Higher Education is not Indoctrination

by Matthew Cannelora

Many Americans remain convinced that higher ed indoctrinates young adults with liberal bias. But data shows American youth moving to the Left regardless of college experience. Also, what is the Conservative case that indoctrination exists, and what does it mean for the way we should view the modern American campus?

On April 28th, United States Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “Federally funded school from age 3 to 20 doesn't sound like education, it sounds like indoctrination.” [Bolded in original.]

This article won’t get into who Marjorie Taylor Greene is—we’ll leave it to the reader to do the deep dive on Jewish Space Lasers clearcutting California forests for freeway development. Instead of focusing on Ms. Greene, I’ll focus on her tweet. After all, she’s not the only person who thinks that our schools indoctrinate our youth. But is there any evidence that young adults come out of college indoctrinated?

I’ll try not to jump down rabbit holes in this article. I’m not going to throw out a lot of graphs and numbers, because we live in an age when it seems like everyone has their mind made up before they read an article. And in any case, who but universities are conducting studies? To someone who thinks that colleges are indoctrinating people, those same colleges aren’t credible enough to offer data to the contrary.

So instead of relying solely on data, I’m going to lay out a simple case—that America is moving to the left. Now that could be because of elementary school teachers brainwashing our children into sharing their juice, or because of nano-technology in our vaccines are re-wiring our synapses. But the current trends in America show a steady bend to the left. And Conservatives have been attacking this bend in any way they can.

In the 1950s, William Buckley hit on the tactic of attacking the higher education system. By claiming that Yale professors were indoctrinating students, he found a way to explain why America was moving to the left, and he found a way to blame a specific group of people. In so doing, he was able to make Conservative readers feel better—it wasn’t their fault America was going liberal—and he was also able to give conservatives an action plan—by stopping these brainwashing teachers, they could turn the tide on liberalization in America.

Fast forward to 2008, when the journal PS, Political Science & Politics found that students that come out of college are, on the whole, more liberal than when they went in. Smoking gun? Not quite. Truth is, all young people get to their mid-twenties more liberal than they were going in. That is to say, take a room full of 18 year olds, send half to college and send half elsewhere. Come back in four years and both groups will have moved to the left at about the same percentage.

This same study found that the overwhelming majority of college professors are indeed liberal. Smoking gun from the grassy knoll? Again, not quite. After all, if a person goes to a college where every one of their teachers is a bleeding heart liberal, and that person only comes out as liberal as their peers who didn’t attend college, did the teacher indoctrinate them? Or did the teacher do a remarkable job of restraining their bias?

Of course all one has to do to disbelieve this study is watch a fifteen minute segment on a conservative news source. They’ll show a poor student, a struggling 20 year old at UC Berkley, who got a failing grade on their paper spotlighting Newt Gingrich as the greatest leader of the 20th century. Or, if a person has a more active social network, perhaps they already know someone who has been discriminated against because of their conservative leanings—discriminated against by a bleeding-heart liberal professor who drives a hybrid car and wants nothing more than to turn all their students into Obama-crats.

Take an article from Michael Torres for Newsweek in July of 2020. In it, Mr. Torres lays out the evidence, such as it is, for how liberals have taken over institutions of higher learning. He writes at one point:

Worse, the environment fostered by radical professors and administrators is coming increasingly close to justifying violence. A letter to the chancellor of Syracuse University sent by a student spells out just how miserable life can be for non-woke students on campus. At one point, the author states, "We are afraid to walk alone at night, to attend meetings for conservative clubs, to even leave our dorms. ...Our calls for help fall on deaf ears and we are left without hope."

But wait—where’s the actual evidence that violence is justified, by the administrators or the faculty? We have none, not as presented by Mr. Torres. We have instead a letter written by a student who doesn’t feel safe walking the campus. Feelings are important, but they are not facts. There is no citation of the faculty at-large, or even of one faculty member, espousing, supporting, rationalizing, or “justifying violence.”

Meanwhile, we have in our society mountains of factual evidence that women and people of color are perpetrated against with acts of violence and harassment in their schools, in their workplaces, and even simply walking down the street. At night, and in broad daylight.

If woke culture has any unified message, it’s to help people have empathy for others’ feelings. And I subscribe to that. So I have full empathy for any student who feels unsafe, for any reason. But my empathy for a conservative student who feels persecuted by other students does not constitute evidence of liberal bias among the staff or faculty; it does not evince “justifying violence”; and it does not rise to the level of presenting the case for systemic liberalizing of college students.

Mr. Torres also makes an admission by proxy, of which we should all be aware—it is most often the students themselves at colleges who represent the more radically left on campus, not the teaching staff. And if a student feels persecuted by other students, the remedy is not to decry that the entire institution of higher learning is indoctrinating young adults. The answer is employ yet more empathy.

Another note from Mr. Torres: “And they've used that astronomical sum to fund a transition from teaching with a liberal bias to teaching, as Andrew Sullivan has consistently noted, an identity-based social justice movement that resembles a new religion.” I followed the link to Mr. Sullivan’s article—he cites no evidence for the “astronomical sum[s]” leading to a “new religion.” He does as Torres has done—he cites a few anecdotes of persecuted individuals, and then uses a lot of hot-button words to make the case that all universities are not only leaning Left, they’re falling over and crushing all their students under the weight of suffocating Liberalism.

(I will note that Sullivan actually does cite figures: in one case to downplay GLAAD statistics on violence against homosexual men, and in another case Sullivan points out how much more the Federal Government spends on education than it used to. In neither case does he make a bridge between these two sets of data and how or why people coming out of college are more liberal than when they went in.)

The state of education in our country is not binary. There are more competing narratives than “colleges indoctrinate” and “no they don’t.” But I have tried to present at least those two main threads. On the one hand we have Sullivan and Torres. Each of them show some very troubling instances of students and faculty persecuted for conservative beliefs. And that is wrong. No one should be persecuted solely for their political beliefs.

But the other side is some raw data. And those data show that young people are generally more liberal than older people—and that young people coming out of college are not more liberal than their peers who did not go to college. And those data also show that college staff and faculty are not significantly pushing students to the left.

There is no arguing that college campuses are hotbeds of Liberalism. But what can be argued is that this has always been, and always will be, because young people typically lean progressive. Whether it’s the Enlightenment pushing away from Orthodoxy, or Millennials pulling away from the NRA. That move to the left is no reason to vilify the institutions of higher learning, and it’s not a reason to indict or impugn professors.

It is, however, a great reason for Conservatives to ask themselves the difficult question, “Why are young people turning away from Conservativism?” After all, wouldn’t it be more in line with traditional Conservative ideals to stop blaming other people for their problems, and ask how they can help themselves, instead?