Prospective teachers should spend their college years learning how to manage a classroom and teach kids to read and write. But future educators at Michigan State University are forced to learn something else entirely—that “whiteness” is destructive and contrary to equality.
One of the nation’s leading teaching schools, Michigan State is now facing renewed scrutiny after reports that a core teacher-training course pushes first-year education majors into a rigid leftwing, race-obsessed framework, according to reporting by Young America’s Foundation.
The revelation underscores why the Goldwater Institute developed the Freedom From Indoctrination Act, which aims to restore neutrality, protect academic freedom, and ensure universities serve the public rather than a political ideology.
Michigan State graduates roughly 300 new teachers every year. All of them must take TE 101: Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education, which depicts “whiteness” not as a cultural or historical concept, but as a moral corruption to be unlearned. The three-credit course is a required component of the university’s “Early Success Scholars” program that is “tailored to 1st year incoming College of Education students.”
Using frameworks drawn from the Black Lives Matter Movement, Learning for Justice, and the Abolitionist Teaching Network, the course begins with a land acknowledgment asserting that MSU occupies “ancestral Anishinaabeg territory,” then moves swiftly into lessons on “systemic oppression” and “racial privilege.”
Students are not invited to question these ideas. They are expected to affirm them.
Such absolutism leaves no room for intellectual exchange, and the message of the class is clear: Michigan State doesn’t want future teachers to think critically—it wants them to confess.
Central to the syllabus is Bettina L. Love’s We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, a text that defines “whiteness” as something inherently destructive. “Whiteness cannot enter spaces focused on abolitionist teaching,” Love writes, according to Young America’s Foundation. “Whiteness is addicted to centering itself, addicted to attention, and making everyone feel guilty for working toward its elimination. Whiteness will never allow true solidarity to take place. Those who cling to their Whiteness cannot participate in abolitionist teaching because they are a distraction, are unproductive, and will undermine freedom at every step, sometimes in the name of social justice.”
To restore integrity and balance, Michigan State’s Board of Trustees should implement reforms modeled on the Goldwater Institute’s Freedom From Indoctrination Act, ensuring that academic freedom protects every student and professor, not just those who echo prevailing orthodoxy.
Under such a framework, colleges would be barred from requiring any course rooted in diversity, equity, inclusion, or critical race theory as a condition of earning a degree, unless the program itself is expressly devoted to those subjects. Faculty would likewise be shielded from requirements to embed political or ideological content in their syllabi or evaluations. To reinforce clarity, Michigan State could adopt a definition of “DEI-CRT content” and set clear limits around it, protecting genuine scholarship while removing the coercion of belief.
Beyond prohibitions, the university should rebuild its curriculum on the foundation of civic understanding. General education courses should invite students to engage with the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the principles that have shaped democratic self-government. Orientation programs, too, should revive classical liberal values by teaching free speech, intellectual humility, and the art of civil disagreement—ensuring that every student, regardless of background, learns to think rather than to recite.
Taken together, these reforms would reaffirm Michigan State’s historic role as a public trust, not a political laboratory or a program aiming to put leftwing activists into classrooms across the Great Lakes State. By embracing institutional neutrality and foregoing ideological mandates, the university would cultivate true diversity of thought and produce future educators ready to teach every child to think critically rather than indoctrinating them to fight for “social justice.”
