Dear editor:
For four years now, I have been calling for reform at the University of Wyoming — sadly, with little result. We need open inquiry and fearless debate.
We have slipped into the mainstream of higher education that Yeonmi Park has rightly called the “suicide of civilization.”
Wyomingites need to remake our university into something that our grandparents would applaud and retake higher education to sharpen, elevate, and inspire the next generation.
In too many ways, the U.S. university system is currently something that Bolsheviks, Nazis, and Fascists might admire.
Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector, has compared the constraints on free speech in U.S. universities to that of her home country. Anna Krylov, a professor of chemistry at USC who attended Moscow State University, has compared the university system in the U.S. today to the USSR’s in four ways:
(i) the atmosphere of fear and self-censorship; (ii) the omnipresence of ideology; (iii) an intolerance of dissenting opinions; and (iv) the use of social engineering to solve real and imagined problems.
Well said: Each of these elements is present and at work in the University of Wyoming today.
From the initially woke and mandated “Saddle Up” orientation to the Honors program to the “grievance studies” sprinkled throughout campus, UW now looks like any other university in the U.S.—and we must change.
Many at UW will tell us that they have recently changed, based on pressure from the Right, especially in the Wyoming Legislature.
They note that the Office of DEI was eliminated and that DEI-related courses were restructured. These small changes, while laudable, are not nearly enough.
The School of Culture, Gender & Social Justice, for example, was renamed the Department of American Cultural Studies. Word salad will not repair statewide confidence in our lone public university.
UW has been heading south for at least two decades. To become an institution worthy of our Land-Grant funds, it must turn 180 degrees to true north. A 10-degree change in direction is not close to enough.
Universities once taught students both the library of knowledge held by mankind and the grit and character needed to persevere in their careers in the face of inevitable adversity.
The UW Board of Trustees should create a concise mandate for UW to return to authentic education and the development of tenacity.
This would distinguish us among American universities and would inevitably draw interest from students nationwide. It would also relieve the growing group of alumni who decide to avoid UW with every new headline of woke activities and indoctrination in Laramie.
Finally, it would likely mean that the legislature would enthusiastically fund UW rather than doing so grudgingly, because there is no other option. The current era of contention between UW and our legislature is quite dangerous and, I hope, can be cut short.
The fundamentals of reform could involve a mandate, from the governor and our trustees, that our business school endorse Austrian School economics, even though we may certainly teach Keynesian theory in contrast.
The education college would likewise eliminate all “grievance studies” (wherein we teach our future teachers to suggest that their students apply for special consideration, as nearly all are somehow “underprivileged” and need “accommodations”), as well as all postmodern nonsense holding that we cannot know if Dr. Seuss or Shakespeare is better literature.
Our Arts & Sciences college would likewise eliminate Critical Race Theory and would acknowledge that man can know the difference between beauty and abomination. It would stop teaching the Marxist belief that society can be separated into two groups, oppressor and oppressed.
These are kernels of my suggestion for a task force of trustees to chart a course for our beloved UW that would clearly distinguish it from the mainstream of increasingly irrelevant universities in America.
As administrative staff has ballooned over the years, the number and strength of our tenured professors has dwindled.
This was a strong component of our traditional university system. When departments are thriving and their passion for their subject matter characterizes the university, then students are animated by that topic and passion.
When administrations set the tone, they are inevitably animated by non-academic topics and drift toward the least common denominator, in many cases an unthinking leftism. This drift by administrations may be corrected by tightening their budgets significantly and better funding those who teach.
The current UW administration has told me that “we don’t mandate woke philosophies,” but any student knows better. Piaget called this “embodied knowledge,” which is effectively communicated to students without leaving a paper trail.
Yeonmi Park and Anna Krylov lived in systems saturated in this embodied knowledge. Students at UW hear the quiet demand to be woke daily.
Only a complete and 180-degree turn of our university, mandated and charted by our governor and trustees, will have the ability to restore open inquiry and fearless debate.
Such teaching, saturated in the wisdom of the West, will sharpen, elevate, and inspire graduates to persevere when challenged and to follow where facts and evidence lead.
There is so much worth defending and growing in our university! Wyoming decisionmakers must steel themselves for the challenge.
Sincerely,
Kyle True, Casper
Kyle is a graduate of the University of Wyoming and has sent six children there.
