Abolishing Tenure Will Undermine Red-State Efforts To Reform Higher Education

Apr 14, 2023 | Political News

Applicants for faculty positions are often required to submit “diversity” statements, which screen out otherwise highly qualified candidates who do not fully endorse wokeness or do not understand its subtleties. In some disciplines, wokeness has corrupted faculty research and teaching.  

Academic journal editors often suppress rigorous studies whose results contradict the tenets of wokeness while promoting shoddy research whose results happen to support wokeness. These poorly conducted studies are easy to publish and even enshrined as conventional wisdom in textbooks.

Thankfully, red states are starting to fight back against wokeness. Bills are being proposed to defund discriminatory and divisive “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracies, where woke initiatives typically originate. Other bills seek to prevent administrators from subjecting students and faculty to tests of fealty to wokeness and to prohibit race preferences in admissions and hiring. Still others would create new academic units controlled by faculty dissenters from wokeness, which could become havens for non-ideological scholarship.