College professors ought to be able to write their course syllabi and teach as they think best. That’s how things have been since America’s Founding. Unfortunately, there is a new trend, with administrators demanding that they include various statements with “woke” sentiments and requirements that they conduct their classes in specific, “anti-racist” ways.
In today’s Martin Center article, Peter Bonilla of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) takes a look at this unfortunate development.
The University of Maryland was considering a mandate that professors include a statement that the school was sitting on “stolen land,” but decided to back away from that demand. At UCLA, a professor found himself in trouble for adhering to his own grading policy rather than a new one intended by the university to help black students.
Bonilla sums up, writing “There are few environments better situated for a wide-open discussion of antiracism and its related issues than the university. But universities are also troublingly susceptible to demands for orthodoxy and the squelching of dissent, perhaps never more so than in moments of national reckoning.”
Will we get over the “wokeness” mania and return to higher education that’s actually about education? Or will administrators who want to curry political favor continue pushing professors to do as they’re told?