Universities can say no to Trump

MIT rejects "the Compact" orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

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— Jay D. Aronson (@jaydaronson.bsky.social) October 10, 2025 at 9:06 AM

October 15, 2025: Brown declined the Compact for Higher Education.

Vanderbilt AAUP press release about the Vanderbilt Faculty Senate voting overwhelmingly to adopt a resolution opposing the President's proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education as an unconstitutional & illegal infringement on rights & freedoms. vanderbiltaaup.org/2025/10/09/v...

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— Jonathan Gilligan (@jgilligan.org) October 10, 2025 at 3:54 PM

'Take A Stand': Obama Rips Trump On Last Episode Of Marc Maron Podcast: The former president warned the country is “being tested right now” as the comedian's pioneering show bowed out. Graeme Demianyk, HuffPost, Oct 13, 2025

Some are still saying yes

BREAKING: Northwestern University has agreed to pay the U.S. Treasury $75 million, over the course of three years as part of an agreement with the federal government to restore funding and end investigations into the university Full statement from NU below:

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— Matthew Eadie (@mattheweadie.bsky.social) November 28, 2025 at 7:31 PM

Some can't wait to be given an opportunity to say yes (shrug)

The president of Oakwood University said the school wants to sign on to the Trump administration's Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education — if the DOE makes some changes. religionnews.com/2025/11/24/a...

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— RNS (@rns.org) November 28, 2025 at 8:30 AM

A consequence

Families Bring Legal Challenge Against Yale, CCMC For Capitulating To Trump On Trans Youth Care: Yale New Haven Health and Connecticut Children's Medical Center abruptly ended care for transgender people earlier this year. Erin Reed, Dec 17, 2025

If you cave, as Brown did, you don't save yourself. The regime will just take away your funding anyway: "On Monday [Dec 22, 2025], the Department of Education announced that it would conduct a 'program review' of Brown to determine if it had violated safety and security requirements that schools must meet to receive federal aid."

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." surreal times dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

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— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) January 7, 2026 at 5:36 AM

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

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— Jonathan Birch (@birchlse.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 12:38 PM

The works of Plato are now being banned at schools in the United States. Tell me again how censorship is a European problem? 🤔

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— Dave Keating (@davekeating.substack.com) January 8, 2026 at 4:34 AM

Texas A&M Bans Philosophy Prof. From Teaching Plato Because of "Gender Ideology": “Silencing 2,500-year-old ideas from one of the world’s most influential thinkers betrays the mission of higher education.” s. baum, Erin in the Morning, Jan 09, 2026

There’s an intensifying kind of threat to academic freedom – watchful students serving as informants, Austin Sarat, The Conversation, January 14, 2026

Texas A&M University cancels programs in women's and gender studies, NPR, January 30, 2026

Gender studies courses are shutting down across the US. The Epstein files reveal why, Joan Wallach Scott, The Guardian, 13 Feb 2026

What grievance?

Some Incredibly Inconvenient Data For College Republicans: Right wingers on college campuses don't actually feel persecuted. Denny Carter, Bad Faith Times, Mar 2, 2026

Resist

Michael Roth - how universities can fight back (watch on The Ink)

"President Trump has backtracked on a major point in negotiations with Harvard, dropping his administration’s demand for a $200 million payment to the government in hopes of finally resolving the administration’s conflicts with the university, according to four people briefed on the matter."

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— Ryan J. Reilly “paints a vivid and urgent portrait of… disarray” (@ryanjreilly.com) February 2, 2026 at 5:15 PM

Pentagon to cut ties with Columbia, Yale, Brown and others, Collin Binkley, Associated Press, February 27, 2026

San José State University Sues Trump Admin Over Anti-Trans Threats—Refusing to Capitulate: The Trump regime said San José State had to break state law to discriminate against trans students, but the university said it isn’t budging. s. baum, Erin in the Morning, Mar 09, 2026

Robots that can't say no

The Pentagon Asked OpenAI for Artificial Intelligence Designed to Rarely Say No The U.S. military’s desire for an AI tool with “minimal refusal rates” was revealed through a FOIA lawsuit filed by The Intercept. Sam Biddle, The Intercept, September 8, 2026

Harvard University sues the White House

Politico explains:

"In a 51-page filing, Harvard’s lawyers argue that the funding freeze violates the First Amendment by amounting to government interference “with private actors’ speech” in order “to advance its own vision of ideological balance.” The suit further claims the Trump administration “has not — and cannot — identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen.” The judge assigned the case is an appointee of Barack Obama, per POLITICO’s legal ace Josh Gerstein. More from The Harvard Crimson’s Dhruv Patel and Grace Yoon."

Harvard President Says University Had No 'Choice' But To Sue The Trump Administration: Donald Trump on Thursday called the elite school a "threat to Democracy." Marita Vlachou, HuffPost, Apr 24, 2025

"Websites for Harvard College centers serving minority and LGBTQ students and women vanished Wednesday, The Harvard Crimson reported, marking the continued unraveling of diversity initiatives at the nation’s most prestigious university as it faces fresh pressure from the Trump administration.

Websites for the Harvard College Women’s Center, the Office for BGLTQ Student Life and the Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations now redirect to a page for an Office of Culture and Community, the student newspaper reported."

— Dakin Andone, "Websites serving Harvard undergrad women, minority and LGBTQ students taken down, Crimson reports," CNN, July 10, 2025

Trump administration still in active talks with Harvard on $500 million deal, McMahon says, From CNN's Betsy Klein, Nov 19, 2025

Trump administration sues Harvard, alleging school didn’t protect Jewish students as settlement talks go nowhere, CNN, March 19, 2026

Mahmoud v. Taylor (SCOTUS case): Whether parents can opt out kids from LGBTQ stories

"Mahmoud v. Taylor is a pending United States Supreme Court case about parents who wish to opt their children out of LGBTQ-themed storybooks in public schools." (Wikipedia)

"In a country where Muslims and LGBTQI+ students alike are being targeted simply for being who they are, it is more important than ever that our taxpayer-funded public schools are learning environments that are safe and respectful of all students no matter who they are or what they believe. But right now, a few Maryland parents, with the backing of the federal government under Trump, are asking the Supreme Court to give them the power to shield their children from any acknowledgment of LGBTQI+ existence in public school.

That’s why A4TE filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Mahmoud v Taylor on Wednesday [April 9] on behalf of eight organizations including Queer Crescent, Al-Wāsi’ Collective, Atlanta Unity Mosque, Queer Muslims of Boston (QMOB), and other groups with LGBTQI+ Muslims among their members in support of Montgomery County Public Schools’ decision to include LGBTQI+-inclusive storybooks in elementary language arts classes. In it, we share a vision of real religious liberty—one that supports and includes trans and queer children and families.

— Gabriel Arkles, A4TE Co-Interim Legal Director, A4TE email, April 11, 2025

But wait. Only 43 families opted out? "Where have all the opt-outs gone?"

Consequences

"On April 30th, [2026,] the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, led by anti-trans activist and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, launched investigations into 36 Illinois public school districts over LGBTQ+ and transgender issues. The investigations target whether transgender students are allowed to use bathrooms and play sports, and whether students learn that LGBTQ+ people exist in their education and curriculum. Dhillon cited Mahmoud v. Taylor, a narrow Supreme Court ruling about religious opt-outs from storybooks that says nothing about banning LGBTQ+ content from schools, as well as a novel interpretation of Title IX that claims the law requires discrimination against transgender students. The investigations carry the implicit threat of federal funding losses and other punitive action. Notably, the Trump administration has tried this same playbook with school districts across the country and has failed repeatedly: school districts in Virginia, Denver, Chicago, and New York City all refused to comply with similar demands, and a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the administration's restrictions on behalf of a 16-state coalition." ("DOJ Launches Anti-Trans Investigations Into 36 Illinois School Districts Over Bathrooms And Books," Erin in the Morning, May 4, 2026)

Detention of Mahmoud Khalil

I wrote:
Tucker Lieberman, Why Was Palestinian Student Leader Mahmoud Khalil Detained? The meaning of ‘shalom’ I know is ‘peace.’ A political arrest isn’t peaceful. Medium, Mar 12, 2025

Here's follow-up info over the past week:

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They arrested another Palestinian student of Columbia, Leqaa Kordia, as well as an Indian one, Ranjani Srinivasan. They accused Ranjani of ‘supporting Hammas’ (ICE misspelled Hamas). www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/...

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— Elia Ayoub إيليا أيوب (@ayoub.bsky.social) March 14, 2025 at 3:47 PM

“Jewish leaders need to ask themselves if they’re willing to allow our community to be used in this way to dismantle democratic norms,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. “If the answer is no, their condemnation of this arrest should be loud and swift.”

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— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) March 14, 2025 at 6:43 AM

The Disappearance of Mahmoud Khalil: Civil rights attorney Edward Ahmed Mitchell and journalist Meghnad Bose discuss the profound implications Khalil’s case raises for free speech and due process. The Intercept Briefing (📢 podcast), March 13 2025

Why Trump Is So Desperate to Keep Mahmoud Khalil in Louisiana: Government lawyers would be happy to avoid a legal precedent set in the case of Ravi Ragbir during the first Trump administration. Shawn Musgrave, The Intercept, March 14 2025

If pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli protests is considered a form of terrorism, then anti-Musk protests will be considered terrorism too. Trump has said so.

Scoop: State Dept. to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who appear "pro-Hamas", Marc Caputo, Axios, Mar 6, 2025

Khalil Gibran Muhammad on LinkedIn: three federal agencies sent a letter to Columbia University that lays out conditions for future federal funds.

A Love Letter to the Student Movement Repression of the Palestine movement is now here, so what must be done? Four practical steps for the next phase. Carrie Zaremba, In These Times, March 17, 2025

Meanwhile over on the other place, rightwing free speech warriors (this guy is a former DeSantis campaign staffer) are calling for me to be denaturalized and deported because they don’t like my political speech. This is what fascism and racism looks like, folks.

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— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) March 16, 2025 at 4:21 PM

"Hundreds of Jewish professors, scholars and students have signed a letter condemning the Trump administration for canceling $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University and threatening other universities."
— Matt Shuham, Hundreds Of Jewish Academics Condemn Trump Attacks On Universities: “The knock-on effects of this will be catastrophic,” one co-author told HuffPost. HuffPost, Mar 19, 2025

2,500 Jewish Academics Call Out Trump: Over 2,500 Jewish academics and students denounce Trump for cynical claims of antisemitism. Arturo Dominguez, Medium, March 20, 2025

BREAKING: Judge Furman transfers Mahmoud Khalil’s habeas case to New Jersey, where he was when the petition was filed, rejecting government requests to dismiss the petition or transfer it to Louisiana, where he is now. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

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— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social) March 19, 2025 at 9:01 AM

My statement on being denied tenure at the Medill School of Journalism drive.google.com/file/d/1BBBI...

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— Steven W. Thrasher is here to protect students (@thrasherxy.bsky.social) March 20, 2025 at 11:10 AM

Columbia University Caves After Threats From Trump Columbia University agreed to implement a suite of policy changes Friday, including overhauling its rules for protests. AP, HuffPost, Mar 21, 2025

Former Columbia law professor @katherinefranke.bsky.social says the Trump administration held the school ransom by freezing $400 million in funds and demanding drastic changes on campus. "Columbia considered it and did more than what the ransom note demanded, for which it got nothing in return."

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— Democracy Now! (@democracynow.org) March 24, 2025 at 7:58 AM

Now this is happening

They are arresting people on the streets, terminating their visas, and disappearing them for writing things they disagree with. This is where we are. Two months in. Right now. If you think they won’t begin coming after citizens soon, you are mistaken.

— Clint Smith (@clintsmithiii.bsky.social) March 27, 2025 at 7:03 AM

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— Congressman Stephen F. Lynch (@lynch.house.gov) March 26, 2025 at 9:32 PM

University Of Alabama Student Detained By Federal Immigration Agents. The Trump administration is continuing to target noncitizen university students. Marita Vlachou, HuffPost, Mar 27, 2025

The tactics ICE is using--thugs in plain clothes kidnapping people simply for their political views--these tactics were developed by the US and spread across the world to hunt down Leftists from Latin America to Indonesia. They've also been used locally for decades to terrorize Black communities.

— Eman Abdelhadi (@emanabdelhadi.bsky.social) March 27, 2025 at 11:45 AM

Khalil was able to dictate an essay:

"Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil rebuked what he called the school’s “repression playbook” that has opened the gates for higher education and the federal government to target dissent on campus and abduct students like him for their pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, was taken by federal immigration agents on March 8 for his role in helping lead last year’s antiwar protests on Columbia’s campus. While his court case plays out in New Jersey, Khalil remains held without charge in a Louisiana detention center — where he dictated to his attorney a searing op-ed for the Columbia Spectator that published Friday [April 4]."

— Sanjana Karanth, Mahmoud Khalil Rebukes Columbia For Targeting Dissent With 'Repression Playbook', HuffPost, April 6, 2025

US Is Quietly Revoking Student Visas From Harvard to Stanford, Alicia A. Caldwell, Yahoo Finance, April 7, 2025

The Fourth Circuit is famously succinct. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

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— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social) April 7, 2025 at 10:59 AM

Sec. of State Marco Rubio has written in a memo that Mahmoud Khalil is subject to deportation because “the alien's past, current, or expected beliefs” have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” His position is potential thoughts are grounds for deportation

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— Nathan Kalman-Lamb (@nkalamb.bsky.social) April 10, 2025 at 3:24 PM

Pressed for evidence against Mahmoud Khalil, government cites its power to deport people for beliefs, Jake Offenhartz, AP, April 10, 2025

Judge Rules That Columbia University Activist Mahmoud Khalil Can Be Deported: The Trump administration argued that the legal U.S. resident posed a national security risk because of his involvement in protests, even as it admitted his conduct didn't break any laws. Associated Press, Apr 11, 2025

Another rabbis' letter--this from over 100 Chicago-area rabbis, proud to be one--protesting the horrors being carried out these days in the name of "combating antisemitism." Published in the Trib today. Full list of signatories in the second skeet. www.chicagotribune.com/2025/04/22/l...

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— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@theradr.bsky.social) April 22, 2025 at 10:59 AM

Deborah Lipstadt, Biden’s former antisemitism envoy, claims that Trump is protecting democracy by targeting student protestors. I’m losing my mind.

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— Elad Nehorai (@eladn.bsky.social) April 22, 2025 at 6:02 PM

New court filing tonight shows that Yunseo Chung, a Columbia student who participated in pro-Palestine protests, was named alongside Mahmoud Khalil in Secretary Rubio's letter terminating their status as legal permanent residents. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

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— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney.bsky.social) May 13, 2025 at 8:51 PM

Pro-Palestine International Students Have Won in Court. Why Hasn’t Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom?: One of Trump’s tricks is to send people to Louisiana where they get harsher treatment. Mahmoud Khalil is pointing out the iniquity of it. Jonah Valdez, The Intercept, February 26 2026

Early education seems to improve social and emotional skills later in life, study finds

David Leonhardt writes for the The New York Times in "The Morning Newsletter," 10 May 2021, that "the results from the Boston pre-K study" are "being released this morning by three economists, from the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley." It's the result of a long-term observation of some students who, at age 4 in the late 1990s, were randomly chosen to attend a pre-kindergarten program in Boston.

The study found that, while those who attended pre-K "did not do noticeably better on standardized tests in elementary school, middle school or high school...More important than the scores are concrete measures of a student’s well-being. And by those measures, the students who won the lottery fared substantially better than those who lost it."

Leonhardt writes that thoe who won the lottery and thus were able to attend pre-K

were less likely to be suspended in high school and less likely to be sentenced to juvenile incarceration. Nearly 70 percent of lottery winners graduated from high school, compared with 64 percent of lottery losers...The winners were also more likely to take the S.A.T., to enroll in college and — though the evidence is incomplete, because of the students’ age — to graduate from college. ... How could pre-K have these positive effects without lifting test scores? It seems to improve children’s social and emotional skills and help them mature more than it helps in a narrow academic sense, the researchers told me.

Similarities of 'new narrative,' 'education,' 'strategic planning,' 'self-forgiveness'

"The 8 Pillars of Possibility" for how we'll say (when we look back) we created a new narrative:

• "We anchored into a new vision."
• "We agreed on the truth."
• "We owned our emotions."
• "We became interconnected."
• "We did shadow work."
• "We practiced forgiveness."
• "We had big conversations."
• "We took action."

— Justin Michael Williams and Shelly Tygielski. How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation, 2023.

Edgar Morin's "complex lessons in education" and Gergen and Vanourek's rules for strategic planning have some overlap. Combining them yields something like this:

• Test our assumptions / Detect error and illusion
• Master the context / Grasp principles of pertinent knowledge
• Confront uncertainties
- Craft experiments
- Mitigate risk

• Identify the required resources / Remain focused and flexible
• Understand each other / Teach the human condition, earth identity, and ethics

From a coaching perspective, Jennifer-Crystal Johnson advises these steps for self-forgiveness. The emphasis is on feeling the situation and knowing when to let the feelings go. Awareness of "context" and "responsibility" is once again relevant, although here, the emphasis is less on building upon or exploiting that information. There is value in being aware of thoughts that do not need to be had and actions that do not need to be taken.

• Begin with calm and peace
• Remember your positive traits
• See the context
• Pay close attention to the area of greatest pain
• Take responsibility for what is yours and acknowledge what you aren't responsible for
• Learn what you need, then let it go

Sources

How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation (howweendracism.com)

Edgar Morin's video. Material is also presented by Brigette Tasha Hyacinth. The Future of Leadership: Rise of Automation, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. MBA Caribbean Organisation, 2017.

Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek. Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives. Jossey-Bass, 2008.

Jennifer-Crystal Johnson for Executive Coaching University

What kind of information do we most need, 'spiritually'?

A common complaint about the increasing availability of information and the speed at which it travels is that our minds cannot hold it all. Three decades ago, Jeremy Rifkin wrote:

Strangely enough, it seems that the more information that is made available to us, the less well informed we become. Decisions become harder to make, and our world appears more confusing than ever. Psychologists refer to this sate of affairs as "information overload," a neat clinical phrase behind which sits the Entropy Law. As more and more information is beamed at us, less and less of it can be absorbed, retained, and exploited. The rest accumulates as dissipated energy or waste. The buildup of this dissipated energy is really just social pollution, and it takes its toll in the increase in mental disorders of all kinds, just as physical waste eats away at our physical well-being.


The sharp rise in mental illness in this country has paralleled the information revolution. That's not to suggest that the increase in mental illness is due solely to information overload. Other contributing factors include such things as genetics, spatial crowding, increased dislocation and migration of populations, and the stresses of environmental pollution.


Part of what we need to do is to decide what information is important. This includes our own cultural and family history, and building culture by participating actively in it. Starhawk, in 1987:

To be disconnected from our past, our history, is to be disempowered. In consumer culture, we consume time and forget what has gone before. We do not value the stories, the experiences, of the elders. But when we devalue their lives, we devalue our own, for at best, we can hope to someday become old. The elders may offer us perspectives we need in times of change.
* * *
A life-loving culture that escaped the repression of the Censor would be expressive, erotic, alive with art, music, poetry, dance, and ritual; diverse, not monolithic, drawing on many rhythms, many languages; active, not passive. Entertainment would cease to be a spectacle we consume, and become what we do for each other and ourselves; the stories we tell, the rituals we create, our own songs and our own laughter.


Something else important is what some call "spirit," "sacred," or "enchantment." From a more secular perspective, this is related to the urge to pursue one's passions girded by one's core beliefs and to experience life in a state of wonder, joyful awe, and calm resignation. Information overload can take us away from this center of who we really are and what we really want to do while we are here. Rabbi Michael Lerner, in 2006:

We live in a world in which a technocratic rationality has replaced an awareness of spirit, flattening the way we experience nature and each other. * * * Most of us have learned to accommodate to a world that has been flattened, made one-dimensional, disenchanted, despiritualized. And yet, we feel an abiding hunger because human beings are theotropic – they turn toward the sacred – and that dimension in us cannot be fully extinguished.

Elizabeth Gilbert, in 2010, reflected on the decision to choose to commit herself romantically to just one man. We often feel pressured to maximize our happiness, she mused. And how do we know what to choose, since we cannot choose everything?

...I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love?
* * *
The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice. (I have a friend who second-guesses herself so compulsively that her husband jokes her autobiography will someday be titled I Should've Had the Scampi.) Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision. By choosing Door Number Three, we fear we have killed off a different – but equally critical – piece of our soul that could only have been made manifest by walking through Door Number One or Door Number Two.

Umair Haque blogged in 2011 that true happiness, profound contentment, is probably not found in the more-is-better, passive consumption model of "hedonic opulence" that the advertising economy presses upon us, but rather in a more active appreciation of smaller, more meaningful things.

In short, I see an outcomes gap: a yawning chasm the size of the Grand Canyon between what our economy produces and what you might call a meaningfully well-lived life, what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia.

The economy we have today will let you chow down on a supersize McBurger, check derivative prices on your latest smartphone, and drive your giant SUV down the block to buy a McMansion on hypercredit. It's a vision of the good life that I call (a tiny gnat standing on the shoulders of the great Amartya Sen) hedonic opulence. And it's a conception built in and for the industrial age: about having more. Now consider a different vision: maybe crafting a fine meal, to be accompanied by local, award-winning microbrewed beer your friends have brought over, and then walking back to the studio where you're designing a building whose goal is nothing less than rivaling the Sagrada Familia. That's an alternate vision, one I call eudaimonic prosperity, and it's about living meaningfully well. Its purpose is not merely passive, slack-jawed "consuming" but living: doing, achieving, fulfilling, becoming, inspiring, transcending, creating, accomplishing – all the stuff that matters the most. See the difference? Opulence is Donald Trump. Eudaimonia is the Declaration of Independence.

Yesterday, pundits and talking heads believed this crisis was just a garden-variety, workaday crash. Today, people like Tyler Cowen and I have called it a Great Stagnation. But here's what I believe it might just be called tomorrow, when the history books have been written, and the debates concluded: a Eudaimonic Revolution. A sweeping, historic transformation in what we imagine a good life to be, and how, why, where, and when we pursue it.

Sources

Jeremy Rifkin with Ted Howard. Entropy: A New Worldview. London: Paladin Books, 1985. p. 187.
Starhawk, Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery. New York: Harper Collins, 1987. pp. 125, 327-328.
Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 1-2. Elizabeth Gilbert. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. New York: Viking, 2010. p. 43, 45-46.
"Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything?" Umair Haque. HBR [Harvard Business Review] Blog Network. May 12, 2011.

The 'Evolution Academic Freedom Act' and the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools

The teaching of evolution in public schools in the United States has long been held in deep suspicion by a large portion of the population. More than half of Americans believe literally in the Biblical creation story (CBS News poll, 2004). This sort of belief varies widely by region. In the southern states of Alabama and Arkansas, three-quarters are Biblical literalists, whereas in the northeastern states of Vermont and Massachusetts, less than a quarter are Biblical literalists (Rasmussen poll, 2006). As public education standards are determined on the state level, certain states have repeatedly battled to keep evolution in their science curricula.

Attempts to replace the teaching of evolution with creationism "has been before school officials, legislators and courts in Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia" over the past several decades, according to CNN. Louisiana passed a law branded as "academic freedom" encouraging the "critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution." A similar law called the Evolution Academic Freedom Act passed the Florida Senate on April 2, 2008. Democrats had criticized that bill for demanding protections for teachers who discuss creationism but not for those who discuss birth control and abortion, which the bill's Republican sponsor had refused to include.

In recent years, opponents of evolution have promoted the idea of "intelligent design," which maintains that some intelligent force set evolution into motion. Most scientists reject this theory as vague, scientifically indefensible (91 percent, according to a Case Western Reserve University poll in 2002), and a front for religious ideology.

In Texas, amendments to the education standards initially proposed in January 2009 were debated at the Board of Education's subsequent meeting in March. The amendments included attempts to discount, highlight weaknesses in, or encourage debate on accepted scientific theories of the common ancestry of life, plate tectonics, radioactive decay, and the origin of the solar system.  On March 27, 2009, the Texas board decided to require students to study "all sides of scientific evidence."  The National Center for Science Education, which supports the teaching of evolution, called this a "flawed" approach. Finally, in July 2011, the board approved educational materials from nine publishers. One of the publishers, Holt, was under fire from a creationist, and as a compromise Holt agreed to work with the Texas Education Commissioner. The final version approved the next month supported the theory of evolution. Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network which exists "to counter the religious right," said: "The release of Holt McDougal's finalized materials puts an end to a campaign to undermine science education in Texas that began with the board's adoption of flawed science curriculum standards two years ago."

The Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), signed into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal in 2008, allowed teachers to "use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique and review scientific theories"-in other words, to teach religious viewpoints in science classes-regarding theories including "evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." Supporters refer to this as "teaching the controversy." In April 2011, a Baton Rouge high school student protesting the LSEA presented a petition to the state legislature that had been signed by 42 Nobel laureates. On May 26, 2011, the Louisiana Senate Education Committee upheld the LSEA. A letter from a science professor supporting the LSEA and "academic freedom" argued that "LSEA does not permit teaching for or against any religious viewpoint."

It is unclear how a scientific approach, while presuming to base itself upon objective fact, can avoid offending or contradicting any religious viewpoint. Indeed, the LSEA itself only states that it should not be understood to "promote discrimination" based upon religious belief or the absence thereof. Even while eschewing intentional discrimination, it is hard to see how science teachers can avoid incidental disagreement with conflicting positions. For this reason and for many other reason, debates on the teaching of evolution remain unresolved in the public opinion and are likely to continue.

The Bible Is About To Become Required Reading In Texas Public Schools: About 5 million kids in K-12 schools will be reading from Bible passages within a few years. Nathalie Baptiste, HuffPost, Jun 26, 2026

Originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 27, 2011.