Flashes of Panic

There was an Ellen Goodman column in the paper the other week about Texas and its insistence that textbooks purchased by the state define marriage as between a man and a woman, and not mention contraception. Some more conservative colleges have gone further and are requesting (don’t laugh) biology textbooks which don’t include evolution and natural selection. (This is not unlike “fat-free ice cream,” I think. The concepts are really hard to separate.)

The veiled implication is that the massive buying weight of the state of Texas is going to drive contraception and Darwinism out of all our textbooks. Perhaps that might have been the case once, but the world has moved on.

It’s getting increasingly easy for publishers to “custom-publish” relatively small print runs economically. What we’re more likely to see is special “Texas editions” of textbooks, custom-edited for the creationism/abstinence market. Some editors will be holding their noses doing it (I work for a company which has published a few salvos in this battle,) but it will happen.

And, recognizing the stunted preparation of students who used these books, we’ll start seeing institutions of higher learning looking on applicants from Texas with a jaundiced eye. They’ll be pushed into remedial classes or simply not accepted. That would be nearly any biology-related graduate field: neuroscience, biotech, ecology, medicine. Want Junior to be a doctor when he grows up? Don’t send him to school in Texas. If the state insists on underpreparing its students, higher education will route around the damage.