Going to college is supposed to be about preparing students for their careers. At Michigan State University, it is about woke indoctrination and poisoning the minds of the next generation.
On October 24, Michigan State’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter posted a statement concerning the course TE 101, “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education,” a required course at Michigan State for Elementary Teacher Certification and Secondary Teacher Certification. On October 29, the College Republicans of America announced that they had obtained a copy of the course syllabus.
Will Donahue, the Chairman of CRA, provided me with that copy. What I found in the document was outrageous and disgusting.
Professor Taneya Chavis teaches the course. According to the course overview, “TE 101 explores the ways social inequalities, systems, and structures affect schooling, and how schooling shapes those social inequalities and structures.” The course focuses explicitly on race and its “intersections with other social identity markers, including gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, religion, and nationality,” all examined through “the lenses of equity, justice, and abolition.” In other words, the course is specifically designed to operate from a woke framework, informed by dangerous ideologies like critical race theory.
But don’t just take my word for it – the syllabus's own “key questions” reveal the indoctrination agenda.
The questions deal with “systems of power and privilege” in the United States and around the globe and how those systems are used to “maintain dominance and oppression over historically and contemporarily marginalized groups of people.” Question three of this section asks how school structures “create and reproduce” these systems of “power and privilege.” Question four asks “In what ways has culture been used to facilitate the social constructions of ‘normality’ and ‘difference’ in ways that maintain colonial, anti-Black, and white supremacist power structures in global contexts.” Notice the capitalization of “black” but not “white.” Question five asks how students can be “change agents and co-conspirators” towards “social justice and abolitionist transformations” in society.
What are the foundations of these ideas? According to the syllabus, the course is committed to three key documents: the Guiding Principles of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Learning for Justice’s Social Justice Standards, and the principles of the Abolitionist Teaching Network. The ideas found in these documents are “both explicitly and implicitly part of our course.” What are these ideas? They include things like explicit globalism, LGBT radicalism, and “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”
The “abolition” referenced by the syllabus and these supporting documents is the abolition of Whiteness. To drive the point home, the course requires students to read We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, a 2019 book by Bettina Love. As pointed out by the MSU YAF chapter, the book contains quotes like the following: “Whiteness cannot enter spaces focused on abolitionist teaching. Whiteness is addicted to centering itself, addicted to attention, and making everyone feel guilty for working toward its elimination.”
In case you did not think this was crazy enough, the syllabus also includes a “Land Acknowledgment,” offering an acknowledgment that Michigan State “occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands” of Native American tribes and advocating for Michigan State to be held accountable “to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.” Finally, in a subtle act of defiance to federal law under the Trump Administration, the syllabus encourages students to use an “all-gender” bathroom found in the building.
This course should alarm everyone. The ideas promoted within the course and the syllabus are antithetical to the values we hold dear as American citizens and are designed to drive us deeper into division. No parent sends their child to school to learn that anyone who is white is evil, and their Whiteness should be abolished. Imagine a first-grade classroom where the teachers label traditional holidays like Christmas as “white supremacist relics” or push gender fluidity as liberation from “oppressive norms.”
There is not a parent in the country who wants that. We have all seen how parents rallied around Governor Glenn Youngkin in 2021 when the radical teaching in the classrooms was brought to light. We have all seen how parents across the nation supported President Trump’s push to get men out of women’s sports and fight against radical gender ideology. No parent in the country wants these radical ideas taught to their children.
But if your child’s teacher is a recent Michigan State University graduate, that is precisely what the child is going to get.
This course advances racism towards whites and resentment towards the Western foundation of the United States. It advances radical racial and sexual agendas, designed to divide Americans and allow Marxist ideology to infect the next generation. Future educators should not be learning about the “evils of whiteness” on the taxpayer's dime.
Michigan State must face backlash. There is no reason any student should be forced to withstand this indoctrination. Parents, alumni, and lawmakers need to demand an audit of the program and strip funding from this divisive nonsense. We must reclaim educational institutions from the clutches of radical ideologues and ensure that colleges produce patriots, not pawns in a communist takeover. There is no reason for Michigan State to continue requiring, much less offering, this course. This should end today.
Jesse Hughes is a conservative columnist for the American Reformer, a JD candidate at Liberty University School of Law, and a legal research assistant at the Standing for Freedom Center at Liberty University.
