Michael Rushton (@michaelrushton1)

You raise the valid point that many courses have a normative judgment “baked in” to the content, that for the most part professors have felt free to not address. A course on Shakespeare’s comedies comes with the implicit judgment that they are worth studying, and Tolstoy’s rants against them can be ignored. A course in Cost-Benefit Analysis - indeed, an entire degree in Economics - comes with a baked in methodological individualism / utilitarianism that a Marxist, or a communitarian, or a Rawlsian, would have objections to, but in my experience these critiques do not play much of a role if any at all in the courses. The examples you give illustrate what the Indiana legislature was concerned about: courses with a left-wing perspective at its heart (ie the Econ department is not what they worry about). These are a much smaller proportion of courses than they think (my son took courses in GIS, and they were non-political / technique-focused), but give the impression, that George and West also perpetuate, that it’s politics everywhere, and so everything warrants review. I just don’t think that’s right.