Why gay is not the new black university of idaho

By Daniel Walters. I t's the kind of report that begins with a quote about good and evil from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, uses little Black Lives Matter fist logos as its bullet points and declares, in bold, that "social justice education poses a threat to education in America and to the American way of life.

But it goes beyond merely tallying up courses that push concepts like "diversity," "equity" and "White privilege" — it recommends a government crackdown on them. It calls on Idaho's Legislature to take more direct financial control of the state's colleges, "penalizing universities that continue to emphasize social justice education" and directing them to "eliminate courses that are infused with social justice ideology.

Then, in the very next paragraph, without a hint of irony, the report calls for protecting free speech on college campuses, recommending the state pass model legislation from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But far from cheering on the report, FIRE President Adam Steinbaugh was disturbed by the direction Idaho's conservative culture warriors have taken lately.

A number of legislatures have really ramped up efforts to try to restrict speech in higher education," says Steinbaugh. This year, as the Washington Legislature passed a bill to mandate student and faculty training programs intended to eliminate "structural racism against all races," Idaho's lawmakers have been heading in the opposite direction, passing Freedom Foundation-inspired bills framed as combating left-wing racial justice ideology in Idaho's universities.

Steinbaugh sees a clear connection to Boise State University's sudden decision to cancel dozens of diversity-related classes that same month. Boise State administrators had received an unverified report of a video showing a White student being degraded or humiliated in one of the school's core diversity-related courses.

Not knowing which class, student or teacher was involved — if any — Boise State took the radical step of canceling all 52 diversity classes in an abundance of caution. With an independent investigation underway, the classes have since restarted, but only in an online, prerecorded format.

That pressure is only increasing: Just last month Idaho Lt. Media outlets, he says, often tend to cover academic freedom through the lens of right-wing university critics. But he says the pressure to whittle away free speech rights on college campuses is bipartisan. InYenor published a post at the conservative Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal blog titled "Transgender Activists Are Seeking to Undermine Parental Rights" that not only hit the trans rights movement, but also gay rights and feminism as well.

Students started a petition to get him fired. A faculty member wrote a rebuttal connecting his rhetoric to the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Idaho student group to host ‘Why Gay is not the New Black’

But while some in the Boise State faculty senate raised concerns about Yenor's writing, ultimately he never faced any official reprimand or punishment. The dean of Yenor's department wrote a Facebook post that disagreed with Yenor's column, but also fervently defended his academic freedom and the value of "robust discussions" around controversial views.

Yet today, as one of the co-authors of the Idaho Freedom Foundation's "Social Justice Ideology" manifesto, Yenor is taking aim at some of his Boise State colleagues' own controversial views. He's the one connecting their rhetoric to extremism, linking the "totalitarian temptations" of "social justice education" to last year's riots in Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis.

Yenor offers a disclaimer that he doesn't endorse the recommendations to the Idaho Legislature in the report, but he doesn't oppose them either. He argues that pushing back against a "pernicious lie" taught in mandatory Idaho college courses is a value that supersedes academic freedom.

They can offer a point of view, but they can't, say, require students or faculty to proclaim that America is a racist country. The law's sponsor, Washington state Sen. Emily Randall, assures the Inlander that they're "not talking about signing a pledge or taking a Girl Scout's oath.

Yet she also indicates it's not intended to be a "colorblind" training focused on treating everyone the same. It's about "confronting our system that is built on the foundation of racism," she says. And so as she was pushing this bill, she says she got a lot of pushback referencing "critical race theory.

Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. Our country's racist roots remain embedded in cracks and crevices everywhere, they concluded, and we need to find them and uproot them, not ignore them. But even from the left, it's an approach that can get criticized for focusing too much on racism at the expense of other factors, like gender, sexuality, or — especially — economic class.

As a number of high-profile liberals — a Democratic pollster, a New York Times writer, a Slate podcaster — have lost their jobs over the past year for running afoul of changing standards in how to discuss racial issues, some have charged that critical race theory had gone from a provocative critique to new kind of cultural censorship.