Back in 1992, in Oregon, a homophobic ballot measure was introduced promising to withhold public funds from any institution thought “to promote, encourage, or facilitate homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism.” Moreover, the measure proposed that the state’s Department of Higher Education “shall assist in setting a standard for Oregon’s youth that recognizes homosexuality … as abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse and that these behaviors are to be discouraged and avoided.”
As Linda Ray Pratt describes in her contribution to Higher Education Under Fire, a 1995 collection of essays edited by Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson (an excerpt from the editors’ introduction appeared in our pages), the American Association of University Professors sponsored an ad campaign excoriating the backers of the measure for pushing “their own political agendas on our kids.” They accused the right-wingers behind the ballot measure of wanting to indoctrinate students — as indeed they did — and they framed their opposition as a matter of insulating both parental and instructional autonomy from nefarious political forces: “We urge you to protect your right to run our local schools and insure academic freedom in university classrooms. Vote ‘No’ on measure 9 and keep local control of our schools.”
The ballot measure failed. But the recent legislation in Florida constraining both secondary and college instructors descends directly from it. Florida’s SB 266, for instance, which goes into effect on July 1, requires that “general-education core courses may not distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics … or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.” As Brian Leiter wrote on his blog, “As state-mandated ideological indoctrination goes, this is remarkably brazen.”
For their part, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies frame their censorial curricular campaigns as revolts against what they depict as an environment of coerced left-wing orthodoxy on campuses. Indeed, “indoctrination” has become the watchword of conservative attacks on higher education today, just as it was in the early 1990s. In 1992, in the Oregon case, the AAUP had the wit to assume the mantle of libertarian righteousness against the totalitarian specter of state censorship, effectively turning the tables on charges of indoctrination from the right.
But then as now, the higher-ed landscape affords both conservative and liberal critics plenty of evidence that narrow political orthodoxies have indeed been inappropriately institutionalized. Higher Education Under Fire contains several liberal and left contributors looking askance at such orthodoxies. Joan W. Scott’s essay in particular, “The Rhetoric of Crisis in Higher Education,” applies with astonishing relevance to our own moment. “There are those,” Scott writes, “on the right and left, determined to impose totalizing regimes of truth about the necessary and unitary meanings of class, race, sex, and gender. And there are the self-appointed mediators — of every rank and status — who offer ‘diversity workshops’ with pious lessons.” She laments “totalizing moralisms, the policing of words and actions of community members, the shaming and/or ostracism of dissenters, and the attempt to use personal guilt as a way of producing understanding of one’s own errors.”
This highly psychologized species of bureaucratized activism has grown rather than diminished in power and institutional scope in the nearly 30 years since Scott’s essay. There is simply no way to account for the current right-wing legislative assault on higher education without acknowledging that fact. The backlash might have been foreseen — indeed, it was foreseen. In their prescient contribution to Higher Education Under Fire, “A Critique of Critical Pedagogy,” Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff write that “the time has come when some serious efforts at left self-criticism have to be ventured, even if they give some aid and comfort to the enemy.” Otherwise, both the activist program and the schools themselves become vulnerable to the depredations of the right.
Jay and Graff’s position, encapsulated in Graff’s slogan “teaching the conflict,” will seem common-sensical to many professors. Hot-button topics with major political and ideological stakes “should denote a set of problems to be explored and debated, not a new truth which teachers and students should uncritically accept.” Common-sensical, but nevertheless something that felt, in 1995, necessary to say. Jay and Graff remind their readers that “as long as education is an institution in an overlapping system of democratic processes, the school cannot and should not enforce a program that commits everyone to a predetermined worldview.”
Scott’s “totalizing moralisms” within the university have, at least in the eyes of the opponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies, moved from the classroom to the administration, where they have not failed to attract the ire both of many liberal and left professors and of Republican legislators. Indeed, bills like Florida’s SB 266 not only take aim, probably unconstitutionally, at classroom teaching, but also at DEI-training programs, where they might have more likelihood of passing legal muster.
