REPUBLICANS SPENT $3 MILLION ON AN ANTI-WOKE UNIVERSITY PROGRAM. ONE PERSON ENROLLED.
A taxpayer-funded West Virginia program built to fight “woke ideology” has drawn almost no student demand ahead of the fall semester.
West Virginia Republicans spent millions in public money to build an anti-woke university program. Ahead of the fall semester, the program has drawn one enrollee.
The Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship program at West Virginia University’s Washington Center was created through Republican legislation and funded with taxpayer money. Its stated academic language points to civics, western civilization, culture, history, and political debate. Its political purpose was much clearer. Gov. Patrick Morrisey said the program was meant to push back on “woke ideology” in schools and return higher education to what he called its true purpose.
That framing matters because “anti-woke” politics are not abstract. The phrase has become a governing weapon aimed at diversity programs, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, trans students, public education, faculty autonomy, and any institution Republicans accuse of being too inclusive, too honest, or too protective of people they want pushed back into silence.
In West Virginia, that politics became a taxpayer-funded university program.
The public was told this was a correction to ideological higher education. But the structure points in the opposite direction. Republican lawmakers used state power to impose their own ideological project onto a public university, then attached millions in public money to it. The result is not a neutral civics project. It is a culture-war program built inside higher education by the same political movement claiming higher education is too political.
The enrollment number matters because it exposes the gap between political demand and student demand. Lawmakers can mandate a program, fund it with taxpayer money, create a center, and give it course titles. But students still have to want what the state is selling.
So far, they mostly have not.
Republicans defending the low enrollment have pointed to the fact that the program does not yet count toward university credit. That may explain part of the problem, but it does not answer the public-money question. If a program needed millions in taxpayer support before it had a structure students could use for credit, the public has every reason to ask why it was funded this way in the first place.
That is not just a rollout problem. It is a governance problem.
A public university has real needs. Students need affordability, housing, mental-health support, faculty stability, academic programs that lead somewhere, and classrooms protected from political interference. Instead, West Virginia Republicans used public funds to build an anti-woke showcase whose first public measure of demand is minimal student interest.
The failure should not be treated as a joke only because the enrollment number is embarrassing. It should be treated as evidence of how culture-war governance works.
The state identifies an enemy: “woke ideology.” It claims schools are infected. It presents itself as the cure. Then it uses public authority to build an ideological counter-program and calls that reform. In practice, the public pays for political branding while the institution absorbs the mandate.
WVU political science professor Erik Herron pointed to that contradiction when he said the Washington Center appears to be exactly what it complains higher education has become: a big government mandate imposed on the university. That is the core hypocrisy. Republicans said they were fighting ideological control, then used state government to impose their own ideological project.
For Trans United, this matters because “anti-woke” is not just a campus buzzword. It is the language used to attack the conditions that allow trans people, LGBTQIA+ people, Black people, immigrants, disabled people, and marginalized students to exist safely inside public institutions. The same political current that calls trans inclusion “woke” also targets school policies, library books, diversity offices, classroom speech, student privacy, and the ability of educators to protect vulnerable students.
That is why this program belongs inside the broader record.
It shows what happens when Republicans turn resentment into policy. The same politics that produces bans and restrictions can also build institutions meant to normalize that worldview, using public money to make the project look inevitable. The low enrollment reveals that inevitability was manufactured.
Students did not create this demand. Politicians did.
The program’s curriculum reportedly includes courses titled “Woke,” “The New Right,” and “Nation and Migration.” Those titles do not erase the political context. They confirm it. This is not simply a broad public investment in civic education. It is a program built around the same culture-war vocabulary Republicans use to attack public schools, universities, diversity work, and LGBTQIA+ inclusion.
A real civics program could teach history, government, public responsibility, rights, law, and political debate without being born from a campaign against “woke ideology.” A real academic program would not need to present marginalized communities and inclusive education as the enemy it was created to correct.
This program did.
The result is a public lesson in failed priorities. West Virginia Republicans spent millions to build an anti-woke university project. Ahead of the fall semester, one person enrolled. That does not mean civics education is unwanted. It means students may understand what politicians refuse to admit: a partisan grievance dressed up as academic reform is still a partisan grievance.
Public money should not be used to stage ideological revenge against public education.
Taxpayers deserve answers about why millions were committed to a program with so little demonstrated demand. Students deserve public universities that invest in their actual needs. LGBTQIA+ communities deserve institutions that are not converted into laboratories for anti-woke backlash. And trans people deserve to see these projects named for what they are: part of the same political infrastructure that turns inclusion into a target.
The enrollment number is not the whole story. It is the clue that exposes the design.
West Virginia Republicans built a program to fight “woke ideology.” They spent public money and used state power to impose it. Students have mostly stayed away.
The enrollment failure matters. But the deeper failure is that the state treated anti-woke politics as a public need in the first place.
Anti-woke politics are used to attack trans people, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, diversity, public education, and institutional safety.
Trans United documents anti-trans laws, public safety failures, and the systems that strip trans people of privacy, housing, dignity, and protection.
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