Stanley Kurtz writes for National Review Online about one southwestern state’s problem-plagued public universities.
The woke rebellion against America’s founding principles continues to advance on all fronts. Nowhere is this truer than at America’s universities, the source and stronghold of the cultural revolution. The pushback against the illiberalism of our universities — their betrayal of their own first principles — has so far been a paltry thing. Supposedly, this is because higher education is shielded by academic freedom in a way that K–12 education is not. But that is not the reason we have failed. The truth is, opponents of the woke revolution have barely begun to do what they can to restore liberal education to America’s academy.
The greatest abdication of all is our failure to reform universities by way of trustees (also called regents or governors). University boards of regents can do almost anything. Yet most often they do nothing but rubber-stamp the decisions of administrators. That has to change right now, and it needs to change first in Arizona. …
… Arizona’s public universities have turned themselves into leaders in the national movement to indoctrinate students in the tenets of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). The showpiece of this campaign is Northern Arizona University’s (NAU) move to require four — count ’em, four — diversity courses for graduation, all of which must be grounded in “critical theory,” the neo-Marxist system that produced critical race theory, critical legal theory, and still more entries in the grand campaign to neo-Marxitize pretty much everything. …
… Lurking beneath this iceberg’s visible tip lie system-wide DEI initiatives at each of Arizona’s public universities: the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and Northern Arizona University. These university-wide “strategic plans,” adopted in the wake of the George Floyd protests and riots of 2020, aim to inject critical theory–based DEI into every nook and cranny of Arizona’s public universities.