My Failure as an Indoctrination-Crazed Lefty Professor (Part 2 of 2)
According to a former US Justice Department lawyer in a whistleblower disclosure, the Trump Administration's attacks on American colleges and universities over alleged antisemitism were "rushed and incomplete or ... failed to establish legal violations by the schools." As reported by AP:
The complaint alleges that the investigations into some of the nation's most prestigious academic institutions were designed to strong-arm the schools into cutting deals for political purposes. Outcomes of the investigations were "predetermined, without regard to the evidence" in a "politically mandated effort" to extract money from schools through settlement demands and funding freezes under the pretext of rooting out antisemitism, the complaint alleges.I know, we are all shocked, shocked that there is dishonesty going on here. These are serious matters, of course, and the problem is in fact much larger, because although the whistleblower is surely correct that "extract[ing] money" was one goal of the White House, the ultimate aim has been to force American higher education to generate ideas that are agreeable to conservatives and then to teach those ideas as gospel to our students. As I once put it:
[T]he Republicans are ... frothing against the universities with ever-increasing intensity. From perpetual-candidate Rick Santorum's claims about "liberal indoctrination" of our gullible youth to tallies of the party affiliations of university professors, there is a well financed army of people whose job it is to claim -- loudly and repeatedly -- that universities are illegitimate because they are too liberal.
I wrote those words in 2017, and the hot link in the second sentence leads to a column from 2013 in which I wrote that the frequent Republican also-ran had attacked President Obama as "a snob" for promoting college education, with Santorum then "rais[ing] the specter of 'some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate' people, and he said that Obama wants people to go to college so he can 'remake you in his image.'"
And now we are back to the I-word: indoctrination. Part of the Republican playbook, at least since the early Cold War if not before, has been to attack what is arguably America's most unique asset: a system of higher education that is absolutely dominant in the best way, drawing students and researchers from around the world to do their work and to learn here. Republicans hate professors who are not toeing their party line, and because our job is, not to be coy about it, to risk pissing powerful people off by saying things that might be true but unpopular, we professors do not toe anyone's party line.
But wait, are professors not mostly registered Democrats? Which party would you support in a world in which one of them is telling you that you are an indoctrinator who needs to be fired or worse, while the other (with too many lapses) generally understands the point of independent universities? Moreover, even left-leaning academics were critical -- often harshly so -- of Obama and Bill Clinton, with no one trying to "remake you in" Obama's image or anyone else's.
In Part 1 of this column yesterday, I focused on a particularly entertaining example of the Republicans' longstanding fixation on the claim that a bunch of lefty professors are indoctrinating America's youth. On his corporate-financed summer road trip with his wife and nine children, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, with a straight face and without a hint of self-awareness, that Harvard -- the focus of so much of the American right's rage -- has "professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like [Duffy's daughter] and, I think, corrupt their minds," adding that Harvard is "so good at it. You’ll see young people go to a conservative school with a conservative family, and they get perverted and contorted."
Duffy is hardly an innovator here. He is simply repeating what he has heard for years in his right-wing monoculture about the big, bad Crimson monster. Indeed, his one skill seems to be to repeat what he sees people around him doing.
For example, in a Senate oversight hearing in May at which Duffy's road trip was at issue, he channeled former Attorney General Pam Bondi's one lasting gift to American political discourse: showing up with a slam book of oppo research on all of the Democratic senators, refusing to answer their questions, and instead throwing accusations at them. (From a New York Times report: "'Do you have jurisdiction over law firms?' Mr. Duffy asked Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, accusing her of having accepted millions from trial law firms.")
When that tactic failed during questioning by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, Duffy resorted to a classic: "Do you hate America? Don’t you want to celebrate America? It’s our birthday." Yes, when asked why a cabinet secretary would be accepting gifts from companies that his department regulates, the answer is to attack the questioner's patriotism.
Put simply, Duffy's nonsense is nothing new and lacks even a slightly interesting gloss. And that is why he is such a good example of the right's blind hatred of American universities. He is certain that there is indoctrination going on, and although he cannot prove it -- he does not even try -- he never stops to question what he has been told to believe. It is almost as if someone indoctrinated him. Hmm.
So Duffy is simply a standard-issue Trump-era Republican. As I pointed out in Part 1 of this column, however, the more interestingly twisted part of that story arrived when one of the Christian conservative columnists for The New York Times responded to Duffy by disagreeing in the most damaging way possible. David French, as I noted at length, claimed to know that Harvard in particular truly is a terrible bubble within which evil indoctrinators lurk. He said that if Duffy's daughter goes to Harvard, her "[r]adical peers, professors and administrators are far better at stigma than persuasion."
Radical, dude. French claimed to know from his own days at Harvard Law how bad things are, but I pointed out that (even if he had been there much more recently than the early 1990's) Harvard Law students have no regular contact with undergraduate students and have no idea what it is like at the College. I should add that the faculties are likewise separate entities, with law professors only rarely crossing into Harvard Yard and the professors who teach undergraduate courses typically having no business being in the law quad.
More importantly, French's claim to fame is that he was the president of a litigation shop that exists entirely to pursue cases against supposedly closed-minded radical lefty professors and their institutions. Even if French had gone into that job with an open mind (and it is clear that he never would have been interested, or hired, if he had been), how could he not come out thinking that places like Harvard are demonic? Insurance adjusters can come to believe that everyone lies about their injuries. Anti-academic zealots who seek out people who are willing to sue Harvard are simply marinating in the right's favorite fantasies.
But French does ultimately disagree with Duffy, saying that academia's definitely-not-imagined radicalism is at worst unfortunate, bad for the liberal students but good for conservatives, because "exposure to very liberal students at Harvard would have given [Duffy's daughter] a well-rounded education. Her liberal classmates? Not as much. When you are surrounded by like-minded people, your ideas are less likely to be tested."
French does add that "[n]one of Harvard’s sins justify the Trump administration’s attacks on its academic freedom," which I suppose counts as a generous concession to the sinners, but everything that he writes there reinforces the tendentious idea that life is miserable for conservatives and a walk down easy street for liberals at places like Harvard. Again, he comes by that dishonest conclusion honestly (having immersed himself in anti-university gospel for so long), but he uses the "Hey Sean, she'll be safe ..." assertion to emphasize that closed-minded people will be safe from the sickos at Harvard who truly are trying to shut everyone else down.
Moreover, he allows that college students are not "little lumps of clay, ready to be molded" in a professor's image. So, yay? All of those radical peers, professors, and administrators (?!) are wasting their time being intolerant? Better than Duffy's inanity, to be sure, but still promoting the long-term attack on academia.
Turning finally to non-pundit sources, Julie A. Reuben, an education professor at Harvard, began an essay in an academic periodical (the Chronicle of Higher Education, or CHE) on February 20, 2024 with this: "Charges that American colleges indoctrinate their students with liberal dogma have been around for decades." The idea of "lefty campus indoctrination" has always been a staple of culture wars -- indeed, since before anyone even applied that martial metaphor to the litany of right-wing grievances.
Back in 2017, CHE published "Why Conservative Fears of Campus Indoctrination Are Overblown," by two professors who described themselves as "Republican political scientists with a combined half-century of experience in higher education and more than two decades studying political correctness," in which they wrote that
the conservative fixation on political correctness is, in fact, misdirected. One of the right’s main worries about campus culture is that the left’s dominance of academe is so widespread and powerful that it leads to leftist indoctrination or conservative alienation. Incidents at a handful of colleges ... seem to suggest that conservatives in academe, both teachers and students, are hopelessly out of place, in need of refuge or rescue.
These fears are overblown.
I would be remiss if I did not point out that it is odd for two professors to describe themselves as having spent decades studying political correctness, because that term -- like "woke" and "cancel culture" -- has no objective definition and is simply an infinitely elastic term to apply to "things conservatives don't like." To give Maranto and Woessner the benefit of the doubt, however, it is possible to study people's reactions to imaginary things, such as the scholars who study conspiracy theories and other group psychoses.
Either way, it was important that the Republican professors told people like Sean Duffy (nine years in advance) that they were worried over nothing. Pre-echoing French, they write that "most undergraduates are not ideologically pliable. By the time they reach college, most students have developed a political point of view."
But is that good? I have often responded to claims of lefty indoctrination by saying that "we're obviously pretty bad at it," but that hides the truly worrisome reality that even eighteen-year-olds are essentially unwilling or unable to critically re-examine beliefs based on new information. And "new information" can include something as simple as explaining that there is are massive differences between communism, socialism, Marxism, Stalinism, and all of the other things that the American right mashes together into a uni-smear. Would I be indoctrinating students in my lefty ways by simply telling them that democratic socialism and socialism are different things -- or that informed people honestly disagree about what each of the -isms mean?
Apparently that would be bad for Republicans, because they want people not to understand the differences. And again, people like Duffy, Trump, and most of the rest have no idea that there are any differences, because they reject learning new things that are inconvenient to them.
So if it were up to me, students would at least be open to reconsidering their unexamined beliefs and possibly change their minds. But apparently that would be bad, because then they might believe something new and scary.
Finally, is there any evidence about how this supposed indoctrination works? Two empirical researchers, reporting on survey data that they had analyzed, offered their broad conclusion in the title of a very recent CHE piece, "Yes, Higher Ed Shapes Students’ Politics. Here’s How," with the sub-headline, "Different disciplines have different ideological effects."
Dorf on Law is not, of course, the platform on which to engage in a technical critique of the authors' survey methodology or statistical techniques. I will note that they did go through the appropriate steps to try to filter out self-selection effects, which is important. I will thus take their conclusions seriously in the sense that we can assume for current purposes that the results are technically robust. They conclude that
- Neil H. Buchanan