Over the past few years, Kansas lawmakers have grappled with the public-policy implications of gender ideology. In 2023, the state legislature overrode a governor’s veto to pass a bill barring males from playing on girls’ student sports teams. This year, a district court judge sided with state attorney general Kris Kobach and prevented Kansans from changing the gender listed on their drivers’ licenses.
These policies seem to reflect the will of Kansas citizens, who voted for Donald Trump by double-digit margins in the last three presidential elections. But at the University of Kansas (KU)—the state’s flagship university—a new center seeks to empower activists to fight these laws.
Trans Studies at the Commons serves as a hub for the burgeoning field of transgender studies. “We study questions of trans life, trans theorizing, and trans materiality across epistemological and ontological bounds,” the initiative’s website states. The program kicked off this year with a million-dollar grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
Through a public records request, I’ve acquired KU’s proposal for the Trans Studies at the Commons initiative. The document gives a detailed—and remarkably candid—look at the program, which seeks to transform both academia and the state’s political landscape.
The proposal gets political within the first two paragraphs, rebuking the Kansas legislature for “advancing repressive anti-trans bills.” The authors suggest that such legislation, and the broader “crisis facing trans people,” justify the creation of a “physical and virtual hub” to “catalyze growth in the larger field of Trans Studies.” One of the center’s goals, the authors state, would be “transforming our local and regional landscape to be more transliberatory.” In practice, it would hire a new professor, recruit a cohort of non-residential fellows, give grants to local nonprofits “working toward Trans and Racial liberation,” and create a “Trans Oral History.”
The proposal becomes increasingly partisan as it proceeds. Its authors explain that their initiative would leverage the “liberal past” of the city of Lawrance, where the university’s main campus is located, “to galvanize efforts aimed at . . . social justice today.” The proposal boasts that Lawrence, “[a]s home to the state’s flagship university . . . is hailed as a ‘little blue dot in a sea of red’—an acknowledgment of the culture wars that swell around us.”
Coming from a state-funded institute of higher education, such partisan language would strike many as odd. But the proposal goes further, advocating specific public policy goals. In a section titled “Reason for the Work,” the authors declare: “Trans Studies, like trans lives, is under severe threat on a national scale.” That threat stems from “state legislatures” that “have set their sights on dismantling, blocking, and censoring gender supportive and anti-racist policies in healthcare and education.” One such policy, they argue, is Kansas’s “heart wrenching” decision to list citizens’ biological sex on state IDs, hence the center’s goal “of transforming [the university’s] local and regional landscape to be more transliberatory.”
While the program pledges to pursue social transformation, its most lasting effect may be on the academy itself. Trans Studies at the Commons illustrates a growing trend in American higher education, whereby universities and outside funders furnish a career pathway for activist-scholars.
As it turns out, the Mellon Foundation funding was key to leveraging more institutional support for the burgeoning field of transgender studies. The university agreed to fund a new faculty role in the discipline on the condition that “the first two and a half years of this faculty member’s salary will come from Mellon grant funds.” In its job advertisement for that new faculty role, the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies noted a particular interest in scholars with backgrounds in “critical race theory, disability studies, and decolonial analysis.”
Mellon Foundation officers have elsewhere signaled their interest in cementing transgender studies as a bona fide academic discipline. Funding Trans Studies at the Commons offers a surefire strategy for doing so: building the academic career pipeline. As the proposal notes, KU’s hiring another trans studies scholar would have “ripple effects” and could “draw a larger pool of Trans Studies-focused graduate students.” The authors likewise state their intention to “deploy the requested Mellon funding for field development at every stage of the academy (faculty, graduate, and undergraduate),” including through a fellowship program for “scholar-activists” from around the country.
All this taps into a broader debate about the role of the university—and, specifically, that of the state university. Activism is an inextricable tenet of transgender studies. As the discipline’s founder Susan Stryker put it, transgender studies has “a radical political potential,” it exists in “deep dialogue with processes of decolonization, of racial justice, of anti-global capitalism,” and it is “a part of an overthrowing and reimagining of how these very pernicious systems of power root themselves in our flesh.” It thus contrasts sharply with the goal that once predominated in academic life: the dispassionate pursuit of truth.
In a recent poll, 32 percent of American adults said that they had “little or no confidence” in higher education. Of those who said they’ve lost faith, a plurality said that colleges were trying to “indoctrinate” or “brainwash” students. That perception is reinforced when state flagships, like the University of Kansas, embrace openly partisan and ideological projects while seeking to reshape academia in the image of an activist nonprofit. Public discontent with university activism represents a mandate for reform. The University of Kansas would be wise to heed the call.
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