For decades, America's universities have largely functioned under an unspoken assumption: progressive political ideology isn't really ideology at all.

It's simply the accepted framework through which students are expected to understand the world.

There are encouraging signs that assumption is finally beginning to crack.

Jessica Adams, a lecturer at Indiana University, will not have her contract renewed after a student complained about material she presented in a graduate social work course. Among the examples of "covert white supremacy" on a classroom graphic was President Trump's slogan, "Make America Great Again."

The chart placed the slogan above "police killing people of color," leading the dean of IU's School of Social Work to conclude that it implied MAGA was the more serious offense.

To be fair, Adams disputes that interpretation.

The student's complaint eventually triggered a review under Indiana's intellectual diversity law. That legislation requires public universities to promote free inquiry and intellectual diversity rather than treating one political worldview as unquestionable orthodoxy.

Since news of her dismissal surfaced, many of the headlines have predictably portrayed Adams as the victim. Given that America's media industrial complex suffers from the same ideological conformity as academia, that isn't surprising.

But there's another way to view this.

For years, universities have insisted they merely teach students how to think rather than what to think. Yet classrooms across the country have routinely presented deeply contested progressive theories on race, gender, sexuality, privilege, and power as settled truth. Students who challenged those assumptions quickly found themselves branded as ignorant, prejudiced, and unworthy of serious consideration.

That's why this case matters.

Whether one agrees with Adams's lesson isn't the central issue. The issue is that students were presented with the highly contested claim that "Make America Great Again" is an expression of white supremacy as though it were an accepted premise of the course rather than one interpretation among many.

That sort of ideological certainty espoused from the lectern has, for a long time, carried virtually no institutional risk. In many academic departments, it was simply the air everyone breathed.

But Indiana's intellectual diversity law may be changing those incentives.

The law doesn't prohibit professors from discussing controversial ideas. It doesn't ban conversations about racism or politics. What it does challenge is the assumption that one political ideology gets to masquerade as objective scholarship while competing viewpoints are dismissed as ignorance or prejudice.

The backlash to Adams's non-renewal has been revealing. Critics warn that academic freedom is under attack.

But academic freedom has never meant freedom from scrutiny at a publicly funded university, particularly when evidence mounts to demonstrate that political advocacy has replaced genuine inquiry.

The irony is that many of the same institutions that have enthusiastically policed dissent on other cultural and political questions now sound alarmed when their own ideological assumptions are subjected to review.

No one should celebrate the loss of another person's job. That's the unfortunate thing about this situation. But looking from a broader perspective, it is worth recognizing that something larger could be happening.

Might it be that the era in which progressive assumptions automatically received the benefit of the doubt inside the university is finally coming to an end?

If so, institutions that have spent years insisting they value intellectual diversity shouldn't see it as a crisis.

It should be an opportunity to prove it.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.