At Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College, instructors for a mandatory course assign readings on “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience” and “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”
At the University of Arizona’s Franke Honors College, students are forced to take an “Honors Seminar” course from a curated list of acceptable classes that feature ideologically extreme and academically unserious courses like “Eating the Globe: The Diverse, Weird, and Queer Food Politics,” which asks, “Can food be colonized and decolonized?”
Honors colleges were founded to enhance the education of the most talented students at public universities, offering them the opportunity to grapple with consequential ideas from history’s greatest thinkers. Instead, radical faculty have hijacked honors colleges and are forcing students into courses centered on their niche interests and ideologically extreme topics.
The content of courses meeting honors requirements, which I detail in a new report for the Goldwater Institute, shows that despite state and federal actions against discriminatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs, students at public universities are still subjected to DEI indoctrination in the classroom.
The faculty at ASU’s Barrett Honors College apparently want to hide this waste of resources from public scrutiny. The university has a robust online course catalog that enables faculty to upload their course syllabi, giving students information about the course before they enroll. But up to 85 percent of faculty teaching a required honors course failed to upload their syllabi, leaving students in the dark about the course content.
The Goldwater Institute sent a lawful public records request asking for only 14 syllabi for this required course that did not appear on ASU’s online catalog. Barrett took nearly 10 months to respond, and when the college finally produced the documents, the administration redacted the names of the faculty on each syllabi. This despite ASU’s course catalog providing thousands of syllabi for other courses with the instructor’s name clearly displayed.
Perhaps Barrett resisted providing basic transparency about one of its signature courses because many sections for required courses contain politicized DEI content that focuses on alleged systemic oppression based on such categories of “identity” as race, gender, and sexual orientation. Goldwater found that over 70% of the syllabi in the public records request (10 of 14) contained such content.
For example, instructors stated that their courses would examine “perceived inequality or marginalization related to a variety of factors including race, class, citizenship, gender and disability.” An instructor assigned the book Postcolonial Love Poem, which declares that America is “predicated [on] the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like [the author’s].”
Radical faculty at U of A have similarly hijacked required courses to lecture students on niche topics such as “queer food politics” and “constructing identity through collage.” And these faculty have used their taxpayer-supported jobs to produce academic “research” that looks more like leftist activism than serious scholarship.
The honors faculty member teaching “queer food politics” describes herself as an “education activist” whose research examines “decolonial pedagogies” and “gender politics.” Another honors faculty member has produced “scholarship” arguing that couples should “have no more than two biological children” because of climate change.
It’s time for Arizona lawmakers to restore honors colleges to their original purpose of providing challenging academic experiences for talented students.
The legislature should consider restricting a portion of university appropriations until the Arizona Board of Regents provides for direct review and approval of faculty hires and required honors courses. Arizona legislators should also ensure passage of a proposed state constitutional amendment that would prohibit mandatory DEI coursework in public universities.
Radical faculty have hijacked Arizona’s elite honors colleges, but through decisive action, policymakers can ensure that these institutions return to their core mission of enhancing the education of the state’s most talented students.
Timothy Minella is Director of Higher Education at the Goldwater Institute.
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