The moral panic about “woke” campuses has spilled over into actual legislation, not just Florida’s swamp idols. Last week, Alabama’s governor signed a bill that is supposed to limit the teaching of “divisive” topics at its colleges and universities. The bill is similar to Florida’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at public colleges, which was signed into law last May. Both are all-out attacks on learning, ostracizing liberal ideas from the classroom. Other state legislatures have also been busy. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Republican lawmakers have proposed 81 anti-DEI bills in 28 states. (So far, 33 have not become law and 11 have become law.)
Because most students attend public universities, state-level threats to higher education are of particular concern. While the federal government has an outsized power, the states have more direct political reach. Republican leaders in the most reactionary states argue that their appeals to moral panics about teaching history, race, gender and identity will attract donors and political favor. The bills already passed in Florida and Alabama are examples of short-sighted, counterintuitive legislative overreach. This political theater conjures up a caricature of college, a caricature in which confused minds are seduced by liberal ideas. Without university leaders, politicians, or voters standing up for faculty governance and democratic discourse, anti-awakening reactionaries can turn college into what they claim it is: closed institutions unable to respond to what students want and need their.
Legislative overreach is difficult to combat in states where the rigor and structure of elections favors reactionary Republicans. But unlike K-12 schools, in higher education, students have enormous power. Public colleges and universities need student tuition. If states become hostile to students’ values, those students could choose to go elsewhere or drop out of college altogether. This will create a conflict between right-wing political favor and student dollars. But first, students should pay attention. They should care. And they should be willing to choose colleges that match their values.
That’s why I read with interest a recent report issued by the Lumina Foundation and Gallup on how policies and laws shape college enrollment. Part of a larger survey of students’ experiences of higher education, the report left me with an important takeaway: The national conversation about so-called woke campuses doesn’t reflect what most students care about. It is worth looking at the main findings of the report. They highlight how out of whack our national conversation about higher education has become, and how wrong Republican-led public higher education systems are with the bulk of college students. It’s not hard to imagine that students could vote with their feet, avoiding schools in states that don’t align with their values.
The report names four reactive shifts in the national policy debate that may shape students’ feelings about transitioning to or enrolling in college. First, there is the group of bills against the teaching of supposedly divisive concepts, such as in Alabama and Florida. Second, there is a 2022 Supreme Court ruling on concealed carry firearms permits. Students fear it signals how states with more restrictive gun regulations will change their campus gun policies in anticipation of legal challenges. Third, there are the sweeping changes in the availability of reproductive health care that came after Roe v. Wade. The Wild West of Diverse Abortion Bans, Legal Challenges to Plan B, and Birth Control Will Shape Students’ College Experiences. Finally, there is the Supreme Court decision in 2023 that effectively ended race-based affirmative action in immigration. States are already interpreting this decision broadly to include scholarships and programming.
If you’re applying to college in 2024, you’re on a mission to not just pick a major at a college where you can be happy and that can get you accepted at a price you can afford. You also think about whether you’ll be safe from gun violence, whether you’ll be able to get medical care if you need it, qualify for certain types of financial aid, and likely encounter a liberal arts education that could improve the course of your life.
I carefully read the report about the guidelines and what some of the detailed data points mean. The big picture is that most students still choose colleges based on quality, cost, reputation, and job prospects. Because I’m interested in which of the four reactive changes matter most (and to whom), I took them out of the list of all the things that matter to students. Students care about — from most important to least important — gun violence, anti-woke laws and reproductive health care. Because race-based affirmative action is measured somewhat differently than other concerns, it is not ranked.
I experienced a shooting on campus last year. As I watched students calmly climb out of the windows to escape the building, I realized that this is a generation that grew up with constant shooting drills. This may explain why 38 percent of students studying on campus said they are concerned about gun violence in their schools. Campus gun policies mattered at least somewhat to 80 percent of respondents. And of those who did care, students who wanted more restrictive gun policies outnumbered those who favored looser policies by five to one, according to the report.
As for those “divisive” concepts? Students want them. The majority of students who cared about these issues, the report noted, said they did not want restrictions on classroom instruction. Even more remarkably, the students’ views do not align with the rabid political partisanship that dominates the headlines. In looking at the students who are interested in this topic, some political differences might be expected. And there are some. But the good news is that they are not as partisan as one might imagine. Even 61 percent of Republicans who were concerned about this issue when choosing a college preferred a state that did not restrict instruction on topics related to race and gender. That compares with 83 percent of Democrats and 78 percent of independents.
It’s remarkable, given these data, how few politicians and the public talk about how scared students are — not about new ideas but about campus shootings.
Reproductive health fears ranked third among these changes. 71 percent of respondents said a state’s reproductive health care policies would affect where they chose to go to college. The gender split here was a mixed bag. While many men cared about reproductive health, women were 18 percentage points more likely than men to prefer states with fewer restrictions on reproductive health care. It’s impossible to claim causation, but the vicious gender culture wars don’t happen in a vacuum. They bring to life the values of men and women. The data suggests that it will be difficult to recruit men (who tend to want more health care restrictions for women) and make female students feel cared for and protected. There may be no way for a single college to serve both masters.
The role of the Supreme Court’s positive decision in shaping students’ college choices is more difficult to analyze than the other reactionary changes. People don’t have a common understanding of what affirmative action means or how it works. Even so, 45 percent of respondents said the decision would determine their decision about which school to attend or whether to attend college at all.
While the idea of campus vigils may grab attention and motivate parts of the reactionary Republican base, the report says those partisan differences are modest among college students. “Most current and prospective students of all political parties who say these issues are important to their enrollment,” the report notes, “prefer more restrictive gun policies, less restrictive reproductive health care laws, and fewer regulations.” in the study programs.
Simply put: Republicans must look like aliens — if not dinosaurs — to the very students they claim to save from hostile campuses.
Debates about what happens on college campuses are proxies for partisan politics. They are also convenient gimmicks for recovering the nominal democratization that higher education suffered during the last half of the 20th century. Those of us who see education as something more noble than a political football should care about how partisan attacks and sensational headlines will hurt real people trying to make sense of their lives.
Students go to college because they want jobs, they want to get an education, or they want to be respected by others (or some combination of the three). A college or university implicitly promises them that it has the legitimacy to allow access, encourage learning, and provide status. The trick is that when universities play the moral panic game about campuses, they become what we fear.
The loudest story about America’s colleges isn’t about what students care about. Even so, the nation’s diverse, ambitious students are trying to make college choices that align with their political values. According to this research, they are remarkably progressive, fair-minded and not afraid of intellectual challenge. If only our politics lived up to its values.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science. the author of “Thick: And Other Essays”; and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow.
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