Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas

Featuring Katherine Stewart: Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy

If you are trying to understand this political moment—not just its surface conflicts, but the deeper architecture of power shaping it—then Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart is essential reading. With careful reporting and years of embedded research, Stewart maps a coordinated movement where concentrated wealth, strategic disinformation, and Christian nationalism converge to reshape American democracy itself. 

Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian proves more detail; however, I urge you to read the book. It's a good audiobook, too. 

What makes this book especially powerful is not only its diagnosis of what she calls “reactionary nihilism,” but its clarity about how such forces organize, message, and endure. This is not simply a warning—it is a call to think more urgently, strategically, historically, and collectively about the defense of democratic life.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Money, Lies, and God exposes a Christian nationalist movement funded by the super-rich seeking to secure their wealth at the expense of othersThere is a “real and very, very present” threat to the US from a shadowy collection of rightwing leaders, a new book on the movement behind Donald Trump warns, with the aim being “an end to pluralistic democracy”.

Katherine Stewart, a journalist who specializes in the religious right, spent years researching the money and influence that has aided and encouraged tens of millions of Americans in their worship at the throne of Trump.

The result is Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, which sees Stewart explore the “antidemocratic movement” – an unholy mix of Christian nationalists, billionaire oligarchs and conservative ideologues who have seized control of the Republican party, and aim to fundamentally change the US.

“Money is a huge part of the story, meaning that huge concentrations of wealth have destabilized the political system. Second, lies, or conscious disinformation, is a huge feature of this movement. And third God, because the most important ideological framework for the largest part of this movement is Christian nationalism,” Stewart said.

In the book, Stewart details how Republicans have been held hostage by the antidemocratic movement, something that “came together long before Donald Trump descended on a golden escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president”.

Stewart – whose previous two books, The Good News Club and The Power Worshippers, focused on the impact of the Christian right and religious nationalism in the US – spent years traveling to an array of rightwing conferences, from Christian nationalist events to ”Make America great again” fests and sober think tank talks, and found many similarities. The eclectic groups may not seem to have much in common, but their aim is the same: bringing an end to democracy in the US as we know it. Their method of achieving that is the same too.

“The overwhelming message, from speaker after speaker, was that ‘Trump needs to be allowed to enact his agenda, and you need to get behind him,’” Stewart said.

Though there is an intriguing collection of individuals and organizations in the movement, Stewart categorizes its members as Christian nationalists – who believe, wrongly, that America was founded as a Christian nation and must be governed as such – and the super-rich, who are seeking to secure their own wealth at the expense of others.

“Much of the energy of the movement, too, comes from below, from the anger and resentment that characterizes life among those who perceive, more or less accurately, that they are falling behind,” Stewart writes.

“The best label I can find for the phenomenon – and I do not pretend it is a fully satisfactory label – is ‘reactionary nihilism’. It is reactionary in the sense that it expresses itself as mortal opposition to a perceived catastrophic change in the political order; it is nihilistic because its deepest premise is that the actual world is devoid of value, impervious to reason, and governable only through brutal acts of will. It stands for a kind of unraveling of the American political mind – a madness that now afflicts one side of nearly every political debate.”

Stewart tells the story of how American Christians rallied in response to a plan by Catholic bishops in 1986 to call on their flock to support “economic justice for all”. The bishops’ sentiment was “a challenge to President Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economic ideology”, Stewart writes – and sent Christian capitalists scrambling.

Over the next few decades, ultra-wealthy Christian donors spent millions promoting a different vision of the gospel, one which Stewart writes “promote[s] the capitalist institutions of property, markets, and free enterprise”.

Among the leaders of that movement were Thomas Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza who in 2002 attempted to build a 250ft-tall crucifix in Michigan, banker Frank Hanna, hedge fund manager Sean Fieler and Timothy Busch, who in donating to the Catholic University of America in 2015 announced that he was “proud to donate to CUA’s vision for an educational program that shows how capitalism and Catholicism can work hand in hand”. Together, they and others have pledged fortunes toward Republican candidates and causes, and established thinktanks and organizations designed to push pro-capitalist, antidemocratic causes – in a way Stewart said Democrats have yet to counter.

“I’m always impressed by how well-organized and strategic this movement is,” Stewart said, noting that it offers “young people and newcomers” a “sustainable career path and incentive to create their futures, secure their futures within the movement”.

Stewart continued, pointing out that “there are pro-democracy thinktanks and institutions and the like, but they tend to center on policy and issues: pro-democracy forces don’t seem to identify and mentor young talent in the same way, they don’t organize and collaborate in the same way.

“They don’t operate with the same coordination of the right, they don’t think strategically about messaging, and about voter engagement and winning over the rank and file.”

Stewart documents some of the troubling ways that organizations, supported by those wealthy backers, have spent their energy – including how they have pushed people to vote. She reports on Chad Connelly, the founder of Faith Wins, an initiative which seeks to turn pastors and churchgoers into political activists.

“The Faith Wins website encourages event attendees to help lead voter registration in their churches with the help of a ‘pastors tool kit’, become poll watchers, and assist ‘with voter integrity efforts’ and other actions,” Stewart writes.

“Pastors are given a QR code, along with an online form, which leads to a suite of tools and messaging materials, including voter guides, voter registration resources, and videos they can use to activate their congregations.”

A central issue for Connelly and Faith Wins is election integrity, which he expounds upon repeatedly in his TV appearances. This is one of the central themes that unites the diverse groups in the antidemocratic movement: Stewart writes that the State Policy Network of libertarian thinktanks and the Virginia Project – a pugnacious get-out-the-vote Republican organization which aims to “eliminate the Democrat party” – may not share the Christian nationalist theology of Faith Wins, but they have the same focus.

“The point, of course, is to convey the frightening but entirely unsubstantiated belief that vast plots are afoot to steal Republican votes,” Stewart writes.

It might seem like a gloomy situation, and a grim future for the US. But Stewart insists the situation is not hopeless.

“We don’t have to crawl into bed and take it. They organized and strategized their way into power, and we need to organize and strategize back,” she said.

Indeed, Stewart ends the book on an optimistic note, listing “six principal findings reported in this book … which should be of interest to a pro-democracy movement”.

“There’s no magic bullet. It’ll take time and effort. But if there is a will for it to be done, I think it can be done,” she said.

“There’s no feature as of yet in the American political system that would ensure that the Maga movement is going to rule indefinitely. And frankly, I take heart from the fact that those of us who believe in democracy and its core principles probably represent a majority and not a minority of the population. I continue to believe more Americans support a democratic political system over some sort of cronyistic, kleptocratic and theocratic system that has authoritarian features.”

Individuated Into Silence: Why the Heterodox Academy Gets Higher Education Wrong

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I saw this video this evening on the Heterodox Academy and decided to write this blog that you can understand best if you view this video on the organization's website.

A growing chorus of voices associated with the Heterodox Academy insists that the central task of higher education is to treat students as individuals—to “individuate” them, to strip away group identities, and to return the university to a supposedly neutral space of ideas. On its surface, this sounds reasonable, even principled. But beneath this framing lies a profound misunderstanding of both education and democracy.

The problem is not individuality. The problem is individualism detached from history, power, and community.

To “individuate” students in the abstract is to ignore the conditions that shape their lives: race, class, language, gender, citizenship status, urbanity, and the institutional arrangements that structure opportunity. It is to pretend that students arrive on campus as free-floating agents rather than as members of communities with histories of exclusion, resilience, and struggle. This is not neutrality. It is erasure.

In fact, the call to individuate often functions as a quiet form of depoliticization. It relocates structural inequality into the realm of personal responsibility and reframes collective concerns as distractions from intellectual life. In doing so, it mirrors what Apple (2018) identified as the ideological work of schooling: to naturalize inequality by presenting it as the outcome of individual differences rather than systemic conditions.

But students—especially in this century—do not need to be stripped of their connections. They need to be anchored in them.

The challenges they face are not individual problems. Climate change, racial injustice, democratic erosion, and economic precarity are collective crises that demand collective capacities. Preparing students to navigate such a world requires more than critical thinking in isolation; it requires relational thinking, coalitional practice, and community accountability (Giroux, 2020).

This is why the most powerful educational spaces today are not those that isolate students into individualized intellectual actors, but those that cultivate shared inquiry and collective agency. Ethnic Studies, community-based learning, and culturally sustaining pedagogies do precisely this. They do not deny individuality; they situate it—within histories, within communities, within movements for justice (Paris & Alim, 2017; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001).

Indeed, as Paulo Freire (1970) reminds us, education is never a solitary act. It is a dialogical process rooted in relationships, in naming the world together, and in transforming it. To educate is not to extract individuals from community, but to deepen their capacity to act within it.

The Heterodox Academy’s framework ultimately rests on a thin vision of democracy—one that imagines a marketplace of ideas populated by disembodied individuals. But democracy is not sustained by isolated thinkers. It is sustained by communities capable of deliberation, solidarity, and action (Dewey, 2004).

If we are serious about preparing students for the world they are inheriting, we must reject the false choice between individuality and community. The task is not to individuate students away from one another, but to cultivate individuals in and through community—capable of thinking critically, acting collectively, and building a more just society.

Anything less leaves them alone in a world that demands we face it together.

References

Apple, M. W. (2018). Ideology and curriculum (4th ed.). Routledge.

Dewey, J. (2004). Democracy and education. Dover. (Original work published 1916)

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

Giroux, H. A. (2020). On critical pedagogy (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury.

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.

Solórzano, D. G., & Delgado Bernal, D. (2001). Examining transformational resistance through a critical race and LatCrit theory framework: Chicana and Chicano students in an urban context. Urban Education, 36(3), 308–342.

Silence Has a Sound: Texas' SB 37, the End of Shared Governance, and the Structured Diminishment of Voice

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Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 23, 2026

What if the 1963 song, “The Sounds of Silence” authored by Paul Simon and that he & Art Garfunkel sang is not only existential loneliness, but the quiet cultural condition that makes authoritarianism possible? Or might it not reflect dystopian futurity under American fascism about which Katharine Stewart writes in her New York Times best-selling book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (2025)?

I encourage you to listen to the song here. 

Listen here.

While Paul Simon did not explicitly write the song as a critique of fascism, critical theorists—from Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt to Herbert Marcuse—have long warned that domination often advances not only through coercion, but through conformity, passivity, and the erosion of meaningful dialogue about which Simon indeed wrote.

In this vein, Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/2002) theorize how mass culture can dull critical consciousness, producing compliance rather than critique. Arendt (1951) reminds us that authoritarianism thrives where public discourse collapses and individuals retreat into isolation. 

Read in this light, the song’s haunting refrain—“people talking without speaking, people hearing without listening”—evokes not just alienation, but a hollowing out of democratic life itself. 

It has a sound. It surfaces in whispers and half-spoken cautions, in the careful recalibration of what can be said and where, in meetings where voices once carried authority but now trail off into procedural quiet. It lingers in the pauses before someone decides whether it is safe to speak, in the substitution of clarity with ambiguity, critique with compliance. It hums beneath the surface of institutional life—not loud enough to name, but present enough to shape behavior.

It's not like scholars and people, in general, have nothing to say. It's that the conditions for saying it have been quietly rearranged. It is the sound of knowledge narrowed, of questions deferred, of dissent rerouted into safer channels. It is not the spectacle of repression that defines it, but its subtlety. 

And once you learn to hear it, it is everywhere.

Contemporary scholars extend this diagnosis into our present moment. Brown (2019) argues that neoliberalism hollows out democratic institutions from within, converting them into instruments of market and political control. Henry Giroux (2022) describes the rise of “authoritarian neoliberalism,” where higher education becomes a key site for disciplining thought and narrowing dissent. He argues for critical analyses of the current, politicized context of education and the need for a collective pedagogy of resistance with social justice, freedom, and democracy as its goals.

Fraser (2019) similarly points to the entanglement of economic, political, and cultural crises that destabilize democratic publics, making them more vulnerable to reactionary capture. Building on Fraser, Stewart, outlines the history and processes of the current moment, naming it "reactionary nihilism." Together, these scholars help us see that silence is not merely absence—it is produced, structured, and weaponized.

In Texas, this “silence” is no longer metaphorical—it is being institutionalized. Under SB 37, faculty senates—the historic vehicles of shared governance—have been stripped of meaningful authority or eliminated altogether, consolidating decision-making power in governing boards and political appointees. This restructuring represents more than administrative change; it marks a profound shift in the governance of knowledge, where faculty expertise is subordinated to political oversight. 

At the same time, the law expands top-down control over curriculum, enabling the rejection, restructuring, or defunding of programs deemed ideologically suspect—developments that dovetail with ongoing efforts to marginalize or eliminate Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and related fields.

As Marcuse (1964) warned in One-Dimensional Man, advanced systems of control do not always silence through overt repression; they produce conditions in which dissent becomes increasingly difficult to articulate, let alone sustain. 

From this vantage point, the “sounds of silence” becomes newly legible as a political condition: not simply the absence of speech, but the structured diminishment of voice. It is the quieting of faculty governance, the narrowing of permissible knowledge, and the normalization of a system in which critique is not dramatically crushed, but procedurally sidelined.

This interpretation may exceed the original intent of the song’s authors. But as with much enduring art, its meaning expands in relation to historical context. In our present moment, the “sounds of silence” is not just something we hear—it is something being built.

We are not without power, however, beginning with the vote. Lest we all get turned into their not-so-grand vision of "one dimensional man"—as Iowa, per yesterday's blog, wants to do—let's run all these power players, these anti-democratic incumbents, out of office. And let's not vote new ones in.

Sí, se puede! Yes, we can!

References

I Was There: New College of Florida, Manufactured Narratives, and the Politics of Decline

I was there last week, meeting with students and faculty who tell a much different story than the one offered by Trustee Lance Karp—a story that Brian Cody now vehemently critiques with data.

What I encountered on the ground was not a campus experiencing renewal or “momentum,” but one grappling with dislocation, loss, and profound uncertainty. Students spoke of instability in housing, disrupted academic pathways, and a palpable sense that the institution they chose—or once knew—was slipping away. Faculty described conditions of constraint, attrition, and a steady erosion of shared governance. These are not abstract concerns. They are lived realities.

Against this backdrop, Karp’s recent defense of New College reads less like an account of institutional health and more like an attempt to manufacture it.

Cody’s analysis cuts through this narrative with empirical clarity. Since Richard Corcoran’s takeover in 2023, New College has experienced measurable declines across key indicators: falling SAT scores, lower incoming GPAs, a dramatic drop in national rankings, and stagnating—or declining—enrollment among first-time-in-college students. At the same time, the institution is facing what can only be described as a self-created housing crisis, with roughly 40 percent of students relegated to hotels and off-campus accommodations despite millions in state funding allocated for housing. These are not the markers of a thriving honors college. They are signs of institutional distress.

And yet, rather than addressing these issues, current proposals seek to expand New College’s footprint by absorbing the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee campus—effectively transferring resources and infrastructure to an institution that, by all available evidence, is struggling to sustain itself. That this proposal is moving forward in the face of opposition from elected officials and regional stakeholders only underscores the extent to which political priorities—not educational outcomes—are driving decision-making.

What we are witnessing here is not simply mismanagement. It is something more systemic: the fake production of manufactured momentum under conditions of decline.

This is where the story connects to a broader national pattern. As we have seen in Texas and Florida alike, governance interventions in higher education are increasingly accompanied by narrative interventions—claims of success, renewal, or correction that are not borne out by the data, but are nonetheless mobilized to justify further restructuring. 

The result is a kind of “policy theater,” if you will, in which institutional deterioration is reframed as transformation, echoing Nathan Allen's allegation of President Corcoran's "performative accounting" (Valenzuela, 2026). Expressed differently, policy theater, of which performative accounting is a part, functions as a mechanism of concealment—masking decline with carefully curated narratives that justify continued political control.

And importantly, this dynamic does not operate in isolation. It coexists with—and is reinforced by—what I have called shadow censorship. When faculty are marginalized, governance structures weakened, and institutional futures tied to political agendas, the space for dissent narrows. The ability to publicly challenge these narratives diminishes. Silence, in such contexts, is not accidental—it is produced.

That is why Cody’s intervention matters. It restores something that is increasingly under threat: accountability grounded in evidence.

Because without that, we are left with narratives untethered from reality—narratives that can justify not only the dismantling of institutions, but their reconfiguration in ways that may be far more difficult to undo.

Brian Cody

All Eyes on Utah: Conscience, Control, and the Expansion of Shadow Censorship

What is happening in Utah may appear, at first glance, to be about protecting student conscience (Weissman, 2026). But look more closely, and it reveals something far more consequential: the continued expansion of state power into the classroom—and the next phase in the governance of higher education.

A newly passed bill would allow students to opt out of course assignments that conflict with their “sincerely held” moral, religious, or ideological beliefs. On its face, this may sound reasonable—even humane. Who could object to protecting conscience? But in practice, the bill introduces a mechanism through which academic content itself becomes negotiable, subject not to disciplinary standards or faculty expertise, but to individualized moral veto backed by state authority. Faculty who deny such requests must justify themselves to a “neutral arbiter.” Assignments that ask students to engage perspectives they disagree with—long a cornerstone of higher education—now risk being recast as coercion.

This is not simply accommodation. It is a restructuring of authority.

And importantly, it does not operate through outright bans. Instead, it produces what I have called shadow censorship—a form of anticipatory self-regulation in which institutions and faculty adjust their behavior in response to perceived political risk. As critics note, the law’s ambiguity—what counts as a “sincerely held belief”? what constitutes a “fundamental alteration”?—is precisely what gives it power. Under such conditions, faculty may begin to avoid assigning controversial material altogether. Why risk a complaint? Why invite scrutiny? The likely result is not a wave of formal opt-outs, but a quiet narrowing of what gets taught in the first place.

This is how governance becomes pedagogy.

Utah is not alone. This bill follows a familiar pattern seen across states like Texas and Florida, where governance overhauls, DEI bans, and curricular interventions have steadily redefined the boundaries of academic freedom. What is new here is the mechanism: rather than removing content directly, the state empowers individuals—backed by institutional review processes—to contest it from within. It is a subtler form of control, but no less effective.

And like so many recent policies, it is likely to travel.

As we have seen with book bans, DEI legislation, and curriculum mandates, once a model is established in one state, it quickly becomes a template for others. Utah’s “conscientious objection” framework may well become the next export in the growing policy ecosystem reshaping higher education nationwide.

The deeper issue, then, is not conscience. It is power—who decides what counts as legitimate knowledge, and under what conditions it can be taught. When that authority shifts away from educators and toward political frameworks of acceptability, the consequences are profound. Students are no longer asked to grapple with difference; they are permitted to opt out of it. Faculty are no longer empowered to challenge; they are incentivized to avoid.

Even if the bill does not become law, shadow censorship means that the university, once again, is quietly transformed.

Reference

Weissman, S. (2026, March 16). Utah could allow conscientious objection to class assignments, Inside Higher Education.

All Eyes on Iowa: Shadow Censorship in the Remaking of the University in Real Time

If we have learned anything over the past few years, it is this: what happens in one state rarely stays there. Florida, Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and Utah have each, in turn, served as testing grounds for a new model of higher education governance—one that moves beyond critique into control. Now, all eyes are on Iowa.

According to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a single legislative cycle, Iowa Republicans have introduced more than 20 bills aimed at restructuring both public and private higher education. Taken individually, some proposals may appear technical or even reasonable—tuition guarantees, expanded community-college degrees, civics requirements. But taken together, they reveal something more consequential: a coordinated effort to redefine the purpose, governance, and boundaries of the university.

Governance boards would be reshaped, faculty authority diminished, general education scrutinized, DEI eliminated, and even land acknowledgments prohibited. Meanwhile, new curricular mandates would narrow how history and citizenship can be taught, explicitly restricting attention to subgroups. Excuse me? You mean Anglo male history only? To be sure, this is not only unconstitutional per the First and Fourteenth amendments (see Valenzuela, 2026), but an unmistakable signal about which knowledges are now considered legitimate and which are to be erased.

This is not simply reform. It is redesign.

And crucially, it is the kind of redesign that gives rise to what I have elsewhere called shadow censorship (Valenzuela, 2026)—a form of indirect, anticipatory suppression in which institutions begin to limit expression not because they are explicitly ordered to, but because they recognize the shifting boundaries of what is politically permissible. 

Policies like those proposed in Iowa do not need to ban every idea outright. Instead, they reshape the conditions under which universities operate: who governs, what is funded, what is taught, and what is deemed risky. Under such conditions, institutions internalize constraint. Faculty rethink syllabi. Programs narrow their scope. Administrators act preemptively to avoid scrutiny. The result is not always visible censorship, but something more insidious: a gradual shrinking of intellectual life.

This is how governance becomes culture.

Importantly, Iowa is not innovating in isolation. It is assembling. Nearly every element of its legislative package has been tested elsewhere: DEI bans in Texas, governance interventions in both Florida and Texas, curriculum mandates across multiple states, and ongoing challenges to tenure and faculty governance nationwide. What makes Iowa significant is the combination—the bundling of these efforts into a comprehensive policy regime. This is policy diffusion in real time: not simple replication, but refinement and consolidation into a more durable model of control based on what they have learned from other states like Texas and Florida.

The implications are far-reaching. When lawmakers gain the ability to influence spending decisions, reshape governing boards, dictate curricular content, and restrict hiring practices, the line between public accountability and political control begins to collapse. And as that line blurs, shadow censorship becomes normalized. Universities need not be told explicitly what they cannot do; they begin to anticipate it. They adjust. They comply. They silence themselves.

For those of us in Texas, this trajectory is all too familiar. Senate Bill 17 and Senate Bill 37 and related efforts have already demonstrated how quickly institutional landscapes can shift under political pressure. Iowa now offers a glimpse of what comes next: a more integrated model of governance—one that operates not only through policy, but through the cultivation of institutional fear and constraint.

So yes, all eyes should be on Iowa. Not because it is unique, but because it is indicative. What is being built there is not just a set of policies, but a governing framework—increasingly shared by a number of states, including Texas. It is one that produces compliance without always needing to command it.

And that is precisely how shadow censorship works. 

All Eyes on Iowa

In recent years, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Texas, and Utah have taken turns leading conservative efforts to make colleges less woke, less expensive, and more work-force-oriented. Here comes the Hawkeye State.

Iowa Republicans are pushing an aggressive agenda to revamp public and private colleges. More than 20 bills have been introduced this month, The Chronicle’s Aisha Baiocchi reports. Among notable proposals:

• Community-college bachelor’s degrees: Two-year colleges could offer four-year degrees that fill unmet local work-force needs. Private colleges say that could put them out of business, The Chronicle’s Lee Gardner reports.
• Public-university governance overhaul: Regents’ terms would be shortened, a student regent would lose voting power, and lawmakers would be added as nonvoting board members, The Gazette reported. The Legislature could reverse spending decisions. Post-tenure review, program cuts, general-education scrutiny, and Faculty Senate limits would loom.
• Civics at public colleges: Undergraduates at public universities would have to take courses on American history and government that couldn’t be “devoted to the study of subgroups,” according to The Gazette. 
• Civics at private colleges: The House Higher Education Committee chair asked private colleges to adopt the same requirements pitched for their public counterparts, citing “a gradual erosion of foundational knowledge about our nation’s history, its founding principles, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship,” the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• State endowment tax: Lawmakers softened an initial proposal but still want to make endowments valued at $500 million or more subject to Iowa’s 7.1-percent corporate tax rate, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• Tuition guarantee: In-state tuition at public universities would be frozen for each incoming cohort of undergraduates, starting in 2027, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• … and more: Other bills seek to tell regents to sign the Trump administration’s higher-ed compact, bar public universities from hiring Chinese citizens on H-1B work visas, prohibit land acknowledgments, and eliminate DEI from general-education courses.

The bigger picture: What’s proposed in one state inevitably resurfaces in another. Much of what’s being discussed in Iowa has been seen elsewhere, but this particular combination is worth watching as a leading indicator of how other big-government conservatives will try to flex their power over campuses.

🎓 Lee’s full story asks whether expanded community-college degrees could fix education deserts. Aisha’s full story explores the back-and-forth over other bills.