Rachel Alexander
Jul 24, 2023 TownHall.com
Award-winning Professor Stanley K. Ridgley has written a book exposing how badly higher education has become infested with dogmatic progressivism. Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities.
“If folks think of the university as an aristocracy of the learned, of the best and the brightest, the reality in the bureaucracy is increasingly that of a ruling clerisy of the worst and the dullest,” he says. Activists “are trying to transform the university into an institution more appropriate to the thirteenth century” that will “ensure ideological conformity.”
Ridgley compares the growing deleterious influence in higher education to that described in Václav Havel’s real-life essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” The former Czech president explained how a small business owner in 1970s communist Czechoslovakia put a sign in his window that said, “Workers of the World, Unite!” not because he supported the communist movement, but “because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble … someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life.”
Ridgley reveals that much of the indoctrination and wokeness is imposed by the Student Affairs departments in universities. Students must be prepared to be assaulted “intellectually, verbally, psychologically, ideologically [and] racially.” He warns that “these folks aren’t satisfied just performing their handsomely subsidized antics on the campuses. They’re on a mission to ‘boldly transform higher education.’”
He explains how it is allowed to continue happening, and describes the bureaucratic mechanism that blocks reform. “Sleepy boards of trustees are feted and given PowerPoint presentations that show progress of a sort, with metrics sufficiently abstract and yet seemingly on point.” The book is peppered with recent outrageous incidents that have occurred at universities around the country, and he described a few of the most outrageous
professors.
Ridgley compared the indoctrination to that of cults, using the Unification Church as an example. Cults “prey on the weak and well-meaning, the uncertain and unaware.” They are directed like “sheep” into one group. Whereas “the strong, assertive, confident, grounded, morally secure student with a strong belief system” are akin to goats, and “quickly returned.” He said, “Cultspeak” is recognized as “big smiles and the mantra of inclusion and belonging.” He laid out several revealing red flags, such as keeping recruits “occupied to such a degree that they don’t get around to thinking about what they are doing or what is being done to them.” Phrases like “Critical Race Theory” are no longer used since the public is onto them. Instead, it’s “learning about race” or “antiracist pedagogy.”
Ridgley has a gift for breaking down the propaganda and defining it at its root level. “The content of antiracism is a mash-up of pseudoscientific speculations inspired by psychopathic paranoia and codified into a conspiracy theory,” he explained. “Many call themselves ‘marginalized voices’ and are declared off limits to criticism. The fact is they are not marginalized. They are lionized, they are feted, they have a canon of books and seminal thinkers, they have a zealous following, and some earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for diversity consulting.”
One chapter goes over the extracurricular workshops the do-gooders push on students, while another focuses on “hook and hammer;” how the “authoritarians” craft a “seductive, idealistic, visionary” message to hook students, then hammer them “with the stark message of racial reality” to “move them quickly along a conveyor belt of conversion.” Not just a laundry list of problems, Brutal Minds offers solutions.
He said parents should push back, since they are paying huge amounts of tuition, and he ridicules the absurdist correspondence universities send to parents: “They offer upbeat, wholesome mails couched in the occasional jargon-laden abstractions, the academic calendar, and reminders to pay tuition on deadline. There is nothing on the parents’ portal or “school’s website about destabilizing the student’s sense of self and replacing the student’s belief system with a crypto-Maoist doctrine in a process of unfreezing-changing-refreezing.”
One important fact revealed in the book is that universities are liable for abuse suffered in workshops and racial caucuses that violate anti-discrimination laws regarding race, gender, and such like. He provided a list of 15 key steps that may be taken, such as cutting all ties with the radical leftist American College Personnel Association (ACPA) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA). Ridgley decimated the organizations. Their national “[c]onferences are places where student affairs staffers go to be somebody,” he said. “It is there they can be taken seriously, no matter now vapid … they take selfies with the high gurus of the faith.”
Ridgley recommends that students contact the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for free speech issues, the National Association of Scholars to find helpful faculty, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni for resources promoting “academic excellence, academic freedom, and accountability in our universities.”
Too bad this isn’t required reading for every student entering college. It could eliminate a lot of unnecessary divisiveness and students could avoid learning the hard way later in life that they’re really conservatives.