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.

State laws threaten to erode academic freedom in US higher education: The public must stand up to this de-democratizing, billionaire agenda

Friends,

Here is an article appearing in Youth Today, authored by Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut Professor Isaac Kamola, that provides a helpful over-arching sense of the ultra-conservative political landscape that should concern us all.

I am most impressed with Dr. Kamola's research unit, Faculty First Responders: Understanding Right-Wing Attacks on Faculty. Check out Kamola's list of books addressing the ways and means of today's "outrage peddlers," including this one by Wilson and Kamola (2021) that is now on my reading list:

Wilson, Ralph and Isaac Kamola. Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War. Pluto, 2021. (read the introduction).

I am most pleased with a burgeoning number of exposés that show just how profoundly higher education—like K-12—are in the throes of a well-heeled, conservative attack on higher education that is already wreaking enormous havoc on our institutions, including at places like UT-Austin, that have not only served us well but to which our hard-earned taxpayer dollars go.

The public must stand up to this de-democratizing, billionaire agenda.

-Angela Valenzuela

#FollowTheMoney

State laws threaten to erode academic freedom in 

US higher education

By Isaac Kamola, Trinity College

Posted on June 3, 2024

Over the past few years, Republican state lawmakers have introduced more than 150 bills in 35 states that seek to curb academic freedom on campus. Twenty-one of these bills have been signed into law.

This legislation is detailed in a new white paper published by the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, a project established by the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP.

Taken together, this legislative onslaught has undermined academic freedom and institutional autonomy in five distinct and overlapping ways.

1. ACADEMIC GAG ORDERS

“ANTI-CRT” BILLS

WIKIMEDIA/CC BY 3.0

Christopher Rufo

As detailed in the report, state legislators introduced 99 academic gag orders during legislative sessions in 2021, 2022 and 2023. All of the 10 gag orders signed into law were done so by Republican governors. These bills assert that teaching about structural racism, gender identity or unvarnished accounts of American history harm students.

These gag orders are widely known as “divisive concept” or “anti-CRT” bills. CRT is an acronym for critical race theory, an academic framework that holds racism as deeply embedded in America’s legal and political systems. The partisan activists, such as Christopher Rufo, have used this term to generate a “moral panic” as part of a political response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

FLORIDA’S “STOP WOKE ACT”

COURTESY OF DOS.FL.GOV

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

For example, in April 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 7, the “Stop Woke Act.” The law defines a “divisive concept” as any of eight vague claims. They include claims that “Such virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist.”

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker described this law as “positively dystopian.” He noted that the government’s own lawyers admitted that the law would likely make any classroom discussion concerning the merits of affirmative action illegal. The vague wording of these gag orders has a chilling effect, leaving many faculty unsure about what they can and cannot legally discuss in the classroom.

2. BANS ON DEI PROGRAMS

The expansion of diversity, equity and inclusion – or DEI – services on campus was a major outcome of the racial justice protests in 2020. By 2023, however, the legislative backlash was in full swing. Forty bills restricting DEI efforts were introduced during the 2023 legislative cycle, with seven signed into law.

For example, Texas’ Senate Bill 17 drew directly from model policy language developed by Rufo and published by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. SB 17 banned diversity statements and considerations in hiring. It also restricted campus diversity training and defunded campus DEI offices at Texas’ public universities.

As detailed in the AAUP white paper, only a handful of people testified in favor of SB 17, and almost all had stated or unstated affiliations with right-wing think tanks. In contrast, more than a hundred educators and citizens testified, or registered to testify, against the bill. Since its passage, Texas public universities have seen the closing of DEI programs and reduced campus services for students from minority populations. For example, after the Legislature accused the University of Texas-Austin of violating SB 17, the school was forced to shut down its DEI office. This involved laying off 40 employees.

3. WEAKENING TENURE

Tenure was developed to shield faculty members from external political pressure. The protections of tenure make it possible for faculty to teach, research and speak publicly without fear of losing their jobs because their speech angers those in power.

FLORIDA AND TEXAS BILLS PASSED

As detailed in the report, however, during the 2021, 2022 and 2023 legislative sessions, 20 bills were introduced, with two bills weakening tenure protections signed into law in Florida and another in Texas.

In Florida, for example, SB 7044 created a system of post-tenure review, empowering administrators to review tenured faculty every five years. The law further empowers administrators to dismiss those whose performance is deemed unsatisfactory. The law also requires that faculty post course content in a public and searchable database.

The AAUP criticized the law, noting that SB 7044 has “substantially weakened tenure in the Florida State University System and, if fully implemented as written,” would effectively “eliminate tenure protections.” Now even tenured faculty have reason to fear that what they teach might be construed as a “divisive concept,” as CRT, or as promoting DEI.

4. MANDATING CONTENT

Lawmakers in several states have also passed legislation mandating viewpoint diversity, establishing new academic programs and centers to teach conservative content and shifting curricular decision-making away from the faculty.

FLORIDA’S BILL

COURTESY OF FLDOE.ORG

Manny Diaz, Florida education commissioner

For example, Florida’s Senate Bill 266 expanded the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, without faculty input or oversight. The original proposal for the Hamilton Center stated that the center’s goal was to advance “a conservative agenda” within the curriculum.

SB 266 also gave the governing boards overseeing the university and college systems the authority to decide which classes count toward the core curriculum. This power was exercised in November 2023 after Manny Diaz, the education commissioner in Florida, requested that the boards remove an introduction to sociology course. He stated on social media that the discipline had been “hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general knowledge course for students.”

5. WEAKENING ACCREDITATION

The accreditation process is an obscure area of academic governance whereby colleges and universities regularly subject themselves to external peer review. Nonprofit accrediting agencies conduct these institutional performance reviews.

As detailed in the report, during the 2021-23 legislative cycles, six bills were introduced – three of them were passed into law – weakening the accreditation process, thereby making it easier for political interests to shape university policy.

NORTH CAROLINA ALLOWS COLLEGES TO “SHOP” FOR AN 

ACCREDITING AGENCY

For example, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, warned the school’s board of trustees that establishing the School of Civic Life and Leadership without faculty oversight and consultation raised serious concerns about institutional independence. The Legislature responded with Senate Bill 680, which would require that North Carolina public universities choose a different accrediting agency each accreditation cycle. Eventually passed as part of the omnibus House Bill 8, this policy allows schools to “shop” for an accrediting agency less likely to object to such political interference in the curriculum.

These five overlapping and reinforcing attacks on academic freedom and institutional autonomy threaten to radically transform public higher education in ways that serve the partisan interests of those in power.

***

Isaac Kamola is an associate professor of political science at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. His research examines the political economy of higher education, critical globalization studies, and African anticolonial theory. His scholarly work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, International Political Sociology, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Millennium, Journal of Academic Freedom, African Identities, Journal of Higher Education in Africa, Third World Quarterly, Alternatives, Cultural Politics, Polygraph, and Transitions as well as numerous edited volumes.

Isaac is the creator of Faculty First Responders, a program that monitors right-wing attacks on academics and provides resources to help faculty members and administrators respond to manufactured outrage. And he currently serves as the director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

The Conversation is a nonprofit, independent news organization dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good. They publish trustworthy and informative articles written by academic experts for the general public and edited by our team of journalists.