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Why are taxpayers financing universities that treat political activism as an academic mission?
By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com
October 23, 2026
I was looking through a website recently when I came across an organization called Critical Ethnic Studies (CES).
Its mission statement caught my attention. Not because it was particularly clear, but because it was so revealing.
CES describes its work as an “urgent political education project” intended to advance the “insurgent possibilities” of a field centered on critiques of “colonial racial capitalism.”
The organization invokes the revolutionary roots of ethnic studies and describes its mission in terms of political transformation. The related Critical Ethnic Studies Association explicitly connects scholarship, institution-building, and activism.
This is not a radical student club operating out of somebody’s garage. CES publishes an academic journal through the University of Minnesota Press. Its editors and board members have affiliations with established American universities.
I read the mission statement again.
Then a question occurred to me.
Are we allowed to question any of its basic tenets?
When the Answer Comes First
Universities are supposed to be places where ideas are examined, challenged, and sometimes discarded. That is how scholarship advances.
A scientist must be willing to abandon a theory when experiments contradict it. An economist must contend with evidence that undermines his model. A historian must reconsider an interpretation when new evidence emerges.
But what happens when an academic organization defines itself by its commitment to a particular political outcome?
Consider the phrase “colonial racial capitalism.”
Those three words combine colonialism, racial hierarchy, and an economic system into a single intellectual framework. The underlying theory argues that capitalism’s historical development has been inseparable from racial exploitation.
There is evidence of slavery, colonial exploitation, and racial discrimination throughout economic history. Nobody needs to invent these injustices.
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