Most people have heard of the Texas two-step, but did you know that there’s an Arizona two-step too? The dances are cousins, yet decidedly different. Well, there’s another two-step spreading across the red and purple states, variations on a two-part theme. You might call this one the “professor-proof step,” or maybe the “stop-being-a-campus-dupe step.” Let me show you how it’s done.

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Following on the decade-long rise of wokeness in the form of campus shout-downs, so-called microaggressions, safe spaces, critical race theory, and the trans movement, red-state legislatures have been pushing back. It started around 2017, with state-level legislation protecting campus free speech. That passed into state-level defunding of campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), bans on professorial “diversity statements” (mandatory oaths of loyalty to DEI), and prohibitions on DEI “training” (compulsory DEI indoctrination coupled with confessions designed to root out “whiteness”).

More recently, and only very incompletely, a third and potentially far more powerful movement has begun. Taking advantage of the well-attested power of state legislatures to mandate general education requirements (courses required for graduation), states have begun both to bar DEI-based graduation requirements and to mandate traditional survey courses in American history, civics, and Western civilization. Equally important, many states have established centers employing traditionalist faculty with the expertise to teach such classic courses.

Most states with the potential to pass campus free speech legislation have already done so. But in many cases, full elimination of mandatory DEI — especially DEI course requirements — has not yet been achieved. More important, only a few red-state legislatures have begun to insist on traditional American history, civics, and Western civilization courses as graduation requirements. Fewer still have taken the crucial step of giving the new traditionalist centers of civic thought (as opposed to the faculty as a whole) authority over the design and teaching of such required courses. That, however, would be a truly transformative step. Only this has the potential to bring substantial intellectual balance to universities that long ago became leftist indoctrination camps.

And so, with campus free speech legislation already in place in receptive states, we’re down to a kind of two-step. Step one is removing various DEI mandates — DEI-based course requirements above all. Step two — only barely begun — is mandating classic courses in U.S. history, civics, and Western civilization as graduation requirements, and putting the design and teaching of these courses in the hands of faculty at the new civic centers rather than the faculty at large.

Maybe only Utah and Florida have gotten far down this two-step path. For a look at a state in midstream of the transition, let’s turn to Arizona. Arizona shows what hasn’t yet been done in most red states and........

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