[Conservative state legislatures and ideologically-driven boards
want to dramatically change America’s colleges. ]
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‘AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION’  
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Adam Harris
November 5, 2023
The Atlantic
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_ Conservative state legislatures and ideologically-driven boards
want to dramatically change America’s colleges. _

University of North Carolina,

 

When Florida Governor Ron Desantis appointed six new members
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the board of New College of Florida earlier this year, giving the
oversight panel of the public liberal-arts college in Sarasota a
decidedly right-wing bent, there was no ambiguity in the message he
was sending. But in case anyone had doubts, one of his appointees,
Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led the push to
redefine
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race theory, quickly eliminated them.

“We are recapturing higher education,” he wrote
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Twitter (now known as X). He also posted an agenda that included
eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; hiring new
faculty “with expertise in constitutionalism, free enterprise, civic
virtue, family life, religious freedom, and American principles”;
and creating a new core curriculum and an academic master plan. Within
120 days, Rufo told _The New York Times_
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school’s academic departments would look “very different.”

In the months that have followed, Republican state legislatures and
governors have made other efforts to overhaul higher education. Texas
lawmakers, for example, passed bills that banned DEI initiatives at
the state’s public colleges and redefined tenure—lawmakers had
considered banning tenure altogether but ultimately reached a
compromise—and listed vague reasons a university can fire a tenured
faculty member, including “conduct involving moral turpitude” and
“unprofessional conduct that adversely affects the institution.”
Free-speech advocates fear what that could mean in practice. Texas A&M
University suspended and censured a professor
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she allegedly made a “disparaging remark” about the state’s
lieutenant governor. (She was reinstated after an investigation found
no clear evidence of wrongdoing, and the institution’s president
resigned.) And in June, the Supreme Court upended more than four
decades of precedent
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it ruled the race-conscious admissions systems at Harvard and the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to be unconstitutional.

Adam Harris: The government finally puts a number on the
discrimination against Black colleges
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This year is a defining moment for American higher education, one that
will decide whom institutions admit, who will teach those students,
and what those professors can teach. For those on the right, it’s a
reclamation, clawing back a set of American institutions that they
believe have veered too far to the left. But for many administrators,
professors, and historians, these changes risk destroying the
pillars—shared governance, academic freedom, free inquiry—that
have held up the world’s greatest system of higher education for
more than a century.

Jerry cirino did not intend to be a higher-education reformer. Prior
to running for public office, in 2020, Cirino, a Republican, had for
decades led medical-device companies in Ohio. But when he launched his
campaign for state Senate, he began scrutinizing the local colleges a
little harder. “One of the things I noticed when I was running for
senate, in 2020, was that higher education was not going in a
direction that I thought it should be going in,” Cirino told me. He
mentioned conservative speakers being shouted down at universities and
the relative absence of conservative voices on campuses. So he made
“taking a look at how we can make higher education better,” as he
put it, a plank of his campaign.

“Make higher education better” could mean a lot of things, but
shortly after winning his election, Cirino began defining what he
envisioned. He became the vice chair of the higher-education committee
in the state Senate and introduced Senate Bill 135—a sweeping
higher-education-reform bill that, among other things, would require
schools to create a formal complaint system for students, groups, or
faculty who were concerned that their free-speech rights had been
violated. “If a student in a classroom feels their professor is
overly liberal and expresses concern about how speaking up is
impacting his grades, I wanted to have a process for him,” he said
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the time. The bill was signed into law last year, and it achieved
several of his aims, he told me. However, he had other things in mind
that S.B. 135 did not accomplish.

I spoke with Cirino twice for this story, once in July shortly after
the Ohio legislature went on recess for the summer, and again in
mid-August, to better understand what about higher education—beyond
what S.B. 135 did—he believed still needed changing. “I really was
alarmed at the lack of diversity of thought on our campuses—that’s
the nationwide view that I had,” Cirino told me. As an example of
the lack of diversity, the senator noted concerns about conservative
speakers being protested. When I asked Cirino if there were any
specific instances he was thinking of in Ohio, he could not think of
any, but he cited an event in March at Stanford Law School where a
handful of students disrupted a conservative judge’s speech over his
stances on transgender people. Cirino’s frustrations echoed those of
many Republicans, who often point to a handful of incidents to argue
that higher education is too liberal.

Several studies have shown
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across disciplines, college faculties _do _tend to lean left, but as
Samuel J. Abrams, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute, and Amna Khalid, an associate history professor at Carleton
College, wrote in 2020, “we should be careful not to assume that the
mere disparities in the political composition of campus communities
are responsible for shaping campus climate.” Still, the fact that so
many professors lean liberal leads many Republicans to say, per a 2021
Pew Research Center study, that colleges have a “negative effect on
the way things are going in the country” (nearly two-thirds of
Republicans surveyed in the study agreed with this assertion). “In
my view, as a legislator looking out for higher education—and we
provide a heck of a lot of funding for higher education—I don’t
believe it’s our role in the legislature to just write checks,”
Cirino told me. “We should also have a little bit of say, so we can
have a seat at the table in terms of what kind of job they are
doing.”

In March, after becoming chair of the Ohio Senate’s higher-education
committee, Cirino introduced S.B. 83—the Higher Education
Enhancement Act. The National Association of Scholars, a conservative
education nonprofit, called the bill a “higher education
reformer’s wishlist.” The bill made changes to post-tenure review,
banned faculty from striking, and required the elimination of DEI
statements in hiring. It also altered how university trustees were
appointed and trained. “The governing boards are appointed by the
governor … and the senate has advice and consent,” Cirino told me
in July. But whereas in the past, the senate’s role had been
perfunctory, “we have a process in place now where we will be
reviewing appointments in the higher-education committee and deciding
whether or not those trustees should be kept in place after the
governor makes the appointment,” he said.

“What we’re trying to do is shore up the governance model a
bit,” Cirino said, “because we want to make sure that at the end
of the day, they are the governing board of the university, and the
president works for them; it’s not the other way around.”

Although Cirino argues that his changes simply bring more structure to
board appointments, in practice, such moves have tended to bring more
politics into university boards, not less. In 2019, caught between a
conservative board of governors that wanted to return a Confederate
monument to its pedestal and a campus community that wanted it
permanently removed, Carol Folt announced that she would be resigning
as the president of UNC Chapel Hill; she removed what was left of
Silent Sam on her way out. The moment crystallized the new activist
posture of boards of trustees, and bills such as Cirino’s could only
accelerate that activism.

Critics immediately assailed the bill as an assault on higher
education. “The ACLU of Ohio does and always has supported robust
free speech, academic freedom, and intellectual-diversity protections
on Ohio’s college and university campuses,” Gary Daniels, the
chief lobbyist for the group, said during a committee hearing to
discuss the bill. “However, we believe S.B. 83 is contrary, not
complementary, to these goals.”

Cirino’s bill also bars colleges from taking positions on any
“controversial belief or policy”—though the bill makes an
exception for supporting the United States when Congress approves a
war declaration, or if the college wants to display the American or
Ohio flag.

The initial version of the legislation named, as examples, climate
change, abortion, and same-sex marriage as areas of controversy, but
Cirino stressed that that list was not exhaustive. “What is
controversial today might be noncontroversial next year,” he told
me. “What we want to guard against is the institutions themselves,
as state institutions, taking positions on controversial issues.”

Conor Friedersdorf: Free speech is not just for conservatives
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If a university was not allowed to take positions on controversial
beliefs, what did that mean for an institution that wanted to
celebrate Pride Month? I asked Cirino.

“If a group of students want to have a parade or whatever, they can
do that,” Cirino told me. “If the university takes a position that
one lifestyle is better than another or preferred to another or should
be given more deference to another, that would be wrong, in my opinion
… The students have their First Amendment rights that I will defend
whether I agree with them or not.”

In the bill’s most recent version, some of the suggested topics
tagged as being controversial have been tweaked. Notably, with
generational weather events becoming more and more common—floods
that have left cities devastated, tornadoes that have leveled entire
towns, wildfires creating plumes that have ruined air quality hundreds
of miles away and left skies a dystopian haze of orange—climate
change is hardly controversial. Instead, the bill now refers to
“climate policy.”

“Even though climatologists view climate change as settled science,
there are different ways that you react to that from a policy
standpoint and that should get lots of debate,” Cirino told me in
August. “And in spite of what some people may say, it is a
controversial topic. There are different views about how critical the
situation is.” He reiterated that his bill was about having debate:
“Nothing can be viewed as closed science, because we’re dealing
with an academic community.” Cirino says he wants institutions that
serve everyone regardless of their political bent. “I’m not trying
to turn our universities into right-thinking institutions; they need
to be neutral,” he stressed.

But there is a difference between an institution seeking neutrality
for itself and the government dictating what it can and cannot do. For
its part, the board of trustees at Ohio State University has said that
the institution is already working to ensure a diversity of opinion on
campus. In a statement, the board criticized the bill prior to its
passage in the senate in May. “We share the General Assembly’s
commitment to free speech, open dialogue, and the importance of
diverse views,” it wrote. “The university is already taking steps
to again emphasize that all viewpoints are welcome and respected on
our campuses.”

But Cirino doesn’t trust that colleges will follow through.
Universities, he told me, “have a terrible track record of
self-correcting anything.”

Despite cirino’s protestations to the contrary, several
higher-education historians worry that the current movement in the
United States to reconstitute university boards, establish guidelines
for what universities can and cannot promote, and restrict faculty
speech is exactly how leaders in authoritarian states operate. After
all, some prominent conservatives have openly praised nations that
have reshaped higher education, such as Hungary—which, as my
colleague Anne Applebaum wrote, “is the only European country to
have shut down an entire university, to have put academic bodies (the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences) under direct government control, and to
have removed funding from university departments that the ruling party
dislikes for political reasons.”

In August, Rufo, who has led the conservative charge to reorient
higher education toward conservative ends, wrote about a trip
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recently taken to Hungary; its leaders, he argued, “are serious
people combatting the same forces confronted by conservatives in the
West: the fraying of national culture, entrenched left-wing
institutions, and the rejection of sexual difference.” Hungarian
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was intentional about how he assigned
members to the boards of its colleges, Rufo wrote, appointing
“conservative stalwarts to the governing boards of these new
institutions, with a mandate to advance a ‘national approach’ to
education, rather than continue to serve as centers for left-wing
ideology.” Orbán, he added, had introduced a new institution with
the intention to “create a new national elite.”

Rufo praised the Hungarian government for the way it had inserted
itself into established institutions, arguing that he suspected
“that the real reason many left-liberals hate Hungary with such
fervor is that its government has adopted their premise that the state
has an abiding interest in managing and shaping society and used it to
pursue goals opposed to theirs.”

It’s difficult to put moments into perspective as you’re living
through them. But to John Thelin, an emeritus professor at the
University of Kentucky who has made a career of studying higher
education’s history, the efforts of Rufo, as well as of Cirino and
politicians like him, have placed higher education at a crucial
juncture—one that challenges not only the way universities are
currently constructed, but also their core tenets, including academic
freedom and shared governance.

“We’re talking about the character and essence of our universities
for at least the next generation,” Thelin told me. The various
governmental efforts to reform higher education—regarding
admissions, curriculum, tenure, oversight—are sort of like the New
Deal, he said. Typically, when an academic invokes the New Deal, they
mean to suggest a positive, dramatic innovation. That’s not what
Thelin meant, though: “I see it more as an unraveling.”

In 1915, the American Association of University Professors established
a committee to take up the question of academic freedom. The panel was
formed in response to threats across the country: At schools including
the University of Utah, Wesleyan University, and the University of
Pennsylvania, professors had been fired for teaching material that
boards disagreed with; presidents had been fired as well. The cases
were too voluminous to handle, so the committee dealt with the most
pressing ones and established principles for others to follow. The
resulting document came to be known as the 1915 Declaration of
Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure; the principles
were updated and reaffirmed in 1940.

The panel aimed to enhance the dignity of the profession and reinforce
the purposes of universities: promoting inquiry, advancing knowledge,
instructing students, developing experts to serve the public. But the
committee members were particularly worried about the boards that
govern institutions of higher education. “The board of trustees is
the body on whose discretion, good feeling, and experience the
securing of academic freedom now depends,” said one president the
committee spoke with. They saw the boards as a weak point in the
protection of a university’s independence, and some people argue
that those concerns now read prophetically. The takeover at New
College began with a changing of the guard at the board level. For
years, state leaders in North Carolina, Florida, and elsewhere have
been remaking
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boards to reflect the conservative priorities of state officials.

Eddie R. Cole, an associate professor at UCLA who studies how college
presidents have shaped policy, believes that the principles laid out
by the AAUP are being eroded, and that the public affront has to be
met with equal force. “When you see a group of elected officials
moving in a certain direction that’s counter to what we’ve
understood higher education to be, that warrants a public response,”
he told me. Administrators typically try to work behind the scenes
with lawmakers and state officials, Cole said, but in the present
circumstance, that’s unlikely to be enough: “Maybe conversations
are happening behind closed doors, but you still need the public
aspect of it too. You need to let your broader campus community know,
let your state know, let everybody who has an eye toward the
university know where the institution stands.”

Annie Lowrey: Why you have to care about these 12 colleges
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John Thelin was more blunt. “This is redefining. So many values and
principles and policies that were hard-fought to gain are being eroded
before our eyes,” he told me. “And if there isn’t some vigilance
from our presidents, they’re going to just evaporate before us over
the next couple of years.”

In a 1916 essay, John Dewey wrote, “Democracy has to be born anew
every generation, and education is its midwife.” It’s an idea that
animates liberal education. And Lynn Pasquerella, the president of the
American Association of Colleges and Universities, told me that she
worries that if the attacks on the sector continue, and higher
education’s central tenants are upended, other democratic
institutions will not be far behind: “If we’re not able to train
students to engage in civil discourse by modeling it, then we no
longer have a system of liberal education as it was meant to be.”

Cirino argued that his goal is also to model civil discourse. When I
asked him, during our conversations in both July and August, what that
looked like, he pointed to a hypothetical conversation between a
professor and a student about the Holocaust.

“What we’re saying simply is that different sides of issues, like
the Holocaust-denier thing that I mentioned earlier, should be given
open discussion,” he told me in July. He was referring to a question
that he’s gotten several times since his bill first came out: What
should professors do if a student continues to present dissenting
views about the Holocaust? Earlier this year, Cirino was admonished by
a colleague, State Representative Casey Weinstein, after he refused to
unequivocally say that Holocaust denialism is outside the realm of
legitimate classroom debate.

“There’s no question that it happened, but if I were teaching a
class, and somebody came up and said they doubted whether it really
happened the way everybody had reported it, the choice for the
professor is that you can throw that student out of class, you can
fail them, you can tell the other students to harass them, or you can
persuade the student with the preponderance of evidence that the
Holocaust happened,” he told me. “You may or may not convince the
student, but that’s the kind of dialogue that should be
happening.”

Of course, there are other options: The professor could have the
student come and speak with them during office hours; a conversation
intended to persuade a single student about the reality of a human
atrocity does not _need _to occur during class, and certainly not if
it risks legitimating Holocaust denial. But in Cirino’s formulation,
even if a conversation verges on devolving the classroom into a
glorified debate forum where one side is arguing with facts and the
other with one of history’s most harmful conspiracy theories, as
long as the argument remains respectful in tone if not in content, it
should be had.

_Adam Harris [[link removed]] is a
staff writer at The Atlantic._

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