ASU student asks for help

how to become "white"

What They’re Really Teaching at ASU
Students are catching on—and asking the right questions.

I’m regularly sent class materials by students at Arizona State University who know I’m one of the very few conservative professors hired by a university that claims to want to represent its community. These students reach out with versions of the same question:

“Why is social justice theory being taught as if it’s true?”

In other words, they’re not being taught one theory among many. They’re being handed a worldview—packaged, unchallenged, and presented as unquestionable fact.

Here’s a recent example. A student in a justice course was assigned readings that assume—without qualification—that Marxist social justice is the correct definition of justice. No debate, no alternatives, no inquiry. Just dogma.

Then came the required reading: James Baldwin. According to Baldwin, a man becomes “white” by slaughtering cattle, poisoning wells, torching homes, massacring Native Americans, and raping Black women. That’s his claim—that’s how whiteness is defined in America. Whiteness, in this view, is about power, and immigrants to America “become white” to gain it, by adopting this legacy of violence.

How do we make sense of such a view? George Orwell said, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

This is what happens when critical race theory takes over: it flattens reality into a single, shallow narrative—economic and power conflict. Why is there suffering? Economics. What causes injustice? Power imbalances. What solves it? Redistribute goods equally, no matter the cost.

It doesn’t matter how many times this model has been tried and failed. The script doesn’t change. All of human reality (their wants, striving, searching for meaning, producing art, building civilizations) is reduced to this power conflict theory.

[Professors decide Dr. Zhivago must be relocated so that his home can be made into apartments for the cause of the workers]

Back to the student—she was perplexed. Her professor, ironically, teaches about implicit bias. But this professor couldn’t see the glaring bias in her own teaching.

This is what I’ve found again and again in the leftist academy: the very people who claim to fight bias are often the most biased. They speak in black-and-white terms: either you accept their ideology, or you’re wrong. They cannot even see that their own worldview is a lens—one of many. They've never been taught alternative views and, frankly, most of them have never shown the curiosity to learn them.

So what can be done?

Make class content public.
Let’s treat university lectures like we treat food labels. If universities want to treat students like consumers, let’s make sure those students can see exactly what they’re buying. Imagine if course descriptions came with honest disclosures:

“This class teaches that whiteness is achieved by committing historical atrocities.”

That would have saved this student time—and tuition. She could have said, “No thanks, I think I’ll pass.”

My class content is fully public. That’s why students come to me. They know what they’re getting: we will explore the philosophical questions that all humans have asked as we search for meaning. We will pursue wisdom together and learn to be virtuous.

Let’s stop pretending that these professors are neutral. They aren’t. And students are beginning to notice. Parents, before you sign your child up for classes, look for the “intellectual nutrition” label.