The Myth of Faculty "Indoctrination"

Of all the foolish things posted online by prominent people last week, perhaps the most foolish came from the veteran far-right journalist and agitator Dinesh D’Souza. “Tyler Robinson,” he wrote on X, “is every conservative parent’s worst nightmare. Send your kid to college where he is radicalized into a violent ‘antifascist’ by the sly, scheming leftist professors. We need to put radical academia on trial along with its cherished product, Tyler Robinson.” D’Souza neglected to mention that Robinson’s entire exposure to college consisted of one semester in a pre-engineering program at Utah State University, followed by enrollment at a technical college where the programs include plumbing, HVAC repair and EMT training. Perhaps some “sly, scheming leftist professor” snuck Frantz Fanon or Angela Davis into a class on compressors or CPR, but, somehow, I doubt it.

But when it comes to the nefarious influence of higher education on American youth, the American right has fallen into a deep rabbit hole of conspiracy thinking that has only a tangential relation to reality. Its members take as articles of faith that, to quote President Trump, our universities have “become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” and that “academics have been obsessed with indoctrinating America’s youth.” And now, in many places where the right has power, it is purging professors and administrators it considers guilty of this “indoctrination,” cutting funding for programs it considers objectionable, and pushing universities to turn rightward by making “ideological diversity” hires. Just in the past week, examples include Berkeley being pressured into naming 160 faculty, students, and other community members to the federal government in connection with “alleged antisemitic incidents,” Indiana University moving to implement post-tenure review that will make it easier to punish or dismiss faculty for political reasons, and Texas A&M firing a long-time lecturer who introduced themes of gender and sexuality into a class on young adult literature.

There is, of course, absolutely nothing new about the right’s moral panic on this issue. The fear that teachers are corrupting their students goes all the way back to Socrates, whom Athens condemned to death on this and other charges. In France, the long battles over whether the Catholic Church or the secular state should control the educational system took for granted that the other side was exerting a dangerous influence over children’s moral and political development. In the US, the 1925 Butler Act, which made it illegal for Tennessee schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” and led to the conviction of John Scopes, was prompted by a legislator reading “in the papers that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense." The current panic on the American right traces back directly to the condemnations of “political correctness” in the 1980s, exemplified by Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.

Are the right’s charges unfounded? One problem in evaluating the issue is that accusations of “indoctrination” often come bundled with ones about “cancel culture,” deplatforming, ideological peer pressure, and antisemitism. On some campuses, these things have been real problems, and university administrators have failed to deal with them effectively. But these are also problems that emanate, in the first instance, from within student bodies. They are separate from the supposed problem of indoctrination by a radical faculty. But it is principally the faculty that Trump and his allies have placed in their sights. Do the charges of indoctrination have any merit?

It is undeniable that American university faculty, especially in the humanities and social sciences, have political sympathies well to the left of the average American’s. A good number of these faculty do in fact believe that the United States is a systemically racist, settler colonialist, imperialist nation and assign readings that support this view. Ethnic studies programs and departments, and programs and departments of gender and sexuality studies, trace their origins to the liberation movements of the 1960s. Perhaps there are faculty appointed in these units who oppose the basic tenets of these movements, but they cannot be many. A few months ago, self-proclaimed “anti-woke” commentators called attention to a study of publicly available U.S. college syllabi which found that Judith Butler was assigned more frequently than Plato, Edward Said more frequently than Kant, and Michel Foucault more frequently than anyone.

Parenthetically, I have my doubts about this study, for the simple reason that, as far as I can see, it only counts print editions. Since Butler, Said, and Foucault are all still under copyright, professors need to assign print editions. They can assign Plato, Kant and most other older canonical authors by linking to any number of publicly available texts online. But no matter. I’ll stipulate that Foucault et al. are very frequently assigned.

But before we rush to draw conclusions from these various data, let’s keep a few other points in mind.

First, the fields in which “sly, scheming, left-wing professors” might have a hope of indoctrinating students into their nefarious ideologies represent only one, relatively small sector of the US university system. The most common US college major, is—no surprise—business, accounting for nearly a fifth of all bachelor’s degrees. Business, the health professions, biological sciences, psychology and engineering together account for over half. More people receive a bachelor’s degree in physical education than in English Literature. The vast majority of university research funding goes to the natural sciences and engineering. In universities with medical schools, their faculty often account for over half of all total faculty. Incidentally, in Tyler Robinson’s home state of Utah, the four most popular authors assigned in college classes are authors of math and psychology textbooks (the fifth, admittedly, is Karl Marx).

Secondly, to state the entirely obvious, the fact that a professor has left wing views and assigns Michel Foucault hardly means that they are out to “indoctrinate” naïve students. I have been in academia my entire adult life. I know professors at a wide range of institutions in the humanities and social sciences. Many of them are indeed very left-wing. Many of them assign Michel Foucault and Karl Marx. Very few of them come anywhere near the caricature of them that circulates on the right. Many more of them bend over backwards to make students with different opinions welcome in their classes. Let’s also remember that the dreaded “tenured radicals” who supposedly moved straight from 1960’s activism into the academy are now mostly retired. The right likes to circulate clips of students challenging left-wing faculty and being punished for doing so (here, for instance, in the case of the fired Texas A&M lecturer). But there is an entire right-wing movement, driven by organizations such as Professor Watchlist (founded by Charlie Kirk), which encourages confrontations with faculty, precisely in order to generate such clips and expose professors as dangerous.

And to add yet another entirely obvious point, assigning a book does not mean endorsing its conclusions. I assign Karl Marx, but not because I agree with him on most points, or because I want to turn my Princeton students into little Marxists. I do so because he is one of the most influential social theorists ever to have lived, and a historical figure of enormous importance. I doubt many of the people who assign Plato agree with his political prescriptions (at least, I hope not), but no one on the right seems to deplore his appearance on reading lists.

Furthermore, um, have you ever met, or been, an adolescent? If so, you might remember that there are a lot of things more likely to influence you than a (most likely) uncharismatic, middle-aged professor assigning a difficult text like Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. There are your friends. Your parents. Religious institutions. Fraternities or sororities, if you belong to one. Your cultural heroes, whether found in sports, entertainment, or (more and more) among the deeply online. If Judith Butler or Angela Davis went to give a lecture at the University of Michigan, I sincerely doubt they would get an audience even five percent of the number who show up for the university’s home football games—probably much less.

Another obvious point. Most students do not go to college solely for intellectual stimulation. They go to learn skills and gain credentials that will open the door to decent careers. They compartmentalize the different aspects of college life, and that is entirely normal. I have known many students who read Marx and Foucault with an open mind and learned a great deal from them, and then went straight into lucrative careers in finance, consulting or tech. Far, far more than the number who became academics or activists.

Finally, note that the audience for the most left-wing faculty is in large part self-selecting. For every naïve, conservative or apolitical student who takes a course with a far-left faculty member and ends up radicalized, many more take the course because they are themselves radical already, and are looking to deepen, strengthen and support their existing convictions.

As proof of all of the above, we should remember that despite our universities having supposedly “become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics” bent on indoctrinating students, the students have somehow singularly failed to get indoctrinated. In the 2024 election, young white men, in particular, gravitated strongly towards Donald Trump. And as the right has not ceased to repeat over the past week, the late Charlie Kirk was enormously successful in building support for his views among young people—more successful than any single figure on the left, to say nothing of any professor, or collection of professors.

So even if you think that “progressive ideology,” or “wokeness,” is posing problems on campus, please don’t fall for the charge of “indoctrination” by left-wing faculty. It is nonsense, and worse: a pretext being used shamelessly by the right to attack the university system and bring it under government control.