The Right-Wing Takeover of the American University

Anti-“woke” hysteria both conceals and abets the actual suppression of left-wing voices on college campuses

Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, TX, where a tenured professor was harassed over a private social media comment until he resigned. An open letter signed by hundreds of academics in protest of the university’s treatment of Professor Jun is currently circulating here. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

From the volume and frequency of high-profile media meltdowns over “woke” social justice activism on campuses, it would be easy to conclude that colleges and universities are sites of leftist indoctrination. In reality, however, it is right-wing interests that are increasingly making a deliberate, concerted effort to exercise control over university departments across the US—and receiving alarmingly little pushback.

The most obvious way that this control is being sought is in the proliferation of laws which have swept through state legislatures this year banning the teaching of so-called “critical race theory”—a field of inquiry which examines how legal structures have been used to perpetuate systemic inequality in the US. Such bans, which have been signed into law in Idaho, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Tennessee, and South Carolina—and introduced to legislature in several more states—will have the effect of severely limiting how history can be taught, criminalizing educators who do not comply with state-mandated censorship.

However there is also a less well-publicized trend sweeping universities—one in which cash-strapped departments receive grants from organizations like the Charles Koch…