Professor Turley neatly lists what is unethical about the Oregon State “core curriculum”:

• It is an abuse of a public university to instill ideological values in students as a condition of their getting a degree. “State schools are critical in realizing a dream of a better life for many of these students,” Turley says. I guess he is referring to getting that piece of parchment that falsely asserts that a graduate has been educated. We know better.
• Faculty are using these students as a captive audience to their own ideological agenda. Yes, but the mandatory course is only a slight expansion of the indoctrination going on in most colleges already.
• State university faculties maintain that they should have full funding and full control over their institutions even as they create ideological echo chambers that exclude or marginalize a large percentage of students. The public should not have to fund such institutions.

Turley is a law school professor so I might forgive him for pretending that any universities can be trusted today to deliver “an opportunity to learn in an ideologically neutral and tolerant environment” with the exceptions of a few scattered exceptions that I am assuming exist, though I can’t think of one. “[M]any states still view public higher education as an opportunity to learn in an ideologically neutral and tolerant environment,” he writes. Well, many states are deluded. Turley seems to know this, so I don’t know why he wrote that sentence. Soon after, he notes, “Conservatives and libertarians have been largely purged from departments. Many do not have a single such faculty member, according to surveys. At the same time, many, including the head of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), oppose institutional neutrality.”

“Just as donors should decline to support private institutions without real reform and strong intellectual diversity, state legislators should use state funding to combat that ideological agenda of faculty,” Turley writes. But he knows many donors want ideological conformity—their way—in society, and a state as hopelessly woke as Oregon (…Washington, California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, Turley’s D.C…) is about as likely to have enough state legislators who oppose enforced ideological conformity as Mayor Mamdani is likely to deliver a Hanukkah message.

“There must be a point where the most fervent liberals in states such as Oregon will recognize the harm that is being done to higher education by yielding to such ideological impulses,” Turley says. Do you think he really believes that? He clearly doesn’t read my Facebook feed.

The only way the OSU method of stamping out those evil, racist conservative values like meritocracy, individual responsibility, immigration control, protection of unborn children, law enforcement, equal justice and the rest will fail is if parents refuse to send their children to such indoctrination factories and students themselves display the courage to say “No!’ to strong-arm attempts to control their intellectual freedom.

Neither of those are likely to occur either.

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Pointer: Steve Witherspoon