Georgia sends chilling message that college professors can’t be trusted
The Board of Regents has decided that by the fall of 2026, professors teaching in Georgia’s university system will have to make their syllabuses publicly available online.
Transparency is the purported rationale for this policy directive. The public, according to University System of Georgia Chancellor Sonny Perdue, needs to know what professors are teaching their students.
After giving this new USG directive some thought, I can’t help thinking that transparency is not what this is about; that, in fact, what’s driving this is the suspicion that professors can’t be trusted.
In just about any online discussion of higher education, the word indoctrination always seems to rear its ugly head. Professors are often said to have harmful political agendas they wish to foist on their unsuspecting students in an effort to brainwash them.
If you think the terms I’ve used are extreme, think again. Social media has proved to be a magnet for views that accept no bounds and take no prisoners.
Subjects like science and humanities are in the crosshairs
What will this mean in the fall of 2026 when the syllabuses of approximately 160,000 classes appear online?
I can imagine that professors teaching engineering, technology and mathematics courses will suffer very little, if any, fallout. These disciplines concern themselves with concepts and theories that rarely, if ever, divide people along ideological lines.
But when it comes to science and the humanities, I see a potential minefield.
Despite the fact that something like 97% of the scientific community accepts evolution as a mechanism for explaining the diversity of life on this planet, some people are downright hostile to that idea.
The Scopes Trial may date all the way back to 1925, but that doesn’t mean it has been forgotten. As for the humanities — particularly history, political science, sociology, even English — the minefield I envision is almost limitless in extent.
USG could be violating its values if it goes too far
So, here’s what I think is going to happen. When creating a syllabus for online public consumption, professors will avoid including any terms that might spark controversy.
In other words, they will self-censor and, in effect, provide students, parents and anyone else who might be interested with even less information than they might have done before this directive took effect.
If that happens, then what?
Perhaps the Board of Regents will decide to hand down yet another directive, one mandating that all lectures be recorded and made available online. We, then, might see professors removed from the teaching ranks for employing terms and teaching concepts in their classes that some segment of the population finds offensive for some reason.
Those could very well be the foreseeable next steps.
But for that to happen the Board of Regents would have to rethink, or eliminate altogether, two of its eight System Values: “We protect freedom of inquiry and expression” and “We value diversity of intellectual thought and expression for all.”
Let us hope it never comes to that.
Rick Diguette taught English in the University System of Georgia for many years before retiring in 2017. He resides in Tucker.
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