Texas Tech University’s Chancellor has published a decision tree/flow chart regarding the inclusion or exclusion of advocacy/promotion of race or sex-based prejudice in the courses the university teaches, and the ideologs in the professorial population are in an uproar. The decision tree (see the link) clearly reins in the heretofore unfettered professors’ ability to “teach” whatever ideology they felt like and requires them, instead, to show the relevance of their material, first to the course and second to the purpose of the course.

The reaction of the ideologs in that population is hysterical. Andrew Martin, Texas Tech Professor of Drawing and Painting, for instance (although, to be sure, at least he has the integrity to go on the record with his concerns):

This is disastrous. History is full of examples of what happens when authoritarian governments gain control of the educational institutions of a country or a society. That is the death of freedom.

No, today’s examples, rather, center on the results of one-sided, extremist control of education. The Chancellor’s move is a restoration of balance and of a focus on actual education.

Martin’s hysteria continued with this bit:

[I]f I welcome a student, whose identity is controversial, to my classroom, and they make work about that identity, is that advocacy? Does that mean I’m subject to disciplinary action?

The decision tree plainly deals only with what the professor professes; there is no mention of what the students do in his classroom. In Martin’s own example, his concern should be with technique and symbolism in the student’s art effort, not with the professor’s approval or disapproval of the art’s content. That’s clear to anyone not overcome with hysteria over being reined in and returned to a focus on the material he’s hired to teach.