The Latest Absurdity in the Chronicle, by someone from Harvard
By Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD
February 24, 2024
Yet another absurd piece has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education that purports to explain why “indoctrination” — particularly of the leftist bent — isn’t really occurring at colleges and universities.
The piece is called “What Is ‘Indoctrination,’ Anyway?,” and the author is Julie Reuben, who is affiliated with Harvard University as a professor of the history of American education and faculty director of the Phillips Brooks House Center for Public Service and Engaged Scholarship.
Reuben serves as Professor in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education; that is to say, the bottom-feeder of higher education academic units, the one with the least respect, the least credibility, and the most politicization of any unit in any modern academic affairs department.
Thus, it’s no surprise that Reuben uses the stale misdirection playbook we’ve grown accustomed to. She ignores the problem she allegedly addresses — indoctrination of students on the university campuses.
Her piece is, in fact, one of the most dishonest examples of misinformation about higher education you will ever see. Her piece serves as just one more reason why average Americans hold academia and academics in increasingly low esteem.
Reuben posits a straw character, “conservatives” (presumably folks like me), and then explains why we are wrong in our claims that higher education is increasingly embracing extreme leftist groupthink as a clear organizational orthodoxy.
But she never addresses what conservatives like me actually say.
She nibbles at the edges, temporizes about the past, tap-dances about transparency, but never acknowledges that the university she analyzed in the post-war period has little or nothing to do with today’s mega-versities with their lumbering and ideologically lockstep bureaucracies and their institutionalized thought reform programs. Programs of which she seems blissfully unaware.
In my book BRUTAL MINDS, I’ve criticized the routinization of thought reform indoctrination in universities and colleges, I have named who is doing it, and I have named the schools that subsidize it.
I have described what their techniques are and who their victims are.
I have documented the source(s) of the doctrine, and I cite and quote dozens of leftists who clearly state that this is their orthodoxy and that this is what they are doing, many of whom serve in education schools just like Reuben’s.
I clearly show that it is the bureaucracy, not the faculty, that is the chief culprit. Another powerful indictment of the student affairs and co-curricular bureaucracy is Social Justice Education in America, by David Randall.
But Reuben ignores these elaborate conservative critiques in favor of her own imagination.
Not once does she address the lockstep higher education bureaucracy that is responsible for the vast majority of political indoctrination on our campuses — “student affairs,” the “co-curriculum,” and select faculty who teach the doctrine to folks staffing the bureaucracy. In fact, it is Reuben’s own field that trains the thought reformers of the bureaucracy in faux subjects like “educational leadership,” “higher education management” and “student affairs.”
This bureaucracy messages students 24-7 in what they themselves call “milieu management,” a technique with the explicit intent of undermining students’ core beliefs to install in students a neo-Maoist “critical consciousness” as a new belief system.
Instead, Ms. Reuben simply ignores the purported topic of her article. She even says this: “The conservative attack on higher education distorts the evidence that it uses to support its charges of indoctrination.”
Reuben never once shares this distorted “evidence” that conservatives offer. Instead, she provides a lame apologia for faculty who want to reveal their political position in the classroom and use it as a bully pulpit for social justice education, and she omits most of the actual critique by conservatives.
Unfortunately, this is a routine method of journalists and, now, academics who simply refuse to engage the substance of the critique. Instead, they offer cheap pretense, mischaracterizing, misrepresenting, and outright lying about the conservative critique — it is this fraudulent straw man that they purport to counter. Upon reading the Reuben piece, a friend put it this way:
People like Julie Reuben gaslight like rest of us breathe. It’s second nature to them — answering the question that was never asked, playing games with words (like “we don’t ‘teach’ CRT in public schools”), or addressing a concern that is only tangential and not the actual subject of discussion. We used to call this lying.
I don’t know why Julie Reuben engages in this exercise, whether through ignorance, whether intentional deception, or whether nothing more than a studied averted gaze, but to omit most of the actual conservative case against the clear indoctrination programs ongoing in higher education while purporting to answer that critique is utterly dishonest and, yes, exemplary of propaganda. It does nothing but confirm the ignorant in their ignorance. It is fraudulent.
Little wonder that mainstream folks rightly suspect academia of routine dishonesty. This is just the latest example.
You can read the piece at The Chronicle HERE.
BRUTAL MINDS gives the lie to this kind of propaganda.