In Arizona, public universities are taking the state’s best and brightest and diluting their potential. Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Arizona (UA) together educate nearly 90 percent of Arizona’s public university students, making them the dominant forces in the state’s higher education system. Both promote their honors colleges as elite academic tracks. But a closer look suggests a curriculum increasingly geared toward producing activists rather than scholars.

My recent report published by the Goldwater Institute, “Desert Brain Drain: Arizona’s Honors Colleges Hijacked by Activist Faculty to Force DEI on Students,” found that honors programs at both schools have drifted from their academic mission. Barrett Honors College at ASU and the Franke Honors College at UA, long considered pipelines for future leaders, now reflect the ideological priorities of faculty more than the intellectual development of students.

At Barrett, the shift is most visible in “The Human Event,” a required two-semester seminar intended to introduce students to the major currents of human thought. In practice, the course often resembles an ideological workshop.

More than 70 percent of reviewed sections incorporated “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) frameworks, with readings and assignments centered on identity, power, and systemic oppression. In one case, students were directed to examine “violence and capitalism, power and powerlessness,” and to consider “the relationship between the white female gaze and the eroticized Black male body.” Another syllabus described the course as an effort “to work toward imagining yet unimaginable future liberatory possibilities.”

The problem is not exposure to controversial ideas, but the systematic exclusion of dissenting viewpoints from campus orthodoxy. One section on Israel, for example, assigned only critical readings of Zionism, offering no competing perspectives and raising questions about whether students are being encouraged to think or steered toward predetermined conclusions. That’s not rigor, it’s indoctrination.

Transparency is also lacking at these public institutions. The report found that up to 85 percent of syllabi for this required course were not publicly available. When the Goldwater Institute requested just 14 missing syllabi, Barrett took nearly 10 months to respond. When the documents were finally produced, the college had redacted the names of the instructors, while ASU’s own course catalog routinely publishes thousands of syllabi with faculty names clearly listed.

At the University of Arizona’s Franke Honors College, the approach differs, but the substance is the same. Students must complete at least one honors seminar, choosing from a variety of far-left pet projects featuring courses like “Eating the Globe: The Diverse, Weird, and Queer Food Politics” and “Cut and Paste: Constructing Identity Through Collage.” Honors education, once grounded in rigor and foundational texts, loses its purpose when students must focus on the puerile instead of Plato.

Besides dubious required coursework, faculty positions at the Franke Honors College facilitate ideologically extreme “scholarship” that is indistinguishable from left-wing activism. The faculty member teaching “Queer Food Politics,” for example, describes herself as an “education activist” who studies “decolonial pedagogies, affect theory, gender politics and Disability activism in global social movements.” Another Franke faculty member has produced “research” arguing that couples should “have no more than two biological children” because of climate change.

The path forward is not complicated, but it does require lawmakers to act. State officials should consider conditioning a portion of university funding on basic transparency and oversight, ensuring that honors college faculty hiring, job postings, and syllabi for required courses are subject to direct review by the Arizona Board of Regents. That process should include a serious reevaluation, if not wholesale reform, of Barrett’s “Human Event” course framework.

Lawmakers should also revisit broader structural reforms. That includes adopting provisions of the Goldwater Institute’s American Higher Education Restoration Act to halt automatic taxpayer funding for research that does not advance human knowledge, as well as pursuing a state constitutional amendment to prohibit mandatory DEI coursework in public universities.

Finally, transparency must be non-negotiable. ASU and UA, along with the Board of Regents, should require all honors-affiliated instructors to publicly post complete syllabi for every course. (Read “Public Money, Public Syllabi.”) That includes “The Human Event” and all honors seminars. Those syllabi should be fully detailed and include assigned readings for each section and each instructor.

The public has the right to know how its tax dollars are being spent by state institutions.

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