Student Affairs Embraces Hate, while Genuine Faculty Remain Oblivious
By Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD
Most people outside higher education blame the faculty for the reputation of colleges as centers of leftist extremism.
These well-intentioned critics typically are unaware of the on-campus entity known as “student affairs,” and that’s exactly how these mediocre campus functionaries want to keep it.
These people are not faculty
“Student affairs” is where much of the campus ideological nastiness occurs, with students deceived into providing personal and family information in interrogation games such as the “privilege walk” while they are attacked in racialist struggle sessions called “difficult dialogues” and “courageous conversations.”
The belief system and sense of self of students is attacked in a process of thought reform, which explicitly uses psychological methods to move students along a metaphorical conveyer belt to what they call critical consciousness and a complete rejection of their own moral, social, political, and cultural upbringing.
This is not speculation—this is what they boast of doing in their literature and what I document in detail in BRUTAL MINDS.
These folks are the products of education schools, which are steeped in crypto-Maoist ideology, and they all march in ideological lockstep. No alternative point of view is permitted for students, not even the suggestion that there might actually be another view besides their own feverish doctrine on offer.
These people are not faculty
They shield their extremism from any of the abundant evidence that would indicate that their dominant ideology is an outlier mash-up sourced from Brazilian (Freire), French-Algerian (Fanon), Italian (Gramsci), Hungarian (Lukacs), Chinese (Mao), and German (Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno) intellectuals.
These political philosophers constitute the pantheon of a sophisticated philosophical and political framework of the doctrine, but it’s problematic whether most student affairs functionaries even know this — they simply believe that they’re “doing the work” of “social justice.”
These campus bureaucrats imbibe this far-left extremist literature on a routine basis, and I detail this in BRUTAL MINDS.
Here is a sample of the doctrine that informs “student affairs” people. This is not an outlier. It is from the editor of the professional organization’s flagship publication About Campus, and it accurately captures the organization’s doctrine.
As you read it, consider that this is not a faculty publication, but rather the official publication for the clerks, enrollment managers, dormitory managers, and orientation organizers.
This is not some minor radical tract from Berkeley. This isn’t some hateful pro-Hamas communiqué.
This is the official publication from the ACPA, the “student affairs” professional organization whose motto is “Boldly Transforming Higher Education.”
Bear in mind that no one asked these mediocrities to transform anything, least of all the institutions that they played no role in creating and in which they serve only as ancillary support personnel. Their transformation project is one of undermining, sabotage, and subversion, which they justify by intoning “social justice” at every opportunity.
Just who are these people you never heard of?
These people are not faculty
They are mediocre bureaucrats, who posture as university people. They desperately want to be faculty. They desperately want to be considered “college educators” just like the faculty. They publish a voluminous self-valorizing literature that up-sells themselves as co-equals to faculty. They have contrived a fake curriculum to teach students. They even lobby to have a transcript provided for the fake classes in this fake curriculum.
But the reality is that they are ancillary support personnel and their off-campus professional organizations are dedicated to subverting American higher education (see below). They are clerks, enrollment managers, “coordinators,” advisors, and “residence life” managers.
In their propaganda literature, they call themselves “college educators,” just like the faculty. They run a fake curriculum on almost all campuses called the “co-curriculum.” Many, if not most of them, receive chit degrees from schools of education in topics like “educational leadership” and “student affairs administration.”
To elevate their self-image, many of them believe themselves to be tempered radicals, a term confected by two frustrated rebels in 1995 to operationalize Herbert Marcuse’s Long March through the Institutions.
These people are not faculty
In this way, they convince themselves that they serve a higher cause of their own contrivance, and they advertise it to others this way. They’ve been up-selling themselves for years.
What’s a “tempered radical”? Stripped of narcissistic self-valorization, a “tempered radical” is nothing more than an organization saboteur. The tempered radical literature offers a raison d’etre for those who work explicitly to undermine the institution that hired them to perform particular functions.
Here is the Cover and Table of Contents from this year’s first issue of About Campus, just last month. It espouses the doctrine that has informed many of the hate-filled racialist street demonstrations both on and off-campus since October of last year.
One of the more interesting articles for these student affairs clerks is the need for them to “confront and resist” something that is called “white Christian hegemony in higher education.” Does this appear to be the purview of dormitory managers or orientation organizers? Did you know this is what they discuss among themselves, how they perceive themselves and their function in the university?
Should these topics and this agenda be the main focus of student affairs apparatchiks in the university, who make dorm-room assignments and conduct scavenger hunts? Bear in mind that this journal is for the ancillary support staff of “student affairs,” folks hired to keep students happy, healthy, housed, and fed.
This is the staff that ensures the pizza is hot and the sound system works for karaoke night. These are not faculty. The workshops and teach-ins these folks administer in the fake curriculum are not classes in the actual curriculum.
These people are not faculty
You can be confident that none of this material finds its way onto the university web-site. None of it will appear in the “parents portal” of your school. It doesn’t appear in the curated material presented by university presidents to sleepy and oblivious boards of trustees.
In fact, the university’s PR team will do its best to keep the actual activities it subsidizes hidden from the inquisitive eyes of parents, donors, alumni, and boards of trustees.
But these over-reaching bureaucrats have big plans for college students and would like nothing better than to be mistaken for faculty in their ongoing campaign to “boldly transform higher education” for Marx and Mao, and Fanon and Freire. And to continue to abuse students by controlling the environment of campuses in a project that they call milieu management. The foremost scholar of totalitarian thought reform movements, Dr. Robert J. Lifton, called this project milieu control. The similarity isn’t accidental.
But the most important point in all of this, of course, is to remember that . . .
These people are not faculty