State Universities Are Scrambling to Appease the Bigoted MAGA Regime

A graduate student at the University of Oklahoma is the latest in a growing list of college instructors to face disciplinary action after being targeted by Turning Point USA, the right-wing campus pressure group founded by the late Charlie Kirk.

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.

Meanwhile, at Indiana University, a professor who showed a diagram in class that labeled “Make America Great Again” an example of a white supremacist slogan has been barred from teaching the class after a student filed a complaint with Republican Senator Jim Banks, who then intervened with the university on the student’s behalf. And the University of Alabama has suspended two student magazines—one focused on Black culture and student life, the other on women’s lifestyle—out of fear that the publications might violate the Department of Justice’s stated prohibition on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in higher education.

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.

It wasn’t long ago that conservatives and center-right pundits argued that colleges were coddling their students, in part by expanding a “woke” administrative apparatus to field student complaints about racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. If the nanny administration is always there to solve your interpersonal problems, the thinking went, you’ll never learn how to solve them yourself in the real world, where appealing to the Dean of Diversity is not an option. The idea that colleges and universities had fallen prey to “woke” mobs hell-bent on infantilizing students and censoring conservative views drew national attention for years leading up to the 2016 presidential election, featuring prominently in Trump’s campaign and energizing conservative politics ever since.

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.

On the one hand, as I’ve argued, it does little to accuse the MAGA right of hypocrisy, because they expressly reject moral and logical consistency, aiming only for dominance and retribution. On the other, it’s worth examining the way they bamboozled a majority of Americans into believing conservatives are simply fighting for the principles of free expression and intellectual diversity. The key to understanding this is recognizing how the right worked around the limitations of the First Amendment before it had the power to extort private universities and directly censor public universities.

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.

The real goal of shifting free speech battles to the battleground of “culture,” and using as a baseline the most extreme interpretations of the First Amendment in the public square, was to flatten the distinctions between state censorship, mission-driven administrative policy at private universities, and student social norms around whom to associate with and which kinds of speech are taboo. In this warped view, it is just as insidious—a crime against free speech, in fact—for a group of students to disassociate from a peer over political differences as it is for the government to force institutional and personal compliance with the Trump administration’s political views.

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.

But again, the point here is not to identify and decry bald-faced hypocrisy, the force of which Republicans would receive as the cosmos receives a shouted rebuke from a fist-wagging lunatic, but to understand what right-wing critics of higher education have been trying to accomplish all along. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now plainly see that inventing “cancel culture” and “free speech culture” were ways of getting at private individuals and private institutions—as it happens, specifically the ones easiest to paint as academic “elites”—for having free expression disputes in the first place. For the right and their enablers, free expression, free expression disputes, free association, protest, and intellectual diversity are means, not ends. The ends all involve remaking as many civic institutions as possible—private as well as public—into MAGA institutions serving the MAGA agenda.

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.