument in the logic of DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] programs.” Simultaneously, these same advocates attack diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at every opportunity.

Lastly, the other theses have been addressed to viewpoint diversity’s conservative defenders. But this final one is directed toward the viewpoint diversity–curious. For rebellious faculty members intrigued by these arguments—perhaps attracted to Heterodox Academy’s tagline, “Great minds don’t always think alike”—viewpoint diversity might appear tempting. That’s the goal: Lure in the faculty iconoclasts of whatever partisan persuasion, those who seek to test the establishment as a matter of course, and deploy them to fill out the faculty lists beyond the conservative rank and file. But those of us who want good ideas to win and bad ideas to lose should understand that viewpoint diversity will not get us there; it can only ensconce more bad ideas. Faculty agreeing to this should be very clear about why their presence on these websites and these civic thought centers is sought out and what role their names, stature, and expertise are playing there. And they, like anyone else committed to “intellectual diversity,” have an obligation to refute—openly, fearlessly, and logically—the seven theses articulated above.

Lisa Siraganian is the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University and the president of the JHU-AAUP chapter. Her next book, The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots, is forthcoming from Verso in February 2026.