THE FACULTY OUGHT BE THE STEWARDS OF THE CURRICULUM.

I never told you that it would be easy.  These days, the stewardship might manifest itself when it's ideologically convenient.

Politicians in a democratic society should not manipulate public school curricula to advance partisan or ideological aims. In higher education, under principles of academic freedom that have been widely endorsed, professors are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject. Educators, not politicians, should make decisions about teaching and learning.

They ought exercise that freedom responsibly, right? "Real teachers focus on the intellectual growth of students, not on their political or social engagement. The character they should seek to foster in their students is that of disengaged love of learning married to affection for their country and their fellow Americans."

Sometimes, they stand on that principle.

The Board of Trustees for Purdue University and all its regional campuses is set to vote on a civic literacy requirement today, without the formal endorsement of any faculty body and over the objections of some faculty members.

The irony was not lost on Alice Pawley, an associate professor of engineering education at Purdue’s flagship West Lafayette campus and a member of its University Senate and American Association of University Professors chapter.

“It's like democracy and civic literacy are so important, we’re willing to be dictators about it,” she said. “We are bringing about this big, precedent-setting change to thousands of undergraduates in a way that does not demonstrate an awareness of governance.”

If the faculty had carried out its stewardship properly, it would not have come to that pass.

Too often, though, the trendy stuff crowds out the sensible stuff, with nary a quibble in the curriculum committee or the faculty senate.

Simply reading Victorian feminists and learning from them isn’t enough.

According to Professor Lana Dalley’s recent article for the Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies journal, “Confronting ‘White Feminism’ in the Victorian Literature Classroom,” Victorian feminists are “problematic” because they promote “white feminism.”

With their focus on women’s suffrage and individual development, these pioneering women neglected issues of race and racism, she argues.

“Left unacknowledged and unchallenged, the race and class politics of Victorian feminisms might result in humiliation, exclusion, and white validation in the classroom,” writes Dalley, a professor of English at California State University Fullerton.

Dalley sees a need for instructors to operate under an “antiracist feminist pedagogy.” This method of teaching would use modern feminist theory to inform class conversations and push back on any and all Victorian ideals, acknowledging the “white epistemologies at their heart.”

It’s part of what she calls world-building, which is the practice of deciding how to interpret the world and guiding students to create new worlds.

“Most undergraduate students enter a Victorian literature classroom with little to no knowledge of the subject, and faculty build a world for them to explore,” she writes, afterward elaborating on how that world should be framed by modern intersectional feminism.

Like that's going to make the Victorian female authors' writing any less soporific, or the Victorian feminists more persuasive.  Also, don't the economists or sociologists get to time-slip the course duplication implicit in such claims?

Where the faculty refuse to exercise proper stewardship, the trustees, and, where applicable, the legislators, must throw the challenge flag.