CONTENT NEUTRALITY MATTERS.

It's apparently controversial for a high school teacher to suggest as much.  But it's doable.

Not, though, if you take the advice of Inside Higher Ed columnists Dennis C. Jacobs and Patrick Hornbeck.  They start in a relatively non-polemical way.

Contrary to stereotypes already circulating on both ends of the political spectrum, the mob that descended on the seat of government included more than working-class whites whose resentment the president had stoked. Wednesday’s subversion was executed by a broad cross-section of the American public, including college-educated disciples of QAnon and alumni of many of our own institutions who believe they have been disenfranchised.

By today's standards, that's making an effort not to condescend. But the question-begging commences almost immediately.

Higher education is distinctly positioned to form citizens and leaders who are able to discern truth in a digital age rife with disinformation, protect the principles of democracy in a deeply divided nation, make life choices informed by a crucial awareness of history, communicate persuasively through civil discourse and fight incessantly for justice in the face of racism and oppression.

If they start from that prior, their efforts will fail.

And if institutions of higher education seek to restore the trust that has eroded among citizens of all political views, the question that every faculty member, dean, chief academic officer and president should be asking is this: How do we need to educate in order to help build up a bulwark against future assaults on American democracy?

Maybe you stop deconstructing the principles by which that democracy emerged in the first place.

First, "We have to prepare students to sift discerningly through the reams of information at their fingertips, to interpret quantitative and qualitative data, to distinguish truthful from untruthful claims, and to understand how information makes its way to them and how the media shapes our national discourse" requires at least the possibility of getting at the truth, even asymptotically.

Second, if  "It is difficult to honor the rule of law without understanding its institutions, and colleges must prepare students to be citizens knowledgeable about the U.S. Constitution, the values it enshrines and the fragile means by which democracy functions," perhaps it might help to take the good with the bad.  "College and university curricula have hidden other forms of oppression and marginalization as well, whether the experience of immigrant laborers or that of the LGBTQ+ community" will play well in the common room; it's unlikely to change the minds of people whose sense of disenfranchisement well might have been reinforced by the preachments of the woke curriculum.

Put another way, the woke curriculum defeats the third proposal, "Colleges can help form discerning citizens who recognize when others are trying to manipulate their emotions and warp their reasoning -- whether through incomplete or biased narratives about the past, fearmongering, intimidation or simply false claims regarding the facts."  Privilege-checking, and unsupported assertions of disparate impact, to name two popular arguments, are the very manipulations the authors otherwise seek to purge.

Finally, the "crisis of credibility" the authors conclude with is nothing less than a self-inflicted wound.

What constitutes the good life is a timeless question, and students need opportunities to explore and interrogate competing visions of what is good, what is just and what sources of meaning and values they will regard as important or ultimate. These conversations are all the more important in a moment when traditional sources of ethics, especially religious institutions, face crises of credibility that dwarf those facing higher education.

Reality is socially conservative. Institutions are civilization. Interrogate that.