Most media attention about Make America Great Again (MAGA) focuses on Washington, but the real struggles are happening in state capitols. And within state capitols, the struggle over MAGA centers on higher education. Let’s switch from the top-ranked football teams to the top-ranked MAGA stars among the states.
Louisiana. Louisiana State University (LSU) fired football coach Brian Kelly during a disappointing season, after the team got crushed by Texas A&M 49-25. That’s where politics comes in. Gov. Jeff Landry said he wouldn’t allow the school’s athletic director, Scott Woodward, to pick the next coach. He said, “Hell, I’ll let Donald Trump select it before I let him do it.”
That alone would be enough to rocket Louisiana to the top of the rankings, even though there’s no sign that President Trump picked LSU’s new coach, Lane Kiffin. However, Kiffin posted a message saying that his move from Ole Miss to LSU was “#God’sPlan,” in an echo of MAGA’s approach to politics. But there’s more. Woodward is a former lobbyist who had previously battled with Landry. Departing the university, all because of political pressure on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) issues, have been its president, William Tate; its provost, Roy Haggerty; the chancellor of the university’s Shreveport health center, David Guzick; general counsel Winston DeCuir; chief administrative officer Kimberly Lewis; and several deans. All this clinches the top spot for Louisiana.
Texas. At Texas A&M, a student secretly recorded a video during a class, “Literature for Children,” in which an instructor said there were more than two genders. The student challenged the instructor, Melissa McCoul, for teaching ideas that conflicted with President Trump’s executive order and that, in the student’s opinion, were illegal. Republican state lawmakers got access to the video and pressured then-university President Mark A. Welsh III, a four-star general who served as Air Force chief of staff, to fire the instructor. Welsh complied and also removed the department chair and the chair’s boss, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. State Rep. Brian Harrison insisted that Welsh himself be fired for allowing DEI to be taught. Welsh resigned before that could happen.
The university system’s regents followed up with a November resolution stipulating that the university president henceforth had to approve any course that advocated for “race and gender ideology or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Florida. Next is the Sunshine State, where the University of Florida’s Hamilton School has grown into a large back-to-basics (as in Plato and Aristotle) program. It was an effort, the school’s former head, William Inboden, said, to solve the “crisis” of “legitimacy and trust” facing higher education. Universities needed to build a new “academic social contract” based on moving past identity politics and uprooting the “academic monoculture.” Instead, Inboden says, universities needed to revive the idea of a “liberal education” based on a rediscovery of the big ideas throughout intellectual history, taught in a way that doesn’t promote a particular partisan point of view.
Florida is backing that up in becoming the first state to adopt the Heritage Foundation’s “Phoenix Declaration,” backed by Project 2025, throughout its educational system. “Too many schools have lost their way,” the declaration says. The answer builds on civic education, truth and goodness, and character formation. This two-tier strategy clearly marks Florida as an up-and-comer, and it could soon boost the state past Texas in the rankings.
North Carolina. In 2023, the board of governors of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill urged the university to create a School of Civic Life and Leadership. Then-board chair David Boliek said Chapel Hill has “no shortage of left-of-center, progressive views on our campus, like many campuses across the nation. But the same really can’t be said about right-of-center views. So this is an effort to try to remedy that.”
The strategy caught fire, with strong political backing and the infusion of outside dollars. Faculty hires and course curricula have sparked ongoing conflict, but the school’s political support has given it staying power — more, probably, than the university’s football coach, Bill Belichick, who holds the record for coaching Super Bowl teams but is struggling through a miserable season.
I have to confess that I’m not an outside observer in this scrum. I was a university faculty member for 45 years and a university administrator for about half that time. I’m a huge fan of civics education, and I’ve taught Plato-to-the present courses. I’m all-in on the approach, along with a commitment to make it safe to discuss issues from a wide array of political beliefs.
However, the emerging programs of civics — at these universities as well as at Arizona State, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Yale, along with 75 more around the country — have become bellwethers of the MAGA movement in the states. At some universities, including the top-ranked ones, conflict has dramatically increased. Faculty members are increasingly fearful that a single PowerPoint slide or an out-of-context surreptitious lecture recording could cost them their jobs. Many faculty members are setting up secret Signal channels to share worries and rumors.
The dominant left inside universities has only itself to blame for the attacks from the right. One of the most important ways of preparing students for a contentious world is making sure they understand the perspectives of others who might not agree with them, and university faculties have not been doing well, both because of the courses they teach and the perspectives they take. When I was dean at Maryland, we surveyed students on the most important diversity issues. The top result: make it safe to be a Republican.
The emerging race for No. 1 in the MAGA rankings, however, is likely to replace one collection of problems with another. Higher ed is certainly at a crossroads.
And, even more fundamentally, the battles are defining the future of MAGA — which states are leading, and which are ignoring it. This is fueling the divide between red and blue states, and that’s certainly not what either Aristotle or Plato had in mind.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
