Arizona’s Public Universities Require Honors Students To Study Far-Left Material, Including the ‘Relationship Between the White Female Gaze and the Eroticized Black Male Body’
The honors colleges at Arizona’s largest public universities have been "hijacked by activist faculty and turned into taxpayer-funded vehicles for leftwing groupthink," according to an Arizona think tank report shared exclusively with the Washington Free Beacon, which found that over 70 percent of mandatory first-year seminars for Arizona State University honors students are loaded with racially divisive, anti-capitalist, and anti-Israel reading material.
ASU’s Barrett Honors College requires that new students take a course called "The Human Event," described on the university’s website as a "year-long, small, intensive, interdisciplinary, discussion-based seminar" that "forms the foundation of the first-year honors experience." That website shows a "sample" reading list for the course composed entirely of classic works including those by Plato, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare. The Goldwater Institute, though, obtained the actual syllabus for "The Human Event" through a public records request. The list, which is not published online, includes books that claim the "patriarchy" controls society and that Israel enforces "militantly oppressive discriminations between Jews and non-Jews," among other concepts.
One seminar session is almost entirely composed of left-wing ideological readings, including Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon, a 1960s philosopher who advocated for violence in the name of "decolonization"; Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, which argues that society is controlled by the "patriarchy"; and an interview with Angela Davis, a militant black power activist and former Communist Party USA member.
In a lesson on Israel, both required readings—one by a Palestinian writer and one by an Israeli journalist—depicted Zionism as a "violent" movement that victimizes Palestinians. The course requires students to read Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims by Edward W. Said, who argued that Zionism entails "militantly oppressive discriminations between Jews and non-Jews." The other required reading, Israeli journalist Ari Shavit’s Lydda, 1948, also framed Zionism as inherently violent, claiming "Zionism had carried out a massacre in the city of Lydda" because "Zionism could not bear the Arab city of Lydda."
Another seminar session involved discussions of "violence and and capitalism, power and powerlessness, Europeanness and Africanness ... political power and violence, physical violence and environmental violence," according to documents obtained by the Goldwater Institute. Instructors asked students to "formulate questions" like, "What is the relationship between the white female gaze and the eroticized Black male body in the text?"
Other reading materials for the course included Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which applies a Marxist lens to the education system; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Decolonising the Mind, which argues that the English language is a tool of oppression; and skits about immigration by left-wing activist and former Daily Show host Trevor Noah. Other readings, the Goldwater Institute found, "promote identity politics and narratives of systemic oppression, including essays on ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience’ and ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.’"
The University of Arizona’s Franke Honors College also requires students to participate in left-wing classes. One course, "Eating the Globe: The Diverse, Weird, and Queer Food Politics," focuses on whether food can be "colonized and decolonized." Another, "#Black Lives Matter Across the Americas," examines "racial violence as in the case of police brutality (as targeted by Black Lives Matter activists in the U.S.)"
Neither the University of Arizona nor Arizona State University responded to requests for comment.
The Goldwater Institute report further demonstrates that public universities outside the Northeast are not immune from left-wing indoctrination. Earlier this month, the University of Florida removed a syllabus for a graphic design course that offered potential accommodations to "queer and trans students, BIPOC students, first-gen students, and students navigating complex lives," the Free Beacon reported. That language, which appeared on a spring 2026 syllabus, violated a regulation the Florida Board of Governors passed in November 2023. While Arizona does not have laws on the books that specifically relate to the curricula, Timothy Minella, director of higher education at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy, emphasized the fact that both universities are public and funded by the taxpayer.
"Rather than provide rigorous academic experience for the state’s best and brightest students, the honors colleges at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona have been hijacked by activist faculty and turned into taxpayer-funded vehicles for leftwing groupthink and unserious and ideological pet projects," he wrote, urging Arizona lawmakers to step in and "stop subsidizing activist research that fails to advance human knowledge."
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