Wherever brutal minds get the upper hand, they destroy, they dumb down, they homogenize, and, if necessary, they stamp the face of opposition with the jackboot of outright repression.
They eliminate the opposition, they remove it, and they censor, block, and obliterate the record of knowledge—anything that gives the lie to the stunted intellectual parochialism that animates them.
They cancel.
These are ideologues, and they strut about American universities freely, they are paid well, and they are bent on the destruction of what they only dimly understand and certainly that which they played no role in creating.
What do brutal minds look like in action?
We have many examples from history, but no better snapshot of brutal minds at work can be found than the photos of smirking Nazi students and faculty hurling books into towering bonfires in May of 1933 in every German university city.
The old black-and-white photographs are faded, and some are cracked, putting an artificial distance between us and the grinning book-burners. This distance affords us the comfortable fiction that these people are somehow different from us, that we would never engage in the barbarism the pictures capture. That we would surely stand up to them.
The truth is that these photos capture a reality that is uncomfortably close to where we sit today.
Brutal minds are ubiquitous in the American university today, and they tirelessly harangue, wheedle, and often abuse the next generation of American youth. Behind a Potemkin façade, the university has been transformed dramatically from what alumni, parents, and donors imagine it to be.
The public façade of higher education conflicts sharply with the reality experienced by students, witnessed by faculty, and lamented by honorable staffers who just keep their heads down and survive until the next paycheck.
These are the neo-medievalists, motivated by social fantasy and pseudoscience and aiming to transform the university in accord with their primitive ideology. Most of them are ensconced in a bureaucracy called student affairs, and their mantra of social justice is the nearest thing to a cult that you will find in the university, outside of particular studies programs and institutes.
These brutal minds are dismantling the university’s intellectual heritage stone by metaphorical stone, not unlike barbarous tribes who dismantled the Roman coliseum for cheap building materials to construct their ill-designed shacks as Europe descended into the period that later scholars rightly branded the Dark Ages.
BRUTAL MINDS reveals the grotesque problems that plague the university . . . it identifies the anti-Enlightenment mediocrities who are responsible . . . and it charts a path forward to reclaim the university from the barbarians who threaten our students and the institution itself.