At UT-Austin, teaching white 4-year-olds that they’re racist is funded by taxpayer dollars

Here, with GoKar, the university actively chose to provide $100,000 of state money to engage in political persuasion aimed at 4- and 5-year-olds based on the claim that it would be too late to wait until they are adults, or even slightly more mature children, to get them to come around to the political views of the researchers.

GoKar is just one, though a particularly egregious, case of UT-Austin diverting money intended for the support of teaching and research to political activism.

The provost’s DEI grants provide a laundry list of such diversions, with many not even having the pretense of research projects. I assure you there is no equivalent list of provost grants to promote alternative perspectives on any of these DEI issues.

The diversion of state resources to political advocacy through bureaucratic means, with extreme resistance to outside monitoring or oversight by the democratically elected branches of government, is not an exercise in academic freedom but instead a grave threat to the free exchange of ideas.

If certain ideas are so advantaged through government support, as they are at universities, both through state appropriations being diverted and through direct federal programs, then we do not have a true marketplace of ideas.