In June 2022, the California Community College Curriculum Committee published a set of guidelines entitled: DEI in Curriculum: Model Principles and Practices.  This document is representative of the flurry of equity activity in the academic world and beyond after the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the subsequent nationwide protesting and rioting. Driven by emotion, sometimes idealistic and well-meaning programs can morph into nightmarish draconian doctrine and dogma with its requisite enforcement and punitive mechanisms. DEI has indeed become such a nightmare.

Having taught college history and enjoyed academic freedom since 1991, I was shocked to see some of the guidance in the curriculum document that employs incendiary language and precepts. I resisted earlier pressure for antiracism at the beginning of my career when an administrator told me to focus on George Washington Carver instead of George Washington. I was puzzled and asked: “Why can’t we talk about both of them?”

Back to my problem with the California Community College Curriculum Committee document. For example, this passage

Take care not to ‘weaponize’ academic freedom and academic integrity as tools to impede equity in an academic discipline or inflict curricular trauma on our students, especially historically marginalized students.

I want to point out the phrase “inflict curricular trauma” as being particularly strange and a bit dramatic, almost sounding like Orwellian thought crime. Also, using the word “weaponize” in conjunction with academic freedom and academic integrity employs conflict language into the mix and raises a few red flags.

Let us begin by defining academic freedom. According to Merriam-Webster, academic freedom is the “freedom to teach or to learn without interference (as by government officials).” When we are hired by our colleges and universities, we are trusted as subject matter experts in our chosen fields. For a DEI administrative committee to step in and determine what is and what is not appropriate to teach is a clear violation of our sacred freedom of speech enshrined in the Bill of Rights. As a community, if we are not allowed to express ourselves, we would quickly fall victim to groupthink and could be easily pushed into a totalitarian structure of government.

The aforementioned document goes on to push for low-cost or free textbooks (commonly known as OER or open education resource). Every semester, the screws have been tightening and pressure building to use these textbooks. Of course, OER textbooks would need to be run through the DEI filter and scrubbed of any non-equity minded “colonizer” language. In other words, the author would be censored. How can we learn if we are too afraid to be heard? I am probably heading straight into the DEI buzzsaw by writing this, but I am at the end of my career, and I am worried about what will happen to my profession and to the students. We can never lose sight of the fact that academic freedom cultivates an environment where intellectual exploration thrives, benefiting both individuals and society. I suspect, although I could be wrong, that DEI gurus are using the OER no-cost/low-cost textbook push as a trojan horse to fully mandate DEI into our curriculum. If so, it is quite a clever tactic. If you fail to comply and resist, you could be branded as a racist who stands in the way of progress and does not care about the financial plight of young students.

In my decades long teaching career, I have never met fellow teachers who were racist or ignored ethnic minorities or marginalized students. Most of my career has been at Citrus College in Glendora, California, where 65% of our students are Hispanic. Opportunistic and insidious authors, politicians, and journalists have convinced many people that little to no progress has been made since the early days of the modern civil rights movement. In other words, a solution in search of a problem. An example of this is the 1619 Project developed by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. The purpose of the project was to reframe U.S. history by placing slavery and the contributions of African Americans at the center of the national narrative. The project became known when it was published by The New York Times in August 2019 in commemoration of the arrival of the first African slaves to the Jamestown colony. An educational curriculum was produced with the help of the Pulitzer Center and in 2020 Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her creation of the project.

Three forces came together in the year 2020 in America: a contentious presidential election, the death of George Floyd, and the COVID-19 pandemic. These forces combined in their effects during the end of a political cycle where approximately every forty years, the center of American politics shifts. This powerful mixture of forces in 2020 led to a dramatic shift in how people see their place in society. Many historians took issue with the 1619 Project citing factual errors (some historians believe that African slaves were present much earlier) and an ideological and political motivation by the creator. Despite such criticism, some states adopted the project into their K–12 curriculum. This reorientation toward race along with the emergence of critical race theory and books like How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo stirred a controversy that continues today. The resulting singular emphasis on race excludes all other contributing perspectives, narratives, and analyses.

Presentism has become a problem in understanding history. It is important to note that it does not help to hold people in the past to our version of reality. They lived much different lives than us. What we need to do is understand how they acted within the context of their times.

We do not have to fix the founding of the nation to 1776 or 1619; the significance of one does not exclude the other. The Hegelian dialectic is in full effect here. We have the generally accepted national historical narrative as the thesis and now the 1619 Project as the antithesis. To complete this dialectical process, we now need a synthesis. By examining many of the contested claims in the 1619 Project and the new antiracist and critical race theory books, we can hammer out such a synthesis. To do this, we need to leave ideology and politics behind and keep cool heads as we continue to build a more perfect union. That is obviously not easy in a divisive time. As political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote: “Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals… They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” A new historical synthesis and generally recognized historical narrative will bind us together. If civil discourse is abandoned, then a second civil war could emerge to violently resolve the divisive issues.

When we look at the culture wars, political conflicts, and the wedge issues that divide us, it is easy to take a cynical view. It appears that there are only strongly entrenched and polarized positions being hashed out in the trenches of social media in America and that the middle ground or the center has disappeared. Trying to be conciliatory is like venturing into no man’s land in World War I, where you could be attacked by both sides. I acknowledge the difficulties and challenges we are having, but I think we will pass through those troubles and enter a new age of transformative equality and put the us back in USA.

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