Earlier this month, the New College of Florida’s board to trustees voted to abolish the school’s gender studies program. This campaign against gender studies raises a larger set of questions about who has an ideological bias, whose scholar-activism is most unnerving, why some academic units get accused of lacking intellectual or viewpoint diversity while others do not, and who is really in the best position to correct any of these problems in higher education. Whenever political, government, corporate, alumni or religious activists steer a college curriculum, the freedom of the faculty and students to pursue questions, and the knowledge-seeking mission of the university more generally, is compromised.
