In the summer of 2022, Dr. Earl Tilford taught an eight-part course on the history of American Higher Education since 1960. After a lecture on higher education in America from the 17th century to 1960, the second lecture focused on the June 1962 meeting of University of Michigan students in their Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) club led by graduate student Tom Hayden at Port Huron, Michigan. The “Port Huron Statement,” a compendium of essays resulted basically outlining how SDS would first take over higher education beginning with capturing faculty and then the administration. From there, it would spread a radically progressive culture into K-12 education, local, state and federal bureaucracies and into the echelons of business and commerce. Sixty years later, empowered by Critical Race Theory (CRT)which originated at the same time the Port Huron Statement was written, the tenets of radical progressivism hold say throughout American and Western European culture. The result of this will be cultural transformation.

Then the course examined CRT’s origins in legal theory which holds that laws are malleable and can be as easily melted as ice cream and rewritten to achieve goals based on race, gender, and various forms of victimhood. A criticism of CRT followed. The fifth lecture addressed the New York Times 1619 Project, compiled by journalist Nichole Hannah-Jones, a handful of mostly journalists and a handful of scholars the most noteworthy of whom is African American historian Ibrahim X. Kendi. Lecture six was a critique of the 1619 Project based as it is on the controversial notion that the introduction of a handful of slaves taken by Dutch privateers off a Portuguese slave ship headed to Brazil and then delivered to Virginia for sale marked the “real” birth of the American experience resulting in the United States of America. This was not a new discovery, that concept has been out there since the twentieth century and largely given the little attention it deserves. Hannah-Jones then went on to contend the American Revolution was driven by fear the British Empire was about to end slavery, a historical inaccuracy that is simply untrue. She then mischaracterized plantations owned by founders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as “slave labor camps” in an effort to align them with Nazi concentration camps. On the positive side, that lecture delivered under the auspices of the University of Alabama College of Continuing Education resulted in the removal of the 1619 Project from the university library’s history section to journalism where it belongs.

The concluding lecture examined “Capstone Gone Woke” which examined how through the auspices of the Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the University of Alabama has totally embraced a cultural paradigm focused on instilling “diversity, equity and inclusion” throughout the faculty, administration, student body and curriculum. This process, beginning around 2015, involves five goals and 76 strategies which, when completed in the next two years, will dominate the academic culture. It proceeds with 31 to 34 dedicated DEI personnel instilling programs governing student and faculty recruitment, administrative hiring, promotion and tenure requirements and requiring all student organizations to be “DEI certified.” By comparison in personnel numbers alone, the University of Alabama history department has 27 tenured and tenure track professors.

The purpose of Alabamians for Academic Excellence and Integrity (AAEI) is to bring these kinds of efforts to the attention of alumni and parents of individuals who are considering higher education for their college age students. Efforts are also being made to inform the state legislature as to the detrimental impact CRT and DEI are having on public higher education in Alabama.

Photo: Students for a Democratic Society, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons