PUBLIC FUNDING OF EDUCATION IS CENSORSHIP PER SE.

Legislators can engage in censorship, but should they?  "Years ago, pioneer economist Richard T. Ely engaged in some scholarship the legislators didn't like.  The regents responded, in a statement that has long been cast in bronze on Bascom Hall."

It has long been my position that higher education brought the Ron DeSantis problem, or was it the Scott Walker problem, or did it begin with Allan Bloom and Charlie Sykes, on itself.

At Inside Higher Ed, a former university president and state attorney general called John Kroger engages in constructive self-criticism.

I have worked in and around politics for more than 30 years, and I have found that in politics, most initiatives from both the left and the right are motivated not just by politics, but by a genuine concern over significant matters of public policy.

When conservatives look at our colleges and universities, what do they see? Faculty are overwhelmingly Democrats or left-leaning, by a ratio of nine to one. Subjects important to conservatives, like military history, are rarely a focus, while subjects grounded in feminist and antiracist perspectives are common. Conservative political thought is often taught as a straw man, not a valid alternative, to dominant liberal and radical perspectives. Staff are overwhelmingly left-leaning, often organized in unions that are overt allies of the Democratic Party, and pursue Title IX and DEI initiatives strongly favored by Democrats and vehemently opposed by Republicans. Given this assessment, it is hardly surprising to see a conservative state like Florida try to alter the trajectory of its universities.

In the matter of higher education, there ought to be some agreement on, oh, developing a functioning jive detector and being receptive to contending interpretations of events or writings.  I contend that reality is socially conservative, and perhaps the best evidence in support of his claim that conservative thought gets a cursory treatment at best is that I've found nothing in the work I've encountered on disrupting reality that convinces me to think differently.

Mr Kroger invokes a tenet of radical skepticism in an interesting way.

For me, the central fact about higher education is that it is not ethically neutral. Students of traditional college age, 18 to 25, are still developing cognitively, politically and ethically. For them, college is not just a process of learning job skills or imbibing information, but a highly impactful experience in human development. Colleges and universities transmit knowledge, yes, but they also inculcate values. Higher education, in short, is a foundational process of cultural initiation, value formation and character development: one that shapes a student’s long-term path as a human being.

There might be no such thing as ethical neutrality, ethical systems being emergent; and yet, in five thousand years maybe we got a few things right.  A university, as opposed to a seminary, or an indoctrination camp, or a technical school, as a matter of purpose, ought inculcate values.  The late Richard "Underground Grammarian" Mitchell nailed that, years ago.  "And that’s what a university is, if it is a university, and not a jumped-up trade school, or a conditioning station for docile citizens, or a pulpit of ideology. It is a place devoted to the study and preservation and nurture of whatever human wisdom can be found that pertains to everybody who lives, or has lived, or ever will live, on Earth."

Whether the university is a vanity project of a deceased industrialist, a continuation of a religious tradition, or a state project combining the intellectual and practical arts, it is in that business.

The fact that education is an ethical process, not just an intellectual experience, is totally unproblematic in the private higher education sector. Every private institution is a unique ethical community, free, within very broad constitutional constraints, to develop and pass on its preferred values. Some colleges emphasize playing and watching sports, others the life of the mind. Some valorize business and commerce, others the arts and humanities. Some schools make religion a cornerstone of college; others more or less actively discourage it. Some choose to require a core curriculum, while others give students broad freedom of choice in coursework. All these choices have significant ethical and political ramifications, but that should not worry us. Brigham Young University is very different from Harvard, in ways that matter profoundly, but as long as our country possesses a broad array of different higher education options, and students and their parents are free to choose or not choose to join any particular ethical community, all is well.

The extension of that argument to the common schools is left to the reader as an exercise. It is, however, Mr Kroger's continuation that gets to the heart of the matter.

This analysis is quite different when we come to public institutions. One of the fundamental tenets of a free society is that the government does not seek to indoctrinate its citizens or require them to think in any particular way. This is the central teaching of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), where the court held, in the midst of the Second World War against Nazi Germany and fascist Japan, that students in public school cannot be forced to pledge allegiance to the American flag. In that case, Justice Robert Jackson wrote, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” When the nation has deviated from this fundamental rule, it has come to regret it. Think, for example, of the plague of McCarthyism in the 1950s or the disastrous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

This basic tenet of our Constitution, one of the foundations of our system of free government, places public higher education in an incredibly difficult position. On the one hand, staff and faculty at colleges and universities must not tell students what to think or believe. On the other hand, crafting an ideologically neutral learning environment, ethically and politically, is impossible. All learning environments, no matter how constituted, have ethical and political ramifications. So how do we square this circle?

Again, radical skepticism properly applied.  If doing something involves deploying an ethical system, or an ideology of some kind, perhaps the best thing to do is bet on emergence.

In a free society, the only acceptable answer is to protect intellectual and ideological pluralism. Public colleges and universities must present students with a multiplicity of ways of thinking and being, and then leave students make their own choices from this spectrum, free and uncoerced. Any other answer conflicts with the basic teaching of Barnette: that government officials, high or petty, may not tell citizens what to think. This is not neutrality: pluralism is an ideology. But it is the only acceptable ideology in a society committed to freedom of thought and expression. Leadership, faculty and staff at public institutions—and the elected governors and legislators who fund and regulate these institutions—are not free to create communities expressing and inculcating their own ethical and political preferences, like people at private institutions. They are held to a different standard.

And, yes, that is precisely engaging in that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing, or perhaps, to paradigms shifting one funeral at a time.  So let it be with Florida.

Banning the teaching of critical race theory, for example, is clearly and definitively a prohibited effort to “prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.” It is unconstitutional and undemocratic. College and university presidents and their faculty have an obligation that ensure that courses subject theories like CRT to criticism and debate, not present them as matters of faith, or, alternatively, to offer additional courses that conduct that essential critique. There may be an argument that in some institutions, this is not being done with sufficient integrity and rigor, and if so, that should be corrected. But an all-out ban on subject matter or a particular set of ideas in a public institution is antithetical to the American system of government.

Put simply, if the people who offer explanations based on critical theories note evidence and anomalies.  I suspect the governor's effort to get critical race theory out of school curricula is a reaction to its uncritical application as part of exercises in privilege-shaming.  That is, dear reader, in ways that lack integrity or rigor.  Mr Kroger addresses that.

There is no doubt that staff have to set and enforce standards for how students treat one another. Institutions have to be inclusive, to be open to all and to require students to show one another mutual respect. These efforts cannot, however, stray into dogmatic indoctrination, establishing mandatory ways of understanding complex questions of race, class and gender. The senior leadership of every institution has an obligation to ensure that they achieve this difficult balance. Staff may oversee student relations, to ensure mutual tolerance and respect. They can run programs to help traditionally underrepresented populations thrive in the university setting. They can discipline students who cause actual harm to others. But, as West Virginia v. Barnette teaches us, they cannot seek to impose their own views of social justice on to their charges. That may be appropriate in a private setting, but it is not in a public one. In my view, the extent to which this balance is achieved is a reasonable subject for legislative and regulatory oversight.

Some faculty and staff at public institutions may object that failure to require students to study particular perspectives on social justice or to adopt particular antiracist behaviors, beyond civility and tolerance, sets our nation backward and interferes with their sense of professional responsibility. I have immense respect for this position. I would simply say that in a democratic society in which government actors may not indoctrinate their citizens, such conduct is not permitted at public institutions. That is true not just for liberal or progressive perspectives, but conservative ones as well.

Somewhere in that passage there is a distinction between studying "particular perspectives" and adopting "antiracist behaviors," particularly for unspecified values of "antiracist behaviors;" and perhaps in addition to protecting intellectual and ideological pluralism, protecting bourgeois norms might have their value.