How MSU’s mandated DEI course trains future teachers in conformity: ANALYSIS
The required textbook for the course says to 'save education' is to find 'new ways to resist, new ways to agitate, new ways to maintain order and safety that abolishes prisons, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.'
'Three fourths of Michigan kids can’t read at grade level,' Michigan State Senator Aric Nesbitt told Campus Reform. 'The next generation of teachers need to be focused on teaching the ABC's, not DEI.'
Michigan State University (MSU) is training future teachers to see classroom inequity primarily through the lens of race—ignoring the deeper forces that most shape student success: class, family stability, and quality of early education.
In the school’s elementary and secondary education programs, every student must take “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education.” Young America’s Foundation (YAF) obtained the syllabus for this required course. It is built entirely around one textbook.
At the top of this syllabus, in large bold print, is the word “REQUIRED.” What follows is a declaration: “There is one required book for this class. It is We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina Love.”
Why do teachers need to approach diverse students differently than white students? Why does the course assign only one textbook—without exposing students to competing perspectives?
Take a look at what’s inside this textbook:
It instructs students that the way to “save education” is through “abolitionist teaching,” the goal of which is to find “new ways to discuss inequality and distribute wealth and resources, new ways to resist, new ways to agitate, new ways to maintain order and safety that abolishes prisons, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
How should students go about engaging in so-called “abolitionist teaching”? Well, it “starts with freedom dreaming, dreams grounded in a critique of injustice. These dreams are not whimsical, unattainable daydreams, they are critical and imaginative dreams of collective resistance.”
Michigan’s future PK-3 teachers are being taught the way to teach students is to dream. The “elementary education” program, for example, targets students pursuing a Michigan elementary teaching certificate for either grades PK–3 or grades 3–6.
Future educators are also being taught not to hold students accountable to academic metrics. Love’s teaching manifesto declares that “accountability is a word used in the field of education to scare educators into spirit-murdering dark children.”
Michigan state senator Aric Nesbitt (R–20th Dist.) spoke with Campus Reform about the importance of ensuring that Michigan universities comply with DEI regulations.
“Universities and educators that choose to ignore the law and force their political opinions on students should lose their licenses and funding,” Nesbitt said. “It’s time to root this nonsense out of our education system and get back to educating instead of indoctrinating.”
Nesbitt nodded to Charlie Kirk, noting Kirk’s insight that the contemporary American higher education system wants “everyone to look different but think the same.”
While educators pat themselves on the back for promulgating this skin-deep diversity, they overlook what the data show matters most—whether children come from stable families, attend rigorous schools, and receive consistent instruction in reading and math.
According to the Institute for Family Studies, young men from non-intact families (single-mother, step-family, adoptive) are more likely to go to prison or jail than to graduate college.
Class effects remain large even after controlling for race: within every racial group, higher-income students are significantly more likely to attend and finish college.
A Brookings Institution analysis of national education data found that students from the highest income quintile enroll in college at rates nearly forty percentage points higher than those from the lowest.
Even when students have identical academic preparation, those from wealthier families remain about eleven points more likely to attend college. Once academic background is equalized, racial enrollment gaps almost vanish.
Wealth and parental education shape opportunity far more powerfully than skin color, yet universities like MSU fixate on racial representation—the most visible metric—while ignoring the deeper class divides that actually determine who makes it to and through college.
Nesbitt also spoke with Campus Reform about how efforts to focus on equity distract from this problem of academic preparation at the K-12 level.
“Three fourths of Michigan kids can’t read at grade level,” Nesbitt said. “The next generation of teachers need to be focused on teaching the ABC’s, not DEI.”
But many of the course offerings presented to elementary education majors at MSU are DEI based.
DEI-based courses include Teaching of Science to Diverse Learners, Teaching of Social Studies to Diverse Learners, Teaching Literacy to Diverse Learners I and II, and Teaching Mathematics to Diverse Learners I and II, as well as Internship in Teaching Diverse Learners in Additional Endorsement Areas and Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education.
The program embeds in future educators the idea that teaching to diverse students is somehow different from teaching white students.
Campus Reform has previously profiled Bettina Love, the author of this required textbook, as a proponent of critical race theory in children’s education.
We’ve reported how the administration of former President Joe Biden endorsed Love by adding a link to a booklet she helped author into their handbook offering guidance to schools reopening after COVID-19. This booklet is titled “Guide For Racial Justice & Abolitionist Social and Emotional Learning” which “demands” that administrators provide “Free, radical self/collective care and therapy for Educators and Support Staff of Color.”
“The Department does not endorse the recommendations of this group, nor do they reflect our policy positions. It was an error in a lengthy document to include this citation,” a department spokesperson told Fox News after they published an article on the issue.
As a recent analysis of millions of college syllabi observed, across divisive issues such as race and criminal justice, “the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.”
Reviewing their research in The Free Press, Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik explain why these one-sided syllabi are so troubling: “Scholars don’t hold a monopoly on truth, especially when their own fields contain live debates. The role of professors should be to expose students to those competing interpretations rather than enforcing one view.”
MSU’s course fits that pattern precisely: by assigning only Love’s text and labeling it “REQUIRED,” the program elevates one activist framework as orthodoxy rather than inviting genuine engagement with competing ideas about justice, education, and inequality.
And yet, we see defenses of this one-sided ideological crusade are normalized and advertised by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), who’ve published a defense of academic monoculture. In her “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity,” Lisa Siraganian claims that “Viewpoint diversity functions in direct opposition to the pursuit of truth.”
In this article, Siraganian essentially argues that exposing students to a broader range of perspectives is either irrelevant or counterproductive because once “truth” is determined the value of competing viewpoints disappears.
When a taxpayer funded public university like MSU requires future teachers to study only one ideological text and calls it “justice,” it confirms how far higher education has drifted from its public mission.
At MSU, only 13% of students identify as conservative, as compared with the 43% that identify as liberal. Despite this, 41% of students actually think the political beliefs at MSU as a whole are politically balanced.
As the country debates President Trump’s Compact for Higher Education and Title VI claims against universities, universities like MSU have lost the ability to reform themselves. They cannot understand why the average American no longer trusts them because they’ve built an education system that eliminates internal dissent.
Universities like MSU are not preparing citizens for a free society—they are training activists to reproduce the same narrowing of thought in America’s classrooms.
Campus Reform contacted Michigan State University for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
