Mel Curth, a trans psychology instructor who recently won the Department of Psychology’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award, gave a zero to junior Samantha Fulnecky’s reaction paper for an assignment on “gender typicality, peer relations, and mental health,” judging that the essay was based more in “personal ideology” than “empirical evidence.” Fulnecky, whose paper describes “the lie that there are multiple genders” as “demonic,” filed a religious discrimination complaint with the university, which in turn put Curth on administrative leave pending investigation.
During the second Trump administration, right-wing politicians and pressure groups have been eager to turn conventional matters of university governance into opportunities for state intervention. That’s been most apparent in the administration’s war on elite private universities. But what we’re witnessing in the above examples and elsewhere is a less heralded, but perhaps even more alarming, trend of public universities making preemptive decisions to appease the bigoted MAGA regime. In doing so, they risk validating the political right’s long-held view that education serves one purpose: indoctrination.
Now that Trump, the Department of Justice, and the wider executive branch are exercising unprecedented power—with the assistance of an impotent Congress and a craven Supreme Court—conservatives have simply swapped the nanny administration for the nanny state, using legislative majorities at the state level and threats from the Department of Justice to lean on colleges like mafiosi. Although federal shakedowns of institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and most recently Northwestern have grabbed headlines, publicly funded red-state universities susceptible to direct interference by Republican-controlled legislatures and the federal government—like the University of Oklahoma, Indiana University, the University of Alabama, Texas A&M, and Texas Tech—are scrambling to remake their policies and curricula in the image of the Trump administration. In this upside-down world, one wonders whether an explicitly anti-trans magazine or racist lecture would trigger any official scrutiny at all.
For years, conservatives—alongside the center-right punditry—made First Amendment jurisprudence into a culture war between “cancel culture” and “free speech culture.” Critics of higher education recognized that private universities can legally impose time, place, and manner restrictions on campus speech—for example, no protests that disrupt class time, or no blackface Halloween costumes—in excess of what’s legal in the public square. By framing First Amendment matters in terms of “culture,” they could get around the pesky fact that private, mission-driven institutions and workplaces of all kinds—universities, newspapers, trade organizations, churches—have pragmatic reasons and legal leeway to operate differently from the public square when it comes to free expression. Residential colleges and universities in particular have always had to carefully balance the students’ rights to speak and associate freely with fiduciary duties to provide physically safe and equally welcoming living and learning environments for students. Needless to say, schools don’t always strike the right balance, but the challenges are greater than culture warriors tend to acknowledge.
You might even think those two things are equally insidious, but if free speech is really your cause, swapping the one insidious thing for the other is obviously not the way to go about it.
The long-standing complaint that higher education is really a left-wing indoctrination mill is not just a partisan talking point. It’s a theory of education. For conservatives of various stripes—from Christian fundamentalists to “parents’ rights” school board activists to the policymakers behind right-wing campus agitation networks—education is indoctrination. Under this theory, students enter college not as thinking agents with their own interests and aims, set to make a future of their own in a big, broad, chaotic world, but as finished products indelibly marked with their parents’ cultural, political, and religious values, beyond which everything new poses the threat of indoctrination.
Once you accept this nihilistic distortion of education, everything that happens in the classroom—every syllabus, every campus social event—begins to look like a shot fired in the culture war. It’s not that people who think this way are against using education as an instrument of indoctrination. They only object to the kind of indoctrination they think education is accomplishing. If we view the second Trump administration’s suppressive actions at universities in light of the culture-warring tactics of the first, it’s clear that what MAGA and the broader right wants is not greater freedom of expression or intellectual diversity but for higher education institutions to forcibly impose the teaching and learning of a narrow set of intolerant conservative values. Trump and his minions are using all of their state power to achieve those ends, but they’re instilling such fear throughout higher education that sometimes, as we’re now seeing, they don’t even have to lift a finger to get what they want.
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