One of the reasons why the ideological Left was able to get away with so much in American higher education for so long is that Conservatives have given too little attention to what’s going on in that arena. And furthermore, this has been the arena of the Left. Increasingly, ever since the midpoint of the 20th Century, university and college faculties have grown more and more liberal. And of course, that’s a generalization. There are Conservative colleges, there are Conservative faculties, but they are the exceptions. The norm has been a very significant lurch to the left, and in some cases, a lurch to the far left in terms of that entire environment of higher education.

So, we go to the campus or the college or university, and what you’re going to find is a succession of programs, emphasis of system of activism, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), identity politics, special studies programs, and all the rest. I want to talk a little bit about how that works and why even undoing this a little bit does matter. For example, the New York Times this past week had a headline, “Texas A&M Alters Classes and Ends Women’s Studies.” Okay, interesting.

So, now, you have a major university, Texas A&M, one of the better known universities in the country, one of the leading state universities in our national network, Texas A&M has ended Women’s Studies. Now, that doesn’t mean that, at Texas A&M, there’s not going to be research on women, or on all kinds of issues. It is to say, there is no department of Women’s Studies. There is no longer going to be a curricular reality, which is a significant faculty investment and specific curricular assignment to the field of Women’s Studies. This really is big news, because that field of Women’s Studies is, just from the get go, it’s ideologically to the left.

One of the things that we have simply had to observe in higher education in recent decades is the fact that so many of these new departments representing these forms of ideology and activism, you can’t possibly have anything even close to ideological balance in those departments because the entire enterprise is entirely on the left. And so, you’re not going to find a Conservative specialist in some of these fields, precisely because the fields themselves are so far on the left. The entire ideology of the discipline is now entirely on the left. 

Women’s Studies is one of these. Women’s Studies really began to develop in American higher education in the 1960s, exploded in the 1970s and beyond, and it is inseparable from second-wave feminism, inseparable from ideological feminism, inseparable from the feminist ideologies that really began to take a hold of so much of the academic elite, and all the rest, and it became a self-perpetuating system. So, for one thing, let’s just take the obvious, you don’t find many men in Women’s Studies departments. Instead, what you find are highly ideological, overwhelmingly leftist women, by and large.

A college student came up to me, years ago, and simply said that in that particular university where that student was studying, not only was the Women’s Studies department ideologically on the left, but the lesbians outnumbered the non-lesbians on the faculty. And so, by the way, that leads to another department, which is Gender Studies. And you can just see how this goes on. 

Now, a part of this is marketing. So, I want to be clear about that, a part of this is how universities position themselves and market themselves. And overwhelmingly, given faculty pressure and the pressure of the academic disciplines, they’ve just marketed left. They’ve trumpeted the existence of these departments. They’re proud of them. And you look at the catalogs of the universities, you see their investment is massive in all of these special studies programs. But where did they come from?

Well, for one thing, you can’t have the entire ideology, that produces these departments, without the concept, two concepts, as a matter of fact: identity politics, and intersectionality. And you know those come from critical theory, but they’re critical theory as applied, pragmatically, to the curriculum of a university. If you have a young person at a university, certainly a major university, you need to know exactly what this process looks like and why all these departments are what they are.

It is because here you have the claim that there is an underrepresented identity group, and thus, the university has the moral responsibility to invest in a special department of studies for this underrepresented group. And so, pretty soon, you can see exactly how this goes. It’s just how the concept of intersectionality happens, the intersection of so many different identity markers. That intersectionality argues that if you are a woman, then you’re underrepresented because you are a woman in terms of power politics. If you are a non-White woman, then you have a different point of intersectionality. So, it’s the intersection of the oppression of gender and the oppression of race. If you are a Black feminist lesbian, well, you’re hitting on three different issues here. And if you think I’m joking about this, you just need to see, for instance, so many academic books, and see how the authors or editors are identified. And these academic departments, can you imagine where this inevitably goes? Well, this is where the Left inevitably wants to go. It’s absolute nonsense, but it’s nonsense that has been very much incorporated into the curricula of major colleges and universities.

But Texas A&M made the headlines because it has altered classes, that’s what the headline says, and it’s ending its Women’s Studies department. Allen Blinder reporting for the Times tells us, “Texas A&M said, on Friday of last week, that it would end its Women and Gender Studies program, and that the syllabuses,” that’s the course description outline requirements, “for hundreds of courses have been altered under new policies, limiting how race and gender ideology may be discussed in classrooms.”

Listen to this, “The university said that six courses have been canceled because of the new rules…” Now, the next statement is simply astounding, “out of the roughly 5,400 that were planned for this semester at one of the nation’s largest public universities.” All right, my most fundamental offense in all of this is ideological, it’s worldview, but honestly, the math is astounding. You’re telling me that at Texas A&M University, that there were 5,400 classes that were scheduled? I’ll just say that’s implausible. That’s not plausible.

So, then, you look and you realize, well, some of these are cross-identified courses, and some of them are sections of classes, which is to say, you have, I don’t know, algebra, and you have different class groupings, and they’re sometimes called sections, as part of a curriculum. But you look at this, and I’ll simply say, I don’t know how in the world the taxpayers of any state, including the state of Texas, pay for a university that would offer 5,400 courses in a single semester. I’ll just go out further on a limb and say, if there were so many courses as this, an awful lot of them have to be absolute nonsense, a lot of them, no doubt, absolutely justifiable, in academic terms.

But when you look at the proliferation of catalogs and all the rest, all these special studies departments and all the rest, it is an absolute, it’s a universe of insanity. And you know what? It’s a very expensive universe of insanity that parents and taxpayers pay an awful lot of money for by the billions a year. 

All right. So, one of the interesting things is that there’s pressure in Texas, a Conservative state. Conservative legislators and governors, political leaders there, they have certainly stepped into this. Nationally, the Trump Administration has put a lot of pressure on colleges and universities that receive, after all, so much federal tax money, to cut down on these programs and to avoid the kind of programs or courses and curricula, and for that matter, lectures in which you have this absolute dependence on leftist ideology.

The Times tells us, “The system’s regents, all of them appointed by Governor Greg Abbott, a Texas Republican, approved the restrictive policies late last year. And officials have been scrambling since then to interpret and enforce them. Supporters contend that the rules are appropriate measures to prevent political ideologies, particularly those often associated with the left. Opponents say the approach encourages self-censorship, and is itself ideological.”

All right, now, one of the things to note here is that in the world of higher academia, over the course of the 20th Century, the ideology took hold that no non-academic has the right to judge what takes place in the academic arena. This is an absolute arena of privilege so far as most academics are concerned.

Now, by the way, this emerged in other professions; in law and in medicine, you had lawyers for the American Bar Association. External authorities aren’t going to tell us who’s a good lawyer and who’s not. That’s what we will do. Same thing in terms of medicine and other professions. But when it comes to higher education, you’re talking about something with such vast influence, and frankly, a self-replicating influence. So, when you look at the highest levels of higher education, the faculty tend to replicate themselves and their students.

That’s one of the reasons why the Left has won so comprehensively for so long. Now, as you might imagine, some of the liberal faculty are fighting back on this. At Texas A&M, we’re told in 2024, “The regents ordered A&M to drop its minor in LGBTQ Studies.” Okay, that goes back to the LGBTQ revolution, the activism, the ideological leftist underpinnings of that. It goes back to intersectionality once again. And that was two years ago, 2024, the regents ordered dropping that minor in LGBTQ Studies.

But what makes this interesting is that Women’s Studies wasn’t just a minor, it was a major, which, in the academic world means, it was a degree concentration. You could do a degree in Women’s Studies. That is past tense, however, because the regents have now shut it down. Listen to this, “Sally Robinson, an English professor who was long taught in Texas A&M’s Women’s and Gender Studies program, said that the demise of the LGBTQ Studies minor had made people think the program could vanish as well,” “given the political context we’re living in, especially in Texas.” She said she hadn’t expected this to come so quickly, however, “There is a deep sense of sadness that this university is going down this path. Whether the regents understand it or not, it’s going to have a devastating effect.”

Now, the same kind of faculty threat has appeared in other universities, I think particularly at the University of Florida, just in recent years. Also, in places like New College there in Florida, which, under the direction of Governor Ron DeSantis, has been taken over, actually. It’s a very liberal experiment, and Governor DeSantis used his appointment powers to the board there to make a difference, and again, made headline news all over the place. 

But the disappearance of these programs is an opportunity, but it’s something we’re also going to have to watch. Because it is a significant gain to get rid of these programs, but it’s also a significant gain to get rid of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, but it can all be an illusion if all of this is just rebranded, and the same ideologies come back again under a new name with the new guys and a new major or a new minor and a new department, same old stuff.

That is what, those who want to affect longtime change, are going to have to watch very carefully.

Okay, one window into all of this, and by the way, let me just give you a couple of statistics that should get your attention. When you think about the faculties in America’s elite universities, one of the interesting things is that there are two ways to judge the actual pragmatic politics of those faculty members. So, one of them is by asking them. And so, there are all kinds of surveys taken in, which, faculty members at these major universities are asked about their political identity. That’s one way. The other way is to track financial contributions to political campaigns.

So, political contributions in the states are eventually reported, and thus, you’re able to say, “Okay, here are faculty members at University X, and here you have all these gifts, all these contributions that are made to the Democratic candidates.” Let’s just say that in so many of these universities, you can’t even find someone who identifies as a Republican, much less as a Conservative, in many of these departments, and then, you look at the financial support and what is self-reported about voting, let’s just say it’s not just left, it’s far, far Left. It’s not only blue, it’s so blue, you’re testing the color theory. 

And one of the most obvious places to look are in all these Gender Studies programs, these special studies programs, but it’s also the classical disciplines that have really turned far, far left, and in a big way. For example, The Wall Street Journal recently ran an opinion piece by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin. And Mr. Kahlenberg is identified as Director of the American Identity Project, and Mr. Lin is a policy research fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. These two scholars acknowledge that there are complexities in American history, but they go on to say, you wouldn’t know that from reading a publication such as American Quarterly, which is described as, “The flagship journal of the American Studies Association.” It’s published by Johns Hopkins University, and as these two scholars say, “is widely considered the country’s premier Journal of American Studies.” They say that in American Quarterly, they found only one side of the story told. “The Journal Scholarship paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the United States. We found that 80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none,” that is to say, zero.”

Of the 96 articles we examined,” they write, “our research identified 77 as critical, focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia.” I continue reading, “Some articles went to absurd lengths to identify sins. One essay posited that thermodynamics, the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work, and temperature is ‘An abstract settler capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of indigenous lands and lives.'”

So, you are supposed to see that as absolutely irrational, and it is because it’s absolutely irrational. It is grotesquely ideological, it is corrupting, and, if you’re not careful, it’s going to be what’s taught by the very highly paid professor at the local prestigious university you’re paying tuition to in order to send your children.

So, remember, these two have looked at a three-year period in this journal of a major American academic society in the area of history and American studies, they summarize, “It’s astonishing that we couldn’t find a single positive article over a three-year period. There were none on American ingenuity. Readers wouldn’t come to understand why, as of 2020, the US representing about 4% of the world’s population won 42% of the individual Nobel Prizes since the award’s creation in 1901, or why the US was the first country to land a man on the moon. There wasn’t a single article about America’s vanquishing Nazi Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union in the Cold War. There was no discussion of why the US is rated as the most desirable destination for immigrants across the world. Readers of American Quarterly learn a great deal about America’s moral failings, but nothing about its virtues.” 

Now, I’ll just state that this pattern of leftism, in most of higher education, is so much in place that you don’t get any academic credit for writing anything that doesn’t follow the ideological line. If you want to get tenure in one of these departments and one of these universities, you’re going to have to come up with a new way of describing how horrible America is. One of the most negative, lamentable elements of all of this, and one that should certainly have the attention, first of all, parents, but then, after all, taxpayers, is that the ideologies here held by these faculty members do, as this article says, take hold of many young people.

“When asked whether America’s founders are better described as villains or heroes in a poll cited by the Atlantic in 2024, about four in 10 Generation Z respondents chose villains, compared with only one in 10, Baby Boomers.” The bigger problem,” I’m here, reading from the article, “as Representative Ritchie Torres has said ‘A nation cannot endure if its children are taught to loathe it’” Very apt statement.

All right, well, I just wanted to remind you, in terms of these most recent developments, of what’s at stake in higher education. And remember, we as Christians understand it’s not just a battle over ideas, and thus, a battle for minds, it’s also a battle for hearts. I think one of the most lamentable aspects of all of this is how many young people become so cynical about their own country simply because they are fed all of this leftist ideology, and it’s presented as what every smart, intelligent, sensitive, sophisticated person would think, and yet, you can trace it all back to these ideologies. And no one’s actually telling the students, “Look, here’s how slanted this teaching is.” 

And again, I just want to point to the pattern that this takes place, first of all, mostly in the most elite American universities. They have the money, they have the prestige, they are the engines of creating the directions for higher education. But it filters down, because one of the things that’s so true about higher education, is that the less prestigious universities want to follow the lead of the more prestigious universities in terms of how these things are judged in academic circles.

And so, you can just see what happens in the Women’s Studies department at Stanford or Yale or the University of Chicago. You may say that’s a long way away, but the next thing you know, it’s showing up at a regional state university very close to you, and of course, also, in private colleges and universities, and if you’re not careful, at the school right down the street.

Okay, now, I have a bit of sympathy for Harvard in this story, but a little bit, just a little bit. And that is because there’s a recent headline in The New York Times about Harvard, “Harvard considers a proposal to add an A+ to help reign in grade inflation.” Okay, so, this is really, really interesting. And Harvard is an example of how this has gone to rot America’s most prestigious university, in many ways. But Harvard understands it has a huge problem, and that is that everybody’s special.

Part of it is because it is such a prestigious university. A lot of students think, “Well, if I got in, I’m an A student, and it’s wrong if you give me anything less than an A.” Listen to this, “Two decades ago, grades of A were much less common. In 2005, they accounted for 24% of all grades awarded at Harvard College, according to the report. 10 years later, though, the share had grown to 40.3%, and the proportion continued to climb steadily, jumping to 62.8% in the pandemic year of 2020, ’21, and then, settling in at just over 60% last year.”  So, 60% of the students in the undergraduate program at Harvard received an A in their courses. So, you look at that, and you go, “Well, they can’t all be that special,” and, “There’s something wrong with the grading scale here.”

But a lot of it’s political, and some of it’s therapeutic. A lot of these students, well, they will just feel like their entire world has come to an end if they don’t get an A. And furthermore, the hyper competitiveness on so many of these campuses mean that they have a plan beyond Harvard, and they want to be able to brag about how high their grades were at Harvard in order to have a competitive advantage.

Well, Harvard has decided that it’s got to do something. And so, it’s been pressing on its faculty to award fewer A’s. And we are told that the number or percentage of A’s is down slightly at Harvard. And again, we were told that it had been about 60% in recent years, we are told that it fell to 53.4% of grades awarded in the fall semester. That’s just over, so, 53.4%, again, you may not have gone to Harvard, but you can do that math, that’s more than half.

More than half the students still received an A. Harvard knows that’s a problem. So, here’s the headline, and here’s what makes it, it makes it a parable unto itself. It makes it slightly hilarious. And I don’t mean this at Harvard’s expense, because this isn’t just a Harvard problem. Harvard is considering whether or not it would help to solve the problem if they come up with a grade higher than an A. They are thinking about putting into place an A+. Okay, so, that’s a serious proposal. “A report issued in October suggested allowing grades of A+, which are not currently used at the school, as a way to recognize the best performing students, demoting the routine ordinary A to the second rung of the grading ladder.”

Okay, so just think about this, though. How in the world does that solve the problem? It’s like there’s too much money here, so let’s throw more money at it. The A is the indication of the grade inflation, so let’s create an A+. How long is it before these smart students at Harvard figure out that, if they were going to be crushed to receive anything less than an A, now, they’re going to be crushed to receive anything less than an A+. Pretty soon the faculty’s going to have to come up with A+++++. It just is going to go on.

Now, this is something just for us to think about. And again, this was slightly at Harvard’s expense, but Harvard sets itself up for this kind of parable precisely because of how it operates. My point is not that this has a lot to do with most people who are listening to The Briefing. The problem is that, down the street, at the closest school to you, the same phenomenon is probably taking place. I can tell you that, in the world of higher education, it’s increasingly difficult, at many schools, to know what any grade means, because so much of it has now become a matter of therapy and self-esteem, and all the rest, or even politics and economics, rather than academic evaluation. This is something we’re all going to have to watch. And frankly, parents, as you’re looking at this and you understand this problem, to what extent are parents also a part of this problem in that they will tell a student, “You’re an A student. You deserve an A,” without respect to the actual performance on the paper, or on the test.

Christian parents in particular, I think, ought to be concerned to make certain that our evaluation, our grading scale is based in reality and honesty. And there’s something that is simply catastrophic when all of that is lost. You don’t even know who the A student is anymore.

Finally, for today, there are going to be some very interesting conversations taking place, primarily in Congress, having to do with the situation that is now set up in which funding is going to expire for the Department of Homeland Security, and huge issues are at stake here.

And what we see right now is a political game being played, and you have very real consequences, nonetheless, that will come as the effect of whatever arrangement the Congress reaches in terms of continuing funding for DHS.

We understand there are huge issues at stake here. We’re paying attention to how the public debate unfolds, because we need to make certain the big issues are actually the big topics of debate. It’s going to have to happen pretty fast because the way the Democrats have set this up, that funding is going to run out very fast.