A graduate student at the University of Oklahoma is the latest in a growing list of college instructors to face disciplinary action after being targeted by Turning Point USA, the right-wing campus pressure group founded by the late Charlie Kirk.

Mel Curth, a trans psychology instructor who recently won the Department of Psychology’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award, gave a zero to junior Samantha Fulnecky’s reaction paper for an assignment on “gender typicality, peer relations, and mental health,” judging that the essay was based more in “personal ideology” than “empirical evidence.” Fulnecky, whose paper describes “the lie that there are multiple genders” as “demonic,” filed a religious discrimination complaint with the university, which in turn put Curth on administrative leave pending investigation.

Meanwhile, at Indiana University, a professor who showed a diagram in class that labeled “Make America Great Again” an example of a white supremacist slogan has been barred from teaching the class after a student filed a complaint with Republican Senator Jim Banks, who then intervened with the university on the student’s behalf. And the University of Alabama has suspended two student magazines—one focused on Black culture and student life, the other on women’s lifestyle—out of fear that the publications might violate the Department of Justice’s stated prohibition on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in higher education.

During the second Trump administration, right-wing politicians and pressure groups have been eager to turn conventional matters of university governance into opportunities for state intervention. That’s been most apparent in the administration’s war on elite private universities. But what we’re witnessing in the above examples and elsewhere is a less heralded, but perhaps even more alarming, trend of public universities making preemptive decisions to appease the bigoted MAGA regime. In doing so, they risk validating the political right’s long-held view that education serves one purpose: indoctrination.

It wasn’t long ago........

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