By Stanley Kurtz
Monday, May 18, 2026
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.
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 why, as a result, so many
well-intentioned steps to date have failed to properly reform our public
universities. Yet Arizona equally illustrates the immense potential of the new
two-step package of university reforms.
It’s not as though Arizona hasn’t tried. Back in 2010,
some years before the heyday of “woke,” Arizona voters ratified a
constitutional amendment banning racial discrimination (including so-called
affirmative action) by a 19-point margin. That alone might have stanched the
ascent of DEI. Unfortunately, there was a catch. The amendment carved out a
loophole for instances in which the federal government conditioned money and
approvals on preferential treatment by race. Until recently, of course, the
feds imposed such requirements on public universities on a regular basis.
That loophole has got to be closed. This may seem
unnecessary now, since President Trump has eliminated pressure from the federal
government for racial preferences. Remember, however, that Trump has set racial
preferences aside by executive order only. Trump’s EOs could easily be undone
by a President Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, or even a President AOC.
True, the U.S. Supreme Court has turned against racial
preferences of late. Yet it’s hard to tell how far that would carry beyond
university admissions policy, especially with a Democratic president in place.
DEI-governed faculty hiring, DEI training for students and faculty, required
DEI courses, and more, might well still be on the table.
But how could Arizona close the racial preference
loophole, you ask, now that the state has a Democratic governor? Here,
thankfully, Arizona House Speaker Steve Montenegro and Senate President Warren
Petersen could ensure that House Concurrent Resolution 2044 (only a single
senate vote away from passage) goes to the voters in a constitutional
referendum this November. Were the proposed state constitutional amendment to
win approval from a simple majority of Arizona’s voters, it would take effect
without the governor’s signature.
The state constitutional amendment proposed in H.C.R.
2044 would do far more than merely close the loophole that allows racial
preferences to be imposed by the feds. H.C.R. 2044 would explicitly ban
mandatory “diversity statements” for faculty job applicants, ban mandatory DEI
training, and make sure that students are no longer required to take DEI-based
courses in order to graduate. (The University of Arizona has required two
DEI-based courses of all graduating students.)
Note, however, that professors are in no way prohibited
by the proposed amendment from teaching DEI-based courses. Designing a course
is one thing. Academic freedom allows a professor to do that. But academic
freedom does not entitle a course to be designated a graduation requirement.
The final decision on general education requirements has always been made by
representatives of the public: typically, by politically appointed or elected
university regents/trustees/governors but also by the legislature, when that is deemed necessary. In the past,
regents have generally rubber-stamped faculty general education decisions. But
this is what is now changing.
Regents, and especially legislatures, are rightly
beginning to insist that general education requirements be shaped by the core
values of a state’s voters. What sort of knowledge is more foundational:
Western civilization or DEI? That is less a question of academic expertise than
of moral and social ideals. Here the voters, through their elected
representatives, legitimately decide.
H.C.R. 2044 is merely part one of Arizona’s higher
education reform two-step. It resembles anti-DEI legislation in other red
states, yet it is significantly more comprehensive than we find elsewhere.
True, in 2025, Idaho’s legislature prohibited public universities from
requiring DEI-based courses as a condition of graduation. The University of
North Carolina system’s board of governors has made a similar rule as well. In
general, however, even red states that have shut down DEI offices and barred
mandatory DEI training have not stopped public universities from forcing DEI
courses on students as graduation requirements. Arizona H.C.R. 2044, then, is
helping to show the way. Public control of general education requirements is
still the great unused lever of public higher education reform. Which brings us
to step two.
Here and there, red states are beginning to grasp their
legitimate, yet largely neglected, power over graduation requirements. Florida and South Carolina have in different ways begun to exercise
this power. Utah recently mandated a three-semester graduation requirement in the
history and literature of Western civilization, with a semester of American
civics as well, all to be designed and taught by a new and independent academic
unit staffed by professors with a commitment to a great-books-based approach.
Arizona has the makings of such a reform, but it’s not
there yet. True, in 2019, with an update in 2021, Arizona’s board of regents
instituted an excellent “American Institutions” requirement, specifying that
all graduating students must take courses covering American history,
constitutional debates, the founding documents, landmark Supreme Court cases,
and basic economic knowledge.
For years, however, Arizona’s public universities have
ignored this requirement, slow-walked it, undermined it, and effectively defied
the regents. I wrote a piece about the fiasco three years ago. So little has
changed that Arizona’s Goldwater Institute recently issued a report on how the universities not only continue to
slow-walk or ignore the American Institutions requirement but directly subvert
it by smuggling DEI content into the required courses. (For an insider account
of some of the University of Arizona’s techniques for avoiding or gutting the
American Institutions requirement, go here.)
After eight years of defiance and subversion, let’s be
honest about what it would take to institute real change at Arizona’s public
universities. Even if the legislature got tough and withheld university funding
until the American Institutions requirement was followed, you can be certain
the subversion would continue. Courses might formally teach the required
American Institutions topics, but the professors would “deconstruct” the
content and slip in DEI-based readings. The university’s monolithic intellectual,
moral, and political bias would continue untouched, and students would still be
deprived of foundational knowledge.
And yet, Arizona State University is home to the School
of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL), one of the most respected and well-established
centers of “civic thought” and a pioneer of this important and welcome but
still relatively new academic phenomenon. Established by an act of the state
legislature, SCETL is well stocked with professors fully qualified to teach the
American Institutions requirement as originally envisioned by Arizona’s board
of regents.
Why, then, would the legislature not put the design and
teaching of American Institutions courses into the hands of SCETL (and/or its
sister institutions: ASU’s Center
for American Institutions, and the University of Arizona’s Center for the
Philosophy of Freedom)? Instantly, this would catapult these academic units
from significant yet still somewhat peripheral programs to pillars of
intellectual life at Arizona’s public universities. The real problem with
higher education reform nowadays is that there are barely any traditionalist
professors left. Universities have a hard time establishing intellectual
diversity on their faculties, even when they finally decide that they want it.
A decades-long purge of conservatives, and even moderates, from academia has
taken its toll. But ASU in particular has a top-notch traditionalist center,
with plenty of participation from professors across the political spectrum.
There is simply no way to fundamentally reform our universities without making
maximum use of that sort of faculty. Arizona has the ingredients for real
reform; it just has to put them together.
This is unlikely to happen, of course, under Arizona’s
current governor. And SCETL and its companion institutions are undoubtedly
under constant pressure from the wider universities, whose faculties are
hostile to their presence — the same faculty who’ve managed to subvert the
regents’ American Institutions requirement for eight years. But that is all the
more reason why the legislature must act, at least once a sympathetic governor
is in place.
Different states will have to devise their own two-steps.
States like Utah were able to bar DEI without a constitutional amendment. Utah
also put classic great books and civics courses under the control of an
independent academic unit, but it will have to work to find enough
traditionalist faculty to staff it. Utah has no equivalent of SCETL. Yet the
basics of the two-step are the same in every state: (1) Block the imposition of
DEI ideology by defunding DEI offices, halting mandatory diversity statements and
DEI training, and by keeping universities from turning DEI courses into
graduation requirements; and (2) institute graduation requirements in U.S.
history, civics, and Western civilization built around a great books approach,
then put the design and teaching of these courses under the control of one of
the new civic centers.
With luck, and under the leadership of Speaker Montenegro
and Senate President Petersen, Arizona will take step one this fall.
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