Is higher education regaining its sanity?

With a growing list of colleges and universities returning to ideological neutrality policies, many are optimistic about the future of higher education. Especially with the Trump administration’s legal action against universities that have aided and abetted progressive antisemitism, crackdowns on gender ideology and pediatric gender medicine, and revocation of grants that go toward ideologically oriented research, there is reason to believe that universities stand to materially benefit from shifting away from leftist ideology. As I myself have argued in the past, many university administrators and professors themselves were secretly sick of radicalism destroying their institutions, and are silently thanking the Trump administration for giving them an excuse to disregard the opinions of deranged activists and shift their focus once again toward teaching and research. 

And yet, a recent episode at Washington State University’s medical school suggests caution at being too optimistic. After offering several accredited continuing medical education (CME) courses that were developed by the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, a group that opposes the medical mutilation of those struggling with gender dysphoria, WSU was forced to suspend those courses by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, or risk losing its accreditation for CME. 

ACCME-accredited courses are required for physicians to maintain their licensure, so if WSU were to keep promoting SEGM’s courses against the ACCME’s mandate, no physician would take them. The ACCME left WSU with no choice. 

Even worse, the ACCME bullied WSU into submission before it even carried out or concluded an investigation into the SEGM curriculum, in a move the New York Sun called “extraordinary.”

As far as opposition to the ideological capture of institutions is concerned, this episode is two steps forward, one step back.

Let’s start with the two steps forward. Five years ago, as basically every mainstream institution kowtowed to progressive activists and fell in line with every one of their demands, not daring to question any of their causes, it would have been entirely unthinkable for a medical college, let alone one as big as WSU, to even attempt to use SEGM’s curriculum. But today, after the work of countless journalists, medical professionals, lawyers, whistleblowers, and, most of all, detransitioners, at least there is a fight within and between mainstream institutions over the validity of gender medicine and leftist ideology as a whole.

Of course, as the ACCME’s clampdown shows, that fight has yet to be won—there’s that one step back. But that there is a fight at all shows cracks in a censorship regime that once seemed unbreakable and allows for legitimate discourse in which the truth has a shot of prevailing.

There is a bigger lesson from this story, though, which is that those at universities who do the actual work of teaching, research, and, in this case, medicine, are often at odds with the bureaucrats who are able to control them via administrative red tape, including licensure requirements. The physicians who staff medical schools like WSU’s generally spend time both in clinic and with students as part of their jobs, giving them the sort of perspective that licensing bureaucrats sitting in office jobs necessarily lack. 

The former might have seen the medical harms of gender medicine firsthand, or noticed how the ideological poison in medical schools affects their students, leading them to consider alternative perspectives like SEGM’s. The latter, on the other hand, are removed from this direct experience, and are far more likely to have the luxury to stew in ideology without understanding what it leads to, and are far more likely to spend their time in the company of activists whose interests are actively detrimental to medicine, education, and American society at large.

But because of the way the medical licensure system is set up, do-nothing cartels control the do-something physicians who have to confront the day-to-day realities of patient care and medical education. 

While this case is specific to medicine, the broader problem of licensure requirements being subject to the whims of progressive activists affects nearly every aspect of American education, from preschool through PhD programs: ideologically motivated cartels control teacher licensure as well as university accreditation, entrenching today’s ideological problems into the very fabric of our institutions.

If higher education is truly to have a renaissance, one in which teaching and research take precedence over ideology, we won’t just need to confront the professors and administrators, who, for all their flaws, do real work and are often more amenable to change than they seem to be due to self-censorship. Indeed, we will need to confront all the licensing bureaucracies that get in the way of education, by disempowering the current licensing regime, by limiting licensure requirements as much as possible, and by creating genuinely independent accreditors for cases in which licensure is truly necessary.