Colleges are enthralled with diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. It’s not just the bureaucratic commissars some red-state leaders are finally defunding. Nor is it that college professors are hired and promoted based on their adherence to DEI ideology. This neo-Marxist ideology is insinuating itself evermore into courses and graduation requirements. Any sign of pushback from legislators is labeled an attack on "academic freedom."

Too many conservative legislators still feel intimidated by college professors. They shouldn’t. The language shell game is too transparent, and the ideology advanced underneath it too vapid and corrosive, to be due any deference. The Left no longer believes in "academic freedom" as normal people understand it: the freedom of professors to set their own research, publication, and teaching agenda. Rather, what the Left means by "academic freedom" is total freedom to control higher education . Anything that advances the Left's control is good. Anything that threatens it is a threat to "academic freedom."

This explains why you’ll never see anyone on the Left labeling the use of "diversity statements" to screen out conservative candidates as a threat to academic freedom. It explains why the Left doesn’t consider efforts to force professors to "diversify" their syllabuses a threat to academic freedom. It explains why it doesn’t consider the institutionalization of campus thought police through so-called "bias-reporting systems" a threat to academic freedom.

While the impulse to slash and burn entire academic departments such as gender studies is understandable, some legislative pushback against the DEI-domination of higher education has cut against academic freedom, as traditionally defined. But rather than wield a blunt club, state lawmakers now have a scalpel at their disposal that will enable them to keep the moral high ground: the Freedom from Indoctrination Act.

Pioneered by the Goldwater Institute and Speech First and recently articulated in a policy brief from the American Enterprise Institute’s Conservative Education Reform Network, the Freedom from Indoctrination Act will begin rolling back the infusion of DEI programming saturating college classrooms. The act will prohibit universities from requiring students to take DEI classes as part of any traditional major or degree program requirement. It is an infringement on students’ academic freedom to require science or math majors to take DEI courses to achieve their degrees.

It will prohibit universities from pressuring faculty to infuse DEI content into their curricula, preserving the academic freedom of academics to assign readings and materials based on what they believe will most effectively communicate core ideas to their students.

It will replace the current regime of college freshmen orientation programming — 90% of which promotes the ideals of DEI and less than a third of which teaches students about free speech. The first introduction that students get to college is being forced to sit through DEI orthodoxy seminars. That must change. It will also ensure that radical race- and gender-based coursework is no longer used to replace core general education studies. And it will entail all students being provided basic instruction in the principles of our constitutional republic, including the freedom of speech. In doing so, the Freedom from Indoctrination Act will restore true academic freedom: the freedom of faculty to teach their subject matter absent left-wing talking points. The freedom of students to pursue their studies without being forced to subsidize DEI courses via their enrollments.

Particularly when coupled with legislation recently passed in Texas — also drafted from model legislation by the Goldwater Institute in partnership with the Manhattan Institute — to defund university DEI administrative offices, the Freedom from Indoctrination Act offers state lawmakers a tool to pry off the ideological capture of our public universities.

No doubt the Left will cry that this is a violation of "academic freedom!" But you’d have to have an advanced degree in the humanities to butcher the English language so boldly. State legislators should dismiss those bad-faith objections and push forward to restore true academic freedom to campus.