The War for Higher Ed Has a New Battlefield, Your State Capitol
Ideology goes in the classroom through the backdoor. These laws change the locks.
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Reclaiming Education: Three Legislative Fixes to Push Back Against Ideological Capture
It may be difficult to focus on the arcane issues of higher education with the summer heating up, taking the culture wars and Middle East conflict with it. But while those situations may be out of our control, starting the process of fixing higher Ed is easily in our grasp. Action taken now is just the investment needed to curtail the chaos coming at us.
This is a time to take on politicized curricula and professional gatekeeping directly. These issues may have silently shaped a generation, but they need not infiltrate our future if we act now.
I’ve spent the last several months looking over legislation that will help Tennessee do just that. There is a long way to go before they become law, but let’s take a look at them and start field-testing these ideas, and place them in the cauldron of our legislative process.
Where the Federal government is getting tied up in geo-political situations, States have the power to change course.
The most effective reforms today focus on transparency in the classroom, accountability for accreditors, and protections for professionals speaking freely in politicized fields. These aren’t silver bullets, but they offer a powerful start.
So let’s make use of them.
Syllabus or Surprise? Transparency in the Classroom
Each year, millions of students sign away their financial futures with little knowledge of what their education will actually entail. Course descriptions are vague. Syllabi are locked behind registration portals. In the absence of transparency, ideology has quietly flooded disciplines once grounded in rigor—education, counseling, social work, even parts of medicine and STEM.
The issue isn’t just fringe courses in gender or critical race theory. It’s the subtle rewriting of core curricula to prioritize ideological outcomes over empirical reasoning. Students enrolling in psychology might learn more about systems of oppression than the DSM. Nursing students are spending more time covering lived experience than diagnostic evidence. These trends are real, and they’re growing.
To address this, states like Texas, Ohio, and Utah have passed Syllabus Transparency Acts—laws requiring public colleges to post syllabi online at least seven days before classes begin. This simple reform empowers students to know what they’re paying for and allows taxpayers to monitor what’s being taught at public institutions. It also invites broader scrutiny from employers, alumni, and policymakers who want to ensure academic standards are upheld.
It’s not a comprehensive fix. But it’s a concrete, achievable step—and a gateway to deeper reform.
Breaking the Accreditor Cartel
One of the least understood but most powerful drivers of ideological conformity in higher education is accreditation. These private organizations determine whether universities qualify for federal funding, and in doing so, shape what institutions teach, how they hire, and what values they promote.
Because accreditors are shielded by federal mandates, states have long felt powerless to intervene—even when accreditors threaten to penalize schools for refusing to adopt politicized standards.
That changed with Florida’s 2022 law requiring universities to rotate their accrediting agencies. This undermined the de facto monopoly accreditors had enjoyed and signaled that states could, in fact, reclaim oversight. Iowa’s House File 295 went further, explicitly barring accreditors from retaliating against institutions that comply with state law—even allowing the state attorney general to bring civil action when violations occur.
Model legislation from the Civics Alliance builds on these reforms by empowering state policymakers to direct how public universities interact with accreditors. Together, these efforts assert that states—not unaccountable nonprofits—should define the public mission of education.
This approach doesn’t hinge on a sympathetic President’s Executive Order. Once enacted, these laws remain regardless of who’s in the White House.
Free Speech for Licensed Professionals
For over a decade, licensing boards have quietly imposed ideological conformity under the guise of “professional ethics.” In fields like counseling, social work, and education, licensure often depends on adherence to progressive orthodoxy—including mandated DEI training and required use of activist terminology.
This isn’t just theory—it’s policy. Some states require counseling students to graduate from CACREP-accredited schools, a national body whose standards demand that practitioners affirm specific sociopolitical views, and allow educators to evaluate trainees on their beliefs and values.
The result? A professional class trained not in clinical judgment, but in activism. Dissenting voices are few and far between, despite egregious horror stories occasionally coming to light. Entire industries have been ideologically captured—especially in the helping professions—where honest disagreement can cost you your career.
The Licensure Nondiscrimination Act addresses this head-on. It prohibits discrimination in licensure or professional development based on group identity or ideology. It requires transparency and depoliticizing training materials. It restricts external funding tied to politicized standards. And it guarantees that licensed professionals retain their right to free expression, even to keep talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion.
This bill isn’t about suppressing views—it’s about ensuring that belief isn’t a requirement for practice.
Turning the Tide, One Bill at a Time
The ideological capture of education didn’t happen overnight. It began decades ago, when critical theory gained a foothold in education departments and feminism. As older faculty retired, new hires brought a mission not of scientific inquiry but of radical social transformation.
Today, those seeds have borne fruit: mandatory bias training, rewritten curricula, credentialing regimes that punish dissent, and students who graduate with debt but no durable skills. We are witnessing the institutionalization of a worldview—and if left unchecked, it will calcify into a system beyond reform.
But reform is still possible. These three measures—syllabus transparency, accreditor accountability, and licensing protections—are only the beginning. If states act now, they can reclaim higher education from ideology and restore its purpose: the pursuit of knowledge, the cultivation of wisdom, and the preparation of citizens capable of reasoned thought.
Change won’t be instant. But these are battles worth fighting—because the classroom shapes the culture, and the culture shapes the future.
Further Reading
The Licensure Racket by Rebecca Allensworth
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About
Diogenes in Exile began after I returned to grad school to pursue a Clinical Mental Health Counseling master’s degree at the University of Tennessee. What I encountered, however, was a program deeply entrenched in Critical Theories ideology. During my time there, I experienced significant resistance, particularly for my Buddhist practice, which was labeled as invalidating to other identities. After careful reflection, I chose to leave the program, believing the curriculum being taught would ultimately harm clients and lead to unethical practices in the field.
Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to investigating, writing, and speaking out about the troubling direction of psychology, higher education, and other institutions that seem to have lost their way. When I’m not working on these issues, you’ll find me in the garden, creating art, walking my dog, or guiding my kids toward adulthood.
You can also find my work at Minding the Campus