Our colleges’ woeful woke curriculum

Our colleges’ woeful woke curriculum

One would hold that our academic institutions would be academic and would enforce academic rigor. Not is always the case. Years ago, when our business school building was under renovation, our classes were temporarily relocated across campus. Mine ended up in the liberal arts building. Walking in, I couldn’t resist telling the class, “This will be the first time truth has been uttered between these walls.” The students laughed — but stepping into that building felt like a journey back in time. Tie-dyed shirts, multicolored hair, tattoos, piercings: the business students stood out and could be easily spotted.

Not long before, our business school had voted to add more liberal arts requirements to broaden our students’ education. The prevailing attitude was so what if they take a few classes over there — we’ll straighten them out once they’re back with us. And largely, that held true. I never saw a surge of radicalism among our students, nor a sudden fondness for multicolored hair.

But I was concerned about the students who stayed on the liberal arts side. What were they being taught and was it feeding the radicalism spreading across campus? Thomas Sowell’s needling question to liberal arts professors who preached diversity and inclusion always stuck with me: “How many Republicans are in your department?” That concern deepened when protests over Hamas erupted on campus, stirring antisemitism. Nearly every student and professor interviewed came from the liberal arts. Not one from the business school. Not one, it seemed, from engineering.

The point came into sharper focus when my niece was installed as president of Harvey Mudd College — arguably the nation’s premier STEM school. At her investiture, protesters blocked the auditorium entrance, lying down with sheets draped over their bodies which for me evoked the Ku Klux Klan. The ceremony was delayed. Here in the South, police would have carted them off. in California, they were left in place. The podium party and family were quietly rerouted to a rear entrance while everyone else watched the ceremony on closed-circuit TVs. I was furious. My niece and her husband, an engineering professor, took it in stride. California cool, I suppose. But her husband made a telling observation: “those are not our students out there. They come from our liberal arts colleges. Our students are too busy to be engaged in such nonsense.”

Those memories resurfaced when I read that Florida was dropping sociology as a required course in its state colleges, charging that it had become less an academic discipline than a vehicle for “woke” advocacy. This is detailed in “Suicide on Sociology Row,” which recounts how the course was stripped from the general education curriculum as part of broader reforms.

https://jamesgmartin.center/2026/07/suicide-on-sociology-row

Florida’s sociology faculty boasted openly about defying the state’s new restrictions on how gender and race could be taught in their classrooms. The chancellor of the state university system put it bluntly: sociology, as currently practiced, had become political advocacy dressed in academic regalia. In the aftermath, sociology enrollment collapsed across nearly every campus in the state — the University of Central Florida being the lone exception. The details are worth reading in full.

I wondered what about all the other majors in the colleges that are “social and political advocacy dressed in the regalia of the academy.” What about Women’s Studies. Gender Studies. Black Studies. Indigenous Peoples Studies and the rest? I bet you a dollar that there isn’t a conservative professor to be found in any of them, nor a single class with a kind word for America or capitalism. 

Mind you, I do not oppose the teaching of ethnic/racial studies. But I do oppose how it is likely taught with bias and prejudice. For example, when I was a student at the University of Georgia in the early and mid-1960s my history classes were horribly biased toward the “southern cause.” I questioned the professors because I had been taught a different history at my all black high school. It was remarkable that I made A’s. I wonder if today’s liberal arts professors would be as tolerant. Today’s history is likely to be the distorted view as exemplified by the 1619 Project that blames slavery for every American ill. Bob Woodson countered with his 1776 Unites (I am a contributor). Both are offered to schools as part of their curriculum. I bet that the 1619 project has found more favor that 1776 Unites which is pro-American and pro-capitalism.

Recall that during Covid parents were appalled when they found out what their children were being taught? Well the state of Florida was apparently appalled with what sociologists were teaching as well. Isn’t it time for all of us to be appalled too at what our kids are being taught at our universities?