Greg Lukianoff is the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has taken over the non-partisan role of First Amendment protector that the ACLU abandoned over a decade ago. In an essay for the New York Times titled, “This Is No Way to Run a University” (gift link), he easily smashes some low hanging conservative fruit: Texas A&M University introducing policy changes aimed at a sweeping review of course materials aimed at purging state disapproved assertions about about race and gender ( according to a bill passed last spring by the Texas Legislature) from woke curricula.

The bill is almost certainly unconstitutional as state forbidden speech. Lukianoff highlights the fact that the law was interpreted at Texas A&M as mandating the elimination of some Plato works from a philosophy course on how classical ethical concepts apply to contemporary social problems, including race and gender. That is clearly a ridiculous result. The free speech activist writes in part,

“Texas A&M seems to have concluded that the safest way to handle the ideas contained in a classic text is to bury them. This is no way to run an institution of higher education. University administrators and state lawmakers are saying, in effect, that academic freedom won’t protect you if you teach ideas they don’t like. Never mind that decades ago, the Supreme Court described classrooms as the very embodiment of the “marketplace of ideas”: “Our nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us, and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom…Within the Texas Tech University system, which has more than 60,000 students, a Dec. 1 memo warned faculty members not to “promote or otherwise inculcate” certain specific viewpoints about race and sex in the classroom. These include concepts like “One race or sex is inherently superior to another”; “An individual, by virtue of race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive”; and “Meritocracy or a strong work ethic are racist, sexist or constructs of oppression.” The point isn’t that these concepts should just be accepted or go unchallenged; it’s that challenging them through a robust give-and-take is what universities are for.”

This would be indisputable, except that the writer, I assume deliberately, ignores the context of the Texas law and the reality of the problem it is addressing. Because the world of academia, along with other institutions, gradually ceased trying to promote critical thinking (that is, how to think) in higher education in favor of indoctrination (what to think), some of those ideas that Texas is trying to suppress aren’t just taught in colleges and universities, but are virtually dictated by them. Contrary positions may not be forbidden by law or policy, but they are disfavored, discouraged, and suppressed by social controls. I would place “An individual, by virtue of race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive” and “Meritocracy or a strong work ethic are racist, sexist or constructs of oppression” in that category.

Those views among others that flourish in our colleges and universities, I believe, are divisive, un-American, destructive, unethical, stupid, to be blunt, and cultural poison. Decades of Leftist infiltration of college faculties and departments along with biased institutionalized favor toward such dubious concepts as intersectionality were allowed to embed themselves in our schools, thanks to apathy and inattention by American society, Now that they dominate higher education, the ratcheting process that characterizes the Left’s long game (recently discussed here and here) appears beyond correction.

If the “marketplace of ideas” is already so corrupted that only unconstitutional laws have a chance of restoring ideological balance and neutrality, what is to be done?

I have absolutely no idea.