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In justifying the decision to fire<\/a> Texas A&M University English professor Melissa McCoul last month over an exchange that took place in her classroom, Chancellor Glenn Hegar used a script from the academic neutrality playbook.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is unacceptable for A&M System faculty to push a personal political agenda,\u201d Hegar said. \u201cWe have been tasked with training the next generation of teachers and child care professionals. That responsibility should prioritize protecting children, not engaging in indoctrination.\u201d<\/p>\n McCoul\u2019s firing occurs at a time when classrooms and campuses across the country are grappling with the very concept of academic neutrality \u2014 a vague ideal calling on educational institutions to avoid taking a position on social or political issues.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk\u2019s fatal shooting, educators are facing termination or suspension <\/a>as their social media posts are being flagged and framed as incendiary, inappropriate or insensitive. Kirk\u2019s organization, Turning Point USA, created the Professor Watchlist<\/a>, which seeks to \u201cexpose and document professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.\u201d Close to 50 instructors from public and private colleges in Illinois are on the watch list, according to a recent report<\/a> \u2014 many of whom say they\u2019re receiving hateful emails and threats of violence.<\/p>\n I specialize in the study of contemporary African American, Asian American and multiethnic literature. Now that museums filled with historic artifacts are labeled \u201ctoo woke\u201d<\/a> by President Donald Trump, it\u2019s easy to imagine how my curriculum could come under attack.<\/p>\n I am not neutral. But as an English professor, my methods are guided by my training in the humanities, a foundation upon which indoctrination \u2014 teaching others to accept certain beliefs uncritically \u2014 is entirely antithetical. I do not tell students what to think. I offer them a space to engage with complex ideas and the tools to make their own inquiries.<\/p>\n But that is not happening in many other places. <\/p>\n Several states have approved the use of Prager University Foundation, or PragerU, content<\/a> as a supplemental curricular resource in K-12 classrooms. The conservative nonprofit touts its short videos as \u201cwholesome, patriotic, and age-appropriate.\u201d One appalling video featuring Frederick Douglass<\/a> has him acknowledge<\/a> that while slavery is \u201cevil and wrong,\u201d America\u2019s Founding Fathers made a compromise for the sake of national progress and so \u201cthings are more complicated than they might seem.\u201d<\/p>\n In a video announcing a partnership with PragerU Kids<\/a>, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters praised the organization\u2019s edutainment videos for presenting only \u201cthe facts of what happened without any indoctrination.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond the blatant whitewashing of the horrors of slavery is another, more telling, incongruity between Walters\u2019 position and that of PragerU. The organization openly refers to itself as an alternative to the \u201cdominant\u201d liberal bias in public education, and its founder Dennis Prager himself has admitted<\/a>, \u201cWe bring doctrines to children … but what is the bad of our indoctrination?\u201d <\/p>\n And still Walters insists on their neutrality. Neutrality in the classroom is, after all, immeasurable, highly contingent and power-laden.<\/p>\n Walters is, perhaps unknowingly, defining neutrality as that which adheres to his worldview. This example demonstrates how the pursuit of neutrality in the classroom is a kind of appeasement to the norm, capitulation to the status quo and a reluctance to even interrogate issues that make us uncomfortable.<\/p>\n Neutrality is being weaponized as part of a larger attack on critical thinking<\/a> and social emotional learning<\/a>. Ultimately, it is nothing more than a smokescreen for state-sanctioned indoctrination. Educators are refigured as mere disseminators of information to be surveilled by students and administrators lest we might veer too far from the approved \u201capolitical\u201d curriculum.<\/p>\n The catalyst for McCoul\u2019s dismissal was a secret video recording<\/a> of her lecture, shared on social media by Republican Texas state Rep. Brian Harrison without regard for student privacy or copyright law. In the clip, a student questions the legality of the lesson, which includes a gender unicorn<\/a> and discussion on trans representation.<\/p>\n Appeals to neutrality are deployed twofold in this instance. First, because responses to the video largely emphasize that the student is asked to leave the class and therefore \u201cboth sides\u201d of the argument are not given equal footing; and second, in the prior assumption of the given neutrality of children\u2019s literature as a category distinct from the inherently political designation of LGBTQ+ literature.<\/p>\n Neutrality, as<\/a> others<\/a> have<\/a> argued<\/a>, is a myth in the contexts of academia.<\/p>\n Still, the language of neutrality is being actively used to undermine the legitimacy and value of higher education by invalidating the acumen, research and training of qualified specialists. Increasingly, expertise, especially from people of color and the LGBTQ+ community, is being cast as intrinsically non-neutral (read: nonnormative). <\/p>\n What\u2019s worse? Our colleges and universities seem eager to discredit themselves to maintain the guise of neutrality.<\/p>\n Akash Belsare is an assistant English professor at the University of Illinois Springfield and a Public Voices fellow with The OpEd Project.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n