Red Flags Indicate Threat Situations for College Students
By Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD
On the university campus, ideological threat situations can develop in any number of ways.
Academic survival depends on recognition of these situations, who engineers them, and how to counter them.
One particularly high-threat time on campus is the beginning of the fall term. With their arrival on campus in the fall, college students, particularly freshmen, are pummeled with a cascade of programs and activities by grinning student affairs types.
If you are one of these incoming students, switch on your critical faculties with these people. A lot more is going on besides free pizza, cornhole competition, and karaoke.
It’s important to be alert for when a campus threat environment develops, and this means learning the tells of thought reform.
Be suspicious of the the big smiles and the endlessly chorused mantra of “inclusion and belonging.“ That’s vapid Cultspeak more appropriate to a retirement home than to an institution of higher learning.
Recognize the Red Flags of the threat environment. Learn the tells of the thought reformers, whether in the residence halls, or in the classrooms, or in strange workshops called “difficult dialogues“ or “courageous conversations“ or something similarly named.
In BRUTAL MINDS, I provide to students a series of Red Flag warnings to indicate when a student is in a threat situation. When staffers or workshop “facilitators“ begin using a strange vernacular, cock an eyebrow — you’re in the presence of cult believers.
Here’s the Red Flag:
BRUTAL MINDS offers a series of Red Flags like this one — “tells“ — that indicate a student has entered the province of fraudulent “transformative education“ that is conducted by underqualified staffers with the obligatory master’s degree in “educational leadership“ and who up-sell themselves as “college educators.“
These are not faculty, and what they do is not coursework in the curriculum.
These folks are overreaching and unqualified in the academic space. If you are a college student, they rely on your willing and docile compliance and they desperately want you to “trust“ them and “make yourself vulnerable.“ Their entire fraudulent enterprise is dependent on your investment of trust.
This is precisely what you do not want to do.
Trust is earned. They haven’t earned it.
Moreover, if you pay close attention to their cultic ideological spiel, you come to understand that you have great reason to distrust them.
Learn and heed the Red Flags.