OSU requires all undergraduate students who enrolled after the summer of 2025 to complete two “Difference, Power & Oppression” (DPO) courses as part of its Core Education curriculum, including “Difference, Power & Oppression Foundations” and “Difference, Power & Oppression Advanced.”
This is all part of what OSU calls a “core curriculum” that teaches students to be “adaptive, proactive members” of society to “build a better world.”
The University of Chicago (my alma mater) developed a very different “core curriculum” that required students to take classes across different disciplines to gain proficiency in subjects from science to math to philosophy.
Schools like OSU have converted the mission into instilling a core ideological agenda, a mandatory agenda for shaping anti-racist social warriors.
The university explains that all students must take these courses to learn how to “disrupt” oppressive systems in the United States and around the world: “The inequitable distribution of social, economic, and political power in the United States and globally is sustained through systems of oppression, which represent a variety of discriminatory institutional beliefs and practices.”
Students are to be trained on how “beliefs and practices obscure the origins and operations of systemic oppression in daily life, such that this inequitable power distribution is assumed to be the natural order.”
The purpose is clearly to train activists to fight against the oppressive institutions and traditions in this country and abroad: “Such examinations will enhance and promote responsible, ethical, and anti-racist engagement by preparing students to understand and disrupt these systems as they manifest in their field.”
It is telling that the faculty and administration are not willing to let students choose whether to take such courses. It is not uncommon for such courses to be offered as electives, but OSU is requiring any graduate to sit through this indoctrination as a requirement for graduation. As Campus Reform noted, DPO courses have appeared at the Yale University School of Drama, the University of Virginia, and Northern Arizona University.
The school is using a public university to instill ideological values in students as a condition of their getting a degree. They are expected to “demonstrate, by using social justice theories, how historic constructions of racism and other forms of systemic oppression result in intersecting inequities – crossroads of oppression – experienced in current times (last 10 years).”
For many students, a college degree is an opportunity to demonstrate academic competence and pursue their own careers and values in society. State schools are critical in realizing a dream of a better life for many of these students.
State tuition of $38,568 a year remains the only accessible path to higher education (nonresidents are charged $65,013). However, faculty are using these students as a captive audience to their own ideological agenda.
The ultimate responsibility for this mandatory curriculum falls on President Jayathi Y. Murthy and her administration.
This controversy is also notable at a time when many faculty are objecting to state legislators seeking to limit funding or regulate the curriculum of their state schools. Faculty maintain that they should have full funding and full control over their institutions even as they create ideological echo chambers that exclude or marginalize a large percentage of students. Many citizens do not understand why they are compelled to fund universities that use these institutions for ideological indoctrination.
Oregon is obviously a heavily Democratic and liberal state. Other schools such as the University of Oregon have shown the same bias, including giving an award to an academic who criminally attacked pro-life advocates on campus. Likewise, states such as California are unlikely to push back on far-left agendas at universities. UCLA even has “activists-in-residence” to shape the political views of students.
However, many states still view public higher education as an opportunity to learn in an ideologically neutral and tolerant environment. Yet they face institutions that are openly hostile to the views of a majority of residents or create hostile environments for students who need to take advantage of the state education system.
Just as donors should decline to support private institutions without real reform and strong intellectual diversity, state legislators should use state funding to combat that ideological agenda of faculty.
If President Murthy and the OSU faculty want to use their institution to instill ideological values and disrupt the oppressive institutions of this country, they can clearly do so. However, they do not have to do it with state money. They can seek to support their institutions with private funds from liberal donors and allow the state to spend money on institutions with greater neutrality and balance.
As shown at OSU, the faculty are unlikely to change this environment. Conservatives and libertarians have been largely purged from departments. Many do not have a single such faculty member, according to surveys. At the same time, many, including the head of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), oppose institutional neutrality.
There must be a point where the most fervent liberals in states such as Oregon will recognize the harm that is being done to higher education by yielding to such ideological impulses. It is often hard to speak up for those with opposing values, but that is the test of principle.
What is most telling is the lack of self-awareness by these academics in their creating their own oppressive environment. In higher education, their mandatory courses are the very evidence of “systemic inequities” and “inequitable power distribution” that is “assumed to be the natural order.” It is a lesson that will not be lost on many students who find themselves isolated and marginalized in their own state school systems.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”