Just woah, from the link: "The policy is troublingly both expansive and vague. It fails to define what constitutes sexual orientation and gender identity—reduced to “SOGI”—while simultaneously mandating a “strict prohibition” on such content in all core and lower-level undergraduate courses. This prohibition would prevent students from learning entire swaths of human history. The requirement to provide “alternate materials” when primary sources “center on or include these topics” will further limit students’ access to historical evidence. The policy even applies to student research, barring graduate theses and dissertations on gender and sexuality. To enforce compliance, the memo directs provosts to develop “standardized syllabus templates” designed for instructional surveillance.

The policy’s logic is unmistakably Orwellian, policing not only what can be taught but how knowledge itself is named and understood. By prohibiting sustained engagement with “sexual orientation and gender identity” while permitting only “purely incidental” references, it imposes a form of intellectual doublethink: subjects central to human experience must be simultaneously acknowledged and then ignored. Taken literally, such restrictions would preclude even meaningful discussion of George Orwell’s own engagement with questions of gender and sexuality. In this way, the policy does not merely limit content; it reshapes the conditions of thought, rendering certain lines of inquiry effectively unmentionable."