How Racial And Sexual Ideology Rapidly Infiltrated Southern Methodist University

[Kamaji]

How Racial And Sexual Ideology Rapidly Infiltrated Southern Methodist University

When SMU embraced leftists’ demands in the violent summer of 2020, it opened the door to critical theory in the forms of race and sexuality.

BY: LOGAN WASHBURN
AUGUST 22, 2023

Southern Methodist University seems like a rarity in higher education.

Students consider SMU to be politically balanced or more conservative, according to Niche, and the school has an “average” free speech climate, according to a survey from College Pulse and FIRE. The school attracts conservative donors like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his wife Suzanne Youngkin, an alumna. The Dallas school’s motto is “Veritas Liberabit Vos,” or “The Truth Will Make You Free.”

It also has an ostensibly religious nature and is well-known in Christian theological circles. It displayed the world’s earliest, most complete 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible in April. It has also produced several Republican political figures including former First Lady Laura Bush, Sen. Rick Scott, and the late Sen. John Tower, and it is home to the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

But when SMU embraced left-wing demands in the turbulent summer of 2020, it opened the door to critical theory in the forms of race and sexuality. The school has since allowed this unorthodox ideology to begin creating an internal structure of enforcement.

“SMU’s fight against racism and discrimination must be enacted as a university-wide effort, not a mere student concern,” reads a letter of demands from the school’s Black Unity Forum, sent in late summer of 2020.

SMU’s Board of Trustees responded with a Sept. 18, 2020 letter encouraging university President Gerald Turner and the administration to make progress on meeting many of the group’s demands.

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But ideology at SMU goes back even further than today’s cultural and political clashes. The Perkins School of Theology hosted a class in 2016 and 2019 called “Queer Bible Hermeneutics,” as reported by The College Fix. The class posted blogs including “Queering King David,” “The Path of Queer Virtue: Identity,” and “On the Intersection of Womanist Queer Theory and the Imago Dei and Kendrick Lamar.”

“One of the goals of queer theologies is deconstruction of the biblical text,” reads a blog post. “Deconstruction can help us understand that there is no clear meaning to the text that we can discern with our own biases.”

Race and gender ideology ultimately aim to “deconstruct” life in their respective areas. Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist and critical theory figurehead, argued in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that education cannot be neutral. Rather, he said, it should aim for transformation, and ultimately “critical consciousness” for liberation.

Critical theory, which weaponizes race and sexuality, had been waiting at the school doors. It just needed someone to let it in.

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Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/22/how-racial-and-sexual-ideology-rapidly-infiltrated-southern-methodist-university/