It is no secret that higher education is under attack in this country. It should not come as a surprise, then, that these attacks are leading to a brain drain, particularly in traditionally red states, such as in the South. Perhaps more surprising to the Fairfield University community is that it could happen here, and it very well may.
On Sept. 19, retired U.S. Air Force General and now former President of Texas A&M, Mark A. Welsh III, stepped down in the wake of a gender identity controversy in a classroom at that school, as reported by AP News and CBS, among other sources. The controversy related to the filming of an interaction between an unnamed student and her professor, Dr. Melissa McCoul, in which the student protested discussing gender identity, claiming it was in opposition to President Trump’s executive orders pertaining to gender identity and higher education.
Dr. McCoul has since lost her position at Texas A&M, along with many of her superiors.
In California, UC Berkeley, long heralded as the center of the free speech movement in the United States, and as a bastion of protest movements in general, capitulated to President Trump’s administration by providing them with the names of 160 students and faculty suspected of alleged antisemitism, in the context of protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, as per Politico.
More recently, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released a study showing a distinctly chilled atmosphere among university faculty in the South, an area of traditionally red states.
In the AAUP study, widely disseminated by The Guardian but publicly available, which included responses from nearly 4,000 professors in the American South, faculty described a “widespread climate of fear and anxiety and by effect, an ongoing desire by some faculty to apply for jobs outside their current state, exacerbating ‘brain drain’ across the region.”
These separate incidents are not unrelated.
The AAUP study revealed that those professors seeking new employment opportunities, who accounted for 25 percent of respondents, listed blue states and swing states among those in which they applied for new positions. None of the top seven states listed were solidly red states, and only one, North Carolina, was in the South.
It is clear, then, that skilled educators no longer want to work in schools where policies approved by President Trump’s administration are the rule of the day. Some are being forced out by the efforts of students involved in conservative activism, while others are being investigated for their political leanings. This trend, the study suggests, is likely to continue and worsen.
That brings us back to Fairfield University.
While Fairfield University exists within the cultural regions of New York City and New England, which are far from conservative places, it exists as something of an island. According to The Princeton Review, which updates its lists on a yearly basis, most recently in August, Fairfield University is the 13th least friendly school for LGBTQ students in the United States. In such an environment, it would not be unimaginable for something like what happened at Texas A&M to happen here. With the recent addition of a Turning Point USA (TPUSA) chapter here at Fairfield, it may very well be the future in store for us.
TPUSA, co-founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012, launched their so-called Professor Watchlist in 2016, which lists academic staff the organization believes hold anti-American and leftist views. Currently, no professors at Fairfield University are on the list, though four remain from Texas A&M and 15 at UC Berkeley.
While TPUSA at Fairfield University has a constitution that states they are opposed to any sort of discrimination, the organization at large was built upon discrimination against those who hold left-leaning views. Beyond the rhetoric of promoting American ideals and the benefits of limited government, discrimination is practically its mission. While this may not be true of the local chapter, it is broadly true of the larger organization.
The TPUSA chapter at Fairfield University did not respond to a request for comment.
The potential for disaster is hard to ignore. If enough students at Fairfield University became convinced it was their duty to enforce President Trump’s ideas about higher education and gender identity, the school’s administration very well could be forced to capitulate. If it can happen at schools like Texas A&M, it can certainly happen here. The presence of a club whose very goal is conservative activism will no doubt make the problem that much worse.
There is hope, though. Students need to stand with their professors and defend their ability to educate as they should. Students owe Fairfield University’s educators and themselves a good, non-partisan education, free from the harmful effects of the policies of President Trump’s administration. Even better, the administration of Fairfield University owes its students and professors a strong stand against any harmful outside influence. Otherwise, we could end up like those students at Texas A&M and UC Berkeley, who were abandoned by their universities when they needed them most.
