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 and academically unserious courses like “Eating the Globe: The Diverse, Weird, and Queer Food Politics,” which asks, “Can food be colonized and decolonized?”
These are just a few of the findings in Goldwater’s new report, Desert Brain Drain: Arizona’s Honors Colleges Hijacked by Activist Faculty to Force DEI on Students, which reveals the ideological capture of honors programs at Arizona’s public universities. These programs—which ought to be enhancing the education of the institutions’ most talented students—are no longer serving the needs of students, taxpayers, and even university leaders. The Arizona Board of Regents, state lawmakers, and university administrators must confront the faculty groupthink that has turned honors programs into engines of ideological programming.
The report finds that:
- Over 70% of all Barrett course sections for the mandatory “The Human Event” (HON 272) reviewed by Goldwater pushed “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) content, including anti-capitalist, anti-Israeli, and sexually explicit “LGBTQ” material. One faculty’s syllabus, for example, boasts readings on “violence and capitalism, power and powerlessness, Europeanness and Africanness, physical violence and environmental violence” and instructs students to ask questions including, “What is the relationship between the white female gaze and the eroticized Black male body in the text?”
- Barrett instructors build their syllabi around works such as Postcolonial Love Poem, a book that explores “the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people” and declares that America is “predicated [on] the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like [the author’s].”
- Barrett faculty have hidden syllabi for up to 85% of all course sections of the mandatory “The Human Event” (HON 272) course, despite ASU administrators having built a robust platform to publicly post syllabi for all courses across the campus.
- Barrett resisted disclosing syllabi for “The Human Event” sections for nearly 10 months even after the Goldwater Institute submitted a lawful public records request. Barrett then redacted the names of all instructors despite faculty in other departments publicly posting their syllabi by name so students can navigate course offerings by faculty.
- The Franke Honors College requires students to complete an “Honors Seminar” course, and many seminar sections include ideologically extreme and academically unserious offerings, such as “Constructing Identity Through Collage” and “#Black Lives Matter Across the Americas.”
- Peer reviewed “research” from Franke Honors College faculty includes articles arguing that it is immoral for parents to have more than two biological children, while other Franke faculty are subsidized by taxpayers to conduct their research focused on “decolonial pedagogies, affect theory, gender politics and Disability activism in global social movements.”
The findings of radical politicization among Arizona honors college faculty are perhaps unsurprising given that nearly 80% of ASU Barrett Honors College faculty protested the university’s decision to allow Charlie Kirk and Jewish intellectual Dennis Prager to speak on campus in 2023 on the nonpartisan topic, “Health, Wealth, and Happiness.”
Yet the hijacking of Arizona’s honors course requirements by ideologically activist faculty demands a response from university leaders and/or state lawmakers to restore academic rigor and educational excellence.
If necessary, state lawmakers should consider restricting a portion of university appropriations until all Barrett and Franke honors college faculty hires, job postings, and course syllabi for sections of required courses are brought under a process of direct review and approval by the Board of Regents. Legislators should also ensure passage of a state constitutional amendment (HCR2044) that would prohibit mandatory DEI coursework in public higher education. Finally, Arizona lawmakers should consider Goldwater’s American Higher Education Restoration Act to end automatic state funding for activist research by faculty members.
Honors programs at Arizona’s public universities have unfortunately succumbed to leftist activism masquerading as serious academic inquiry. But Arizona leaders can reverse this decline by adopting policies that bring greater oversight and transparency to institutions of higher education.
You can read the full report here.
Timothy K. Minella is the Director of Higher Education at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.
