Now I’d like to circle back to the idea of brainwashing, and why I think that term is not quite appropriate. Institutions of higher learning are certainly advancing one strand of left-wing thought at the expense of other branches of left-wing thought. Conservative thought isn’t present enough in fields like humanities or cultural studies to bother mentioning. But political monoculture on campus only works to brainwash those with weak brains to begin with. I would contend that most students really aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid.Ted Kord may be right that certain students, including himself, are relatively immune to being influenced by the left-wing ideas advanced in colleges. But, as a former geology undergraduate, he wasn’t himself a student of the humanities, and was only exposed to obviously left-wing ideas in the specifically ‘educational’ part of his studies. (He was training to be a geology teacher.)
A particular strand of left-wing thought now dominates the humanities. It has also started to influence other areas, some of which may like to think of themselves as mainly scientific. These include psychology, sociology, anthropology, educational theory, and medicine. Students in those areas are expected to get to grips with this brand of left-wing ideology.
Many students, particularly humanities and social science students, may already lean left before they come to college. Thus the political monoculture on campus would only serve to confirm and deepen their left-wing bias.
Left-wing ideology is designed to play on people’s sense of guilt for being ‘privileged’, and on their sense of resentment for being ‘oppressed’. Feelings of guilt are uncomfortable, and a person feeling guilty may well become an activist on behalf of the ‘oppressed’. Even those who don’t become activists may become influenced, possibly far more than they realise.
Left-wing ideology likes to present itself as occupying the moral high ground, as wanting to liberate the oppressed, and as exposing the subtle ways in which oppressors have power over certain groups of people. If a student of literature or other humanities subject constantly has to write essays interpreting literature, history, etc, from a particular left-wing point of view, it’s possible that they absorb this point of view unconsciously, however much they may dislike it, or reject it consciously. This is more likely to be the case if the student is idealistic and conscientious — the thick-skinned, firmly conservative or ‘entitled’ student is less likely to be affected.
And now tens of thousands of students are being exposed to this ideology, with no counter-ideology being promoted on campus.
Christine Fulcher