Aggie With a Spoon
There’s a teachable moment taking place on campuses across the country. The lesson that will ultimately be learned will largely depend on who, in the end, is left doing the teaching. Politics isn’t just invading campuses; in many cases, syllabi-curious politicians (or the people who fund them) are taking over leadership roles at universities, playing god on the quad. Among the big changes taking place over just the past few years is the widespread surveillance of what teachers choose to teach, and the punishments doled out when those assignments fail to make the grade. NYT (Gift Article): “College professors once taught free from political interference, with mostly their students and colleagues privy to their lectures and book assignments. Now, they are being watched by state officials, senior administrators and students themselves.”
+ Nowhere has the control over a campus been more pronounced than at Texas A&M. The Aggies have seen five presidents in five years, high-profile firings and cancellations, and crackdowns on dissent. What’s so troubling about what’s taking place in College Station isn’t just the degradation of educational values, it’s the breathless pace at which things are changing. DEI, now considered a crime against the Humanities Department, was not only common at A&M, until quite recently, it was celebrated. “When the school was designated a Hispanic-Serving Institution in 2022, federal recognition that comes with additional funding for schools with a student population that is at least 25 percent Hispanic, interim provost Tim Scott said it was ‘indicative of how seriously we take our land-grant mission to serve all the citizens of this great state.’ … But within a year or so of Scott’s statement, it became completely impermissible to talk this way.” Christopher Hooks in Texas Monthly: Texas A&M’s Melting Point. (Alt link just in case.) “The … reason you should care is that the political questions facing Texas A&M are the most important questions facing the nation as a whole. In 2026, the university will celebrate its 150th birthday and the nation will celebrate its 250th. Who counts as a true Aggie? A true Texan? A true American? …. The frenzied political squabbling over buzzwords, both at A&M and in the nation at large, obscures what is really being debated every day now in a thousand different forms: whether we can keep a plural, tolerant, diverse republic, or whether those who currently have power can mandate ways of thinking, ways of being, and a social hierarchy based on difference.”
+ From WaPo (Gift Article): Before Trump ban, universities were slowly making faculties more diverse. Now, defending that diversity often leads to removal. Former Villanova professor says she was fired after accusing the law school of racial discrimination. The broader reason why these school brawls are important is because they represent what is a much larger battle over American truth and history, one that extends from the White House (where they just published a website that rewrites history of the Jan. 6 attack) all the way to visitor brochures recently pulled from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument. Medgar Evers’ killer was a Klansman, but Trump administration says stop calling him a racist. To you, that probably sounds ridiculous. To those who want to rewrite American history, it’s all part of the (lesson) plan.
