ARTICLES
Will Trump’s Executive Order on Accreditation Rebalance Social Work?
Nathan Gallo, Arnoldo Cantú
Health and human services specialists Nathan Gallo and Arnoldo Cantú examine how “critical social justice” mandates have come to dominate American social work education. Drawing on scholarship and firsthand experience, they trace a top-down system in which the Council for Higher Education Accreditation’s DEI-infused standards shape policies, programs, and classroom instruction. Moreover, the CHEA’s exclusive control of accreditation may put social welfare education beyond the reach of U.S. Department of Education reforms.
Academic Responsibility and the New Kinship Studies
Warren Shapiro, Rutgers State University
Anthropologist Warren Shapiro traces the origins of the “new kinship studies” and argues that the subfield rests on long-discredited nineteenth century ideas revived through Marxist and postmodern interpretations. Shapiro contends that scholars who make claims about “undivided kinship,” matriarchy, and the absence of the nuclear family substitute ideology for evidence and thus undermine disciplinary standards in anthropology.
I Lived Through the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Yili Olson
An immigrant from China presents a chronicle of her experience as a young adult during China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to coincide with its sixtieth anniversary. In this memoir, Yili Olson reveals how ideology invaded daily life and weakened human bonds, but also how she and others were able to persevere with sometimes heroic human decency. The narrative testifies to how cruelty and moral courage coexisted during one of the twentieth century’s most devastating upheavals.
I Can’t Relate: Relationship as the Heart of the Liberal Arts
John Kainer, University of the Incarnate World
Drawing on more than a decade of teaching experience, John Kainer argues that the real threat to the liberal arts is not student apathy, but an academic culture dominated by critical theory and contempt for the past. The result is an impoverished education that severs students from authors and older people, replacing the development of intellect and character with cynicism and aimlessness.
The End of a Fine Romance: Jews and the American Academy
Edward S. Shapiro, Seton Hall University
Historian Edward S. Shapiro examines the post–October 7 campus upheavals, arguing that administrative paralysis and ideological conformity have allowed antisemitism to flourish under the guise of social justice. Shapiro contends that the fate of American Jews on campus is inextricably linked to the fate of the university itself, and whether it can recover its liberal foundations.
Woke Citations: A Norm Reversal in Science
Harry Haufele
Social scientist Harry Haufele insists that Citation Diversity Statements, intended to address alleged racial and gender disparities in whose work gets cited, risk replacing scholarly competence with identity quotas, undermining traditional research norms. If such practices become widespread, Haufele warns, academic freedom and public trust in science will be further eroded.
College Libraries Defy Trump’s DEI Reform Efforts
John A. Gentry, Missouri State University
Have the Trump administration’s anti-DEI reforms had any real effect? John A. Gentry decided to check in with university libraries, the ideological nerve centers of many campuses. Drawing on a six month nationwide survey, Gentry finds that most libraries have largely ignored federal directives, with meaningful reform occurring mainly where state governments intervened directly.
The Campus Inquisition? Policing Thought Then and Now
Erwin James Casareno, Carleton University
Without claiming moral equivalence, Erwin James Casareno makes the case that the contemporary mechanisms for enforcing ideological conformity in academia resemble nothing so much as the institutional logic once used to enforce theological orthodoxy during the Inquisition. While the Inquisition was far more brutal, both institutions successfully imposed a regime of knowledge control that constrains intellectual freedom.
SHORT TAKE
Common Sense Returns to Classrooms in College Station, Texas
John M. Kainer, University of the Incarnate Word
Texas A&M’s Board of Regents has adopted common-sense guardrails requiring faculty to obtain approval before teaching race and gender ideology. The goal of the new rules, explains John M. Kainer, is a good one: curb activist instruction and rebuild trust in higher education.
REVIEWS
The winter AQ features seventeen book reviews, beginning with David Randall’s review of The Free Inquiry Papers, a volume that brings together twenty essays by a wide range of reformers examining the importance of free inquiry to education and suggesting ways to have it restored. Mary Grabar then takes up Daniel J. Flynn’s impressive The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, the most thorough account to date of the ex-communist who played an outsized role in shaping late twentieth century conservative philosophy.
Gorman Beauchamp looks at Against Morality, Rosanna McLaughlin’s critique of “Liberal Realism,” a philosophy and style that she believes stymies artistic expression and mandates the transmission of pre-approved moral lessons. Shale Horowitz offers his take on popular pundit Douglas Murray’s assertion in On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization that Islamism’s deftness at exploiting democratic openness poses an existential threat to the West. And speaking of Western civilization, David Randall tells us his own view of George Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea, which argues that the term “Western civilization” itself has more often been employed to advance political agendas than to describe a fixed reality.
Tim Hartnett takes a witty look at a book documenting a serious problem. In Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation Adam Kissel and two colleagues scold elite universities for replacing intellectually rigorous courses with trendy, politically driven ones that prioritize identity politics and pop culture. Frequent AQ contributor John Adam Moreau takes on another serious book, Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now, which Moreau describes as a blistering but eloquent takedown of modern totalitarian impulses masquerading as social justice. The NAS’s Ian Oxnevad and Peter Wood team up for David R. Shedd’s and Andrew Badger’s The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets. The book exposes China’s decades-long campaign of industrial and economic espionage, revealing how Beijing weaponizes major American institutions to steal secrets, boost its own economy, and undermine American security.
Jacob Williams reflects on the unexpected turns he encountered while reading Shadi Hamid’s The Case for American Power. Here, writes Williams, is a somewhat (neo)conservative manifesto in progressive clothing, arguing for U.S. global hegemony because power is inevitable—and if Americans don’t wield it, tyrants will. NAS science director J. Scott Turner reviews Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion and approves of the way author Nicholas Spencer dismantles the myth of an eternal war between science and religion and carefully documents their long and sometimes mutually beneficial interaction.
Matthew Stewart finds that Christopher Eisgruber’s Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right is a self-serving defense of elite campus culture by a president of an elite campus (Princeton), a volume that excuses left-wing illiberalism and minimizes the decline of academic freedom. Edward S. Shapiro, author of a feature article in this issue, points to America’s Christian good will and exceptional legal protections to challenge Pamela S. Nadell’s thesis, in Antisemitism: An American Tradition, that antisemitism is an inherent and permanent component of American life.
David Lewis Schaefer is fascinated by Edward J. Erler’s Prophetic Statesmanship: Harry Jaffa, Abraham Lincoln, and the Gettysburg Address, a probing look at Lincoln as a “prophetic” statesman and natural rights defender. In his Vanishing Point: In Search of Our Constitutional Future, Edwin C. Hagenstein does an admirable job laying out the sources of today’s conflicted “constitutional moment” and setting forth competing visions for the future, according to Bruce P. Frohnen. William Briggs reveals that Adam Kucharski, in Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty, sets out to explain how arguments and evidence work but inadvertently illustrates how identity-infused notions of proof and expert overreach can mislead even those most confident they are following reason.
Making his second appearance in this issue of AQ, Boston University humanities professor Matthew Stewart writes that while Adam Szetela positions himself in That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing as a class-conscious man of the left, he gives a more than serviceable critique of how identitarian ideology and “sensitivity readers” have hollowed out contemporary publishing.
Also making his second appearance here, and bringing up the rear, David Lewis Schaefer champions Tulane University philosopher Ronna Burger’s masterful study The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth and On Plato’s ‘Euthyphro’, New Edition. Schaefer is impressed by Burger’s willingness to reexamine Plato’s Phaedo not only as a meditation on the soul’s immortality, but as a complex dialogue in which Socrates and Plato seek to preserve philosophy and model a life worth living.
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