ACTA’s report, “How Many Ward Churchills,” got some nice (and not-so-nice) notice last week, but we should hope that the direction laid out by the document receives further attention. It’s the best approach to the ideological and other biases haunting higher education. While documenting specific episodes of misconduct (because of their value in attracting attention to the problem), we should also focus on the substance of the curriculum. As Anne puts it in her introduction, “the solution is not to fire professors who express extreme views, but to expose them, to compel them to defend their positions, invite them to debate ideas, and, above all, to insist that they do their job of teaching students well and empowering them to make up their own minds.”

Hence the decision to fill the document with course descriptions. They are tendentious, clichéd, and argumentative. The solemnities about social justice, the catchphrases on “constructed identities,” the blanket indictments (example: “We also explore and discuss, both from a historical and present day perspective, ways in which our culture covertly and overtly condones the abuse of women by their intimate partners”)—they numb the intellect. But they are also far too respectable in the scholarly world, and the labor of exploding their doctrinaire aura will be a slow and deliberate one. The university needs to undergo a massive change in principle, especially the principle that distinguishes education from activism, political analysis from political indoctrination, but the change will only come incrementally.

Each senior professor today is the outcome of a twenty-year process beginning with the freshman year and ending with tenure, and they have an intense and enduring acculturation steering their thoughts and actions. Few of them will change. But the curriculum they manage and the courses they offer are subject to scrutiny, and if students graduate with a half- or quarter-knowledge of history, civics, arts and culture, science, and math—notwithstanding all the high-sounding talk about critique, society, America, etc. in the course descriptions—we may call for an accountability. It may take the form, say, of a low-stakes exit exam for graduating seniors to measure core knowledge in the basic subjects, but somehow we need systemic evidence matching curricula with outcomes. It may feel like shifting a plodding ocean liner off-course one small degree at a time, but it’s progress.