BY THE GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY AAUP CHAPTER

From donor influence scandals to Supreme Court boondoggles, there’s never a dull moment at George Mason University (GMU). Now, once again, Mason students and faculty find themselves under attack. This time, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin and his political appointees on Mason’s Board of Visitors are coming for our core curriculum because a new requirement asks students to engage in critical thinking about—you guessed it—concepts related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Isn’t this playbook getting a bit tired?

When Governor Youngkin began to impose his will on K-12 education in Virginia by rolling back diversity and inclusion initiatives, including an attempt to downplay the histories and experiences of indigenous and Black Virginians, we knew that higher education would be next. Now that Youngkin appointees make up half of the board, this day has finally arrived.

Governor Youngkin’s appointees are a formidable group. They include two Heritage Foundation directors (Dr. Lindsay Burke and Charles “Cully” Stimson), a former deputy attorney general in Donald Trump’s White House (Jeffrey Rosen), the chief of staff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (Armand Alcabay), and  a major Republican donor, Reginald Brown, who has given over $50,000 to Youngkin’s political action committee.

Our newest board members, in short, are well-connected operatives with decades of experience in the conservative political movement. They’ve spent the last two years learning from the DeSantis-Rufo playbook in Florida, and now they’re ready to strike against academic freedom and shared governance at Mason.

Their first target is, predictably enough, GMU’s new in the Mason Core, our general education curriculum. Set to begin in fall 2024, the Just Societies (JS) requirement simply states that, of the seven “exploration” courses undergraduates must take, two of these courses must engage with, at some point in the semester, questions and concepts related to equity, inclusion, diversity, and justice.

Sadly, though, for our new board members, it appears that even simply talking about inclusion, equity, diversity, and justice is unacceptable. So now they are coming for Just Societies and the Mason Core.

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in February both the governor’s office (through the deputy secretary of education) and Mason’s Board of Visitors requested copies of all Mason Core syllabi approved under the Just Societies flag. Without thinking twice, GMU administrators quickly complied with the requests and provided copies of the syllabi (with faculty info redacted). These syllabi were then published—and made public— in the Board of Visitors’ Board Book for their meeting on February 22. We await the Heritage Foundation’s “study” of these published Just Societies syllabi with bated breath.

It was also during the February 22 meeting that our politicized board members sprung their trap. At the board’s invitation, the administrator supervising the Mason Core delivered a short presentation reviewing the goals of the course and argued that there was nothing ideological nor even controversial in these JS courses.

That is when the knives came out. With the Heritage Foundation’s Dr. Burke chairing the meeting, she largely ignored faculty and student representatives, calling primarily on the duo of Stimson and Rosen. These board members then predictably sought to frame the JS requirement as a “mandate” that would force conservative students to pledge fealty to “woke” ideology by swearing on a stack of Ibram X. Kendi books. Stimson even referred to Kendi’s antiracism work as “a hoax.” It was every bit as cartoonish in the room as it now reads in text.

More importantly, though, another Youngkin appointee, Reginald Brown, revealed the new board’s true intentions: asserting power over Mason’s curriculum. In Virginia, university governing boards have the authority to review and approve “programs” (for example, a new degree) but have historically followed AAUP principles and restrained themselves from dictating curriculum. Repeatedly and inaccurately calling the JS flag a “program,” Brown strategically used this term to assert the board’s power over the Mason Core.

For our part, it’s clear that this attack on Just Societies ultimately has little to do with the politics of diversity and equity at Mason and everything to do with the governor’s attempt, working through his political appointees, to exert his will over Virginia’s public universities and colleges. After all, this is the same governor who began his tenure by “strong-arming” his own representative onto a search committee for a new chancellor for Virginia’s community college system. And this is the same governor who, not long after, and in a radical departure from previous opinions, sought and received an advisory opinion from his attorney general that claimed university governing boards like Mason’s primarily serve the interests of state government instead of their home institutions or the citizens of the commonwealth.

Governor Youngkin’s power grab at Mason is far from unique. It is in fact part of a national movement on the political right to weaken public universities as independent and inconvenient producers of knowledge about the world. As always, their core strategy for accomplishing this ideological project lies in attacking tenure and the academic freedom rights of faculty. With faculty weakened and fearful for their jobs, very little stands in the way of an activist governing board determined to remake the university in its own ideological image.

So what is to be done? On this point AAUP principles could not be clearer: Faculty, not political appointees, must set Mason’s curriculum, and the institution of tenure is the non-negotiable foundation of academic freedom and shared governance. These are our principles, and they are worth fighting for.

We may wish that things were different. We may wish the basic values supporting free inquiry and open dialogue in American higher education were not under constant attack. We might even wish we could just focus on our teaching and research and hope it all goes away. But we don’t have a choice. We simply cannot let the university die on our watch. We must organize. We must build coalitions with students, parents, alumni, business leaders, and legislators, and we must fight like hell to preserve our vision of a university that serves the common good.

GMU-AAUP is organizing and taking action. Starting with a petition (now close to 200 signatures) and our trademark barrage of memes, we have planned a rolling series of actions over the next two months, including an event that ties our Just Societies struggle with the upcoming April 17th National Day of Action. To learn more about this struggle and to join in the planning, email us or visit our website.