Arizona Public Universities Using Required American Civics Courses to Push DEI Content
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State Law Requires American History, Civics, and Economics. Instead, Students Are Taking Courses on Queer Food Politics and Decolonizing Museums.
Arizona's public universities claim they are abiding by state requirements and providing students with a robust education in American history, the principles of our constitutional republic, and basic economics. But a course at Arizona State University that allegedly teaches these subjects requires students to critically reflect on their positionality, recognizing how their identities and cultural background influence their understanding of U.S. democracy.
Under the guise of providing a foundational education in American civics, public universities are allowing faculty to push diversity, equity, and inclusion content in courses that all students must complete.
This academic subterfuge represents a refusal to comply with the clear directive of the Arizona Board of Regents that American civics be integrated into each university's general education program.
State Law Requires Specific Content
Through its American Institutions policy, the Arizona Board of Regents requires Arizona public universities to provide instruction in American history, American civics, and basic economics in their general education programs.
The policy aims to ensure every student receives rigorous training in the constitutional framework that governs the state. But instead, students are taking courses that focus on identity categories rather than universal principles behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
At Arizona State University, students can meet the policy's requirement by taking courses in Social Welfare, Work, and Justice in the US, Theatre and U.S. Democracy, and Anthropology of American Democracy. These courses fail to meet the board's civics and history standards.
At Northern Arizona University, courses like Sociology of Chicanx and Latinx Communities and Indigenizing Museums and the Art World are being used to meet the civics and history requirement.
In utter defiance of the board's directive, the University of Arizona has so far failed to implement the policy at all. UA's plan to integrate the civics and history requirement into general education has been mired in delays and troubling protocols.
Honors Colleges Become Training Grounds for Ideology
The problem extends beyond general education requirements. Arizona's elite honors colleges have become sites where radical faculty push their own niche interests on the state's most talented students.
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 courses like Eating the Globe: The Diverse, Weird, and Queer Food Politics. This course 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, faculty have hijacked these programs to force students into courses centered on their niche interests and ideologically extreme topics.
Lack of Transparency Deepens the Problem
The faculty at ASU's Barrett Honors College appear to 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 syllabus.
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 percent of the syllabi in the public records request, 10 of 14, contained such content.
What Students Are Actually Learning
Class curriculum examples that stood out included a book titled Postcolonial Love Poem, which declares that America is predicated on the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like the author's.
Another honors faculty member has produced scholarship arguing that couples should have no more than two biological children because of climate change.
At UA's Franke Honors College, some of the classes students can choose from include:
- Eating the Globe: The Diverse, Weird, and Queer Food Politics
- Black Lives Matter Across the Americas
- Why Does Difference Matter? Constructing the Self and the Other
- Cut and Paste: Constructing Identity Through Collage
- Getting Into Good Trouble: When Government Threatens Civil Rights
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.
Call for Legislative Action
It is 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.
Goldwater is recommending the Arizona Board of Regents take a closer look at these courses and that the state Legislature consider withholding funds until this situation is addressed.
Federal Inaction
Despite the efforts of the Trump administration to tackle DEI efforts, the administration said it is not looking into college curriculum. Goldwater called this appropriate because curriculum is the province of state governments when it comes to public universities, not the federal government.
Goldwater said states have not exercised sufficient oversight over the academic curricula taught in their public universities. They need to take a much closer look at if we're going to continue rolling back this nefarious DEI ideology on public university campuses.
What the University Says
An ASU spokesperson said a university is an academic environment where many viewpoints are discussed and debated.
The Human Event is a two-part course that has been taught for decades at ASU and includes the works of Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare as well as more contemporary readings.
Currently, more than 50 faculty teach this course resulting in different syllabi and approaches delivering a class in which adult students are required to do the thinking, to conduct research and analysis and to engage respectfully in sharing different ideas and perspectives.
The Center Square reached out to the University of Arizona, but did not hear back before press time.