Are Professors Indoctrinating Their Students?
Don't believe the talking points
In the wake of all of the “anti-woke” outrage, performative legislation, and actual institutional harm being done in places like New College of Florida, professors are getting the short end of the stick. Politicians and critics quickly claim that they want to put and end to the never-ending indoctrination of today’s young people. For example, Chris Rufo made this claim on Twitter yesterday:
For decades, conservatives have ceded the universities to the most intolerant and ideological factions of the Left. We've been paralyzed by the fear of specious accusations of "censorship." No more. We must restore public authority over public institutions. We must govern.
The argument is that these left-leaning professors (many of whom may in fact vote for Democrats) are poisoning the minds of their students. They either do this is subtle ways by excluding conservative ideas from their courses or explicit ways that require students to parrot the party line in order to pass the class.1
Ta-Nehisi Coates observed last night on All In With Chris Hayes, that it wasn’t that long ago that conservatives were making fun of “snowflakes” who needed “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”. It’s interesting to see how that logic got reversed once it was in conservatives’ political interests.
As a sociology professor who spent four decades in Christian Universities, I know a bit about managing the diversity of student ideas and the difficulty they have with the discipline’s material. This is especially true when conservative students (of which there are many) hear ideas from a progressive professor. They still have to feel safe and know that I am looking out for their best long-term interests.
In fact, that is true of most professors even in secular institutions.2 On his Why Is This Happening podcast this week, Chris Hayes interviewed Dr. Jonathan Cox, sociology professor at the University of Southern Florida. Cox, the only black professor in his department, was scheduled to teach two classes on race relations in the Fall of 2022. After the Stop Woke act passed in Florida, he had to consider what to do with those classes. Should he teach them as scheduled and risk becoming a cause celebre and thereby losing his job? Or should he cancel them and take on “safer” courses. Not knowing exactly how the law would be implemented, he opted for the second option.
The interview gave Cox the opportunity to unpack his teaching philosophy. He prefers class discussion to lecture, so he keeps lectures short. He provides students with readings from a variety of perspectives and has them discuss the authors’ perspectives. So maybe professors like Jonathan Cox and me don’t intend indoctrination, but isn’t it possible that years of schooling have trained our students to intuitively believe the views of their professor?3
As it turns out, we actually do have a good indication of how students view the indoctrination question. This week, the University of Wisconsin system released a survey on exactly this question. They wound up with data on over 10,000 students from across the state.
There’s a lot of great data here, but let’s start with the central question about indoctrination. They asked if faculty members generally encourage a wide variety of viewpoints or if they discourage diversity of thought (as the critics believe).
System wide, 56% of students say that their instructors often or extremely often support diverse views. In contrast, only 9% said that instructors discourage variability of thought.
The survey data is broken down by a number of subcategories. While it’s disappointing that the figures aren’t better for the social sciences relative to other fields, the contrast of supporting vs discouraging diverse views isn’t even close. Even among the “very conservative” students, instructors come off as plus 14.3% in supporting diverse views. The gap for the “moderate” student 45.5%.
Nearly 40% of students say that their faculty are willing to hear from “students with unpopular views” and only 18% would be trying to discourage such views. Over a third of students system-wide have felt that they needed to address particular positions as part of an assignment but that falls short of believing they were being indoctrinated.
Another part of the survey addressed why students keep their views to themselves. Not surprisingly, over 60% said it was because of how their peers would respond, considerably less than those who worried about the instructor or their grade4.
In general, students were open to having controversial speakers on campus (from any perspective) and support the university’s right to make sure speakers and audiences are safe. The students have an overall sense of first amendment protections vs institutional prerogatives.
So the students at New College of Florida were clear that they didn’t feel indoctrinated.5 Jonathan Cox goes out of his way to provide balance at CFU. Students across the state of Wisconsin (they aren't all from Madison!) said that they didn't experience indoctrination.
So, at the end of the day, who are you going to believe? Students actually attending classes in our colleges and universities? Or pundits and politicians whose livelihood depends on perpetuating indoctrination fears?
Trust the students.
The former administrator in me is quick to point out that the latter is particularly irresponsible and should result in a meeting with the department chair or dean. Grades should never be a punishment. If the student fails to critique ideas with which she disagrees, that’s a different thing but even then I’d advise the professor to tread very carefully.
In spite of what Kevin Sorbo would have you believe.
Early in my career, I had a student who was majoring in economics and minoring in sociology. He seemed to thrive on the contrast between the two disciplines. Navigating the different views from professors he trusted gave him a great experience. I wish I knew where he is now.
Although three in four “very conservative” students are sure that would be the result. Perhaps they listen to very conservative folks like Rufo.
I saw one report on NCF where a student claimed he was far more likely to read Adam Smith as Karl Marx.
It should be obvious that my use of the second person as the comment continues isn't directed at John. I write to conservatives:
The indoctrination claim is given teeth by, for instance, English professors deciding to teach "cultural studies" with no background in anthropology, sociology, or psychology. It's shattered by simply opening the directory to any university and counting even the possible liberals against the inevitable conservatives. Why, and to what detrimental effect, would a professor of mechanical engineering act as a liberal indoctrinator? If we started at motive and opportunity, we'd end at "nothing to see here."
One of your heroes let Newt Gingrich teach history, and another one let Mitch Daniels do the same. I'm sure the Everett Massacre is a staple in their "classes." The Wharton School of Business is going to Hell for the sin of the Gentleman's C. Does that bother you?
We can't teach African American history, but any Fox junkie can register for the several military history courses offered at the local university. Those will never DeSantised by a conservative, not as long as he draws from the hip.
One nearly hilarious irony, except for what it's done to English departments, is that even the most "Marxist" postructuralist professors aren't really liberals, at least not in practice. They vote for Democrats, but how's that been working out? Whatever they might say, the French continentalists practicing philosophy without a license (as one of my former colleagues put it) are happily corporate, trying to maximize their salaries by competing with one another for territory, expecting job security according to a tenure system of hazing and clubbish approval that they lord over their supposed inferiors as if it were based on merit, and publishing as often to advance their careers as to contribute anything to cultural understanding. I've known English professors as convinced they were scientists as the anti-masker clowns wearing MAGA hats. They're stuck in Jameson's late capitalism, but they sure talk a good proletariat game. You have nothing to fear.
The business school at a university is looking for liberals. It can't seem to find them by "luring" their MBA professors "from the private sector." Even their adjuncts make two to three times what those awful indoctrinating history adjuncts make, because in right-wing university America, the average adjunct salary is a magic number no one actually earns. It exists in an empty bracket between the adjunct number and the "adjunct" number. Again, just test the odds on this: Liberal contingent labor makes less.
Yes, if you're a semi-qualified black lesbian, then your percentage chance at six-figure employment in the woke university is probably precisely the opposite of what it is in the "private sector." Is that what you conservatives are angry about? That you don't get to corner the market on racism and gender discrimination? Remember, every time an unjustified Affirmative Action hire is made, five Proud Boys get their wings.
Throw a dart into the athletic department, the staff of which permeates every aspect of university life, and hit a liberal. I dare you.
Please find me the liberals in the Construction Management program. You might have a crack at finding a few in the College of Engineering, of which the Construction Management program is kind of a jowly, barking mascot, but again, so what? Is a Hadron collider a gateway drug to feminism? Are you worried about closet liberals in civil engineering who get drunk at parties turning sophomores against oil companies? If so, then you should try stand-up comedy.
Are you more pissed because the STEM professors are speaking unintelligible English as their third language to lecture halls of 200 students? (Pro Tip: That's a horrible indoctrination method, so you should do your best to keep a recently arrived "Asian" woman in front of that calculus class. NOT ONE of those 200 kids will become a liberal).
Conservatives don't seem to care that we're educating students from Saudi Arabia and China who will pay full freight to take their degrees home so they can support into their own nations' economies. Often enough against ours. They don't need financial aid, though, right? So that's straight academic capitalist profiteering, baby! I guess liberal indoctrination to globalism is fine when the sheik makes sure the provost retires a multi-millionaire. No one in that arrangement--down to the (male) student from Riyadh who got an American degree in supply chain management--is a liberal.
How many liberals does it take to screw in a lightbulb in the Computer Science department, and how is it even remotely possible for them to indoctrinate anyone to wokeness as they do so? Is C+ really a code for Marxist rebellion? Or, perhaps, the people making claims about "the universities" being liberal are doing the coding. You know, in Q+.
A claxon should go off every time a liberal is spotted among the C-suite administrators making more than $200k a year. You will never find less-liberal liberals than the ones who work 70 hours a week trying to justify their existences in the midst of administrative bloat while they create adjunct pools or contingent labor budgets in order to fulfill the very purpose of a university. Go ahead and listen to them talk about how horrible the GOP is. They run the 21st century plantation system. Were it 1862 they'd be asking their house N what he thinks of all this mess.
I have worked at five universities, ranging in student population from 1,200 to 36,000, and I have never heard of a Board of Trustees member who would be recognized as a socialist progressive with an anti-capitalist indoctrination program in mind for the school. I have seen Lockheed Martin write the curriculum for an aero class. I've seen Eli Lilly threaten a working group that didn't produce the stats Lilly wanted in exchange for grant money. Rolls Royce wanted to set up shop in my latest university employer's garage. I'm sure it was to rally students against the 19th century labor laws of Indiana.
I'm a progressive who has been directly, viciously screwed over by so-called liberals. I have only peripherally been screwed over by conservatives, and at least they write into the contract how they're about to do it. To the very best of my ability, I've never indoctrinated a single person to anything but a sound and valid argument. I can sometimes gauge when that's working by how often I get shouted down by a bald woman with a nose piercing calling me a mansplainer within measurable proximity of some hill jack dip-spitting sophomore studying forestry calling me a snowflake on Facebook. My worst enemies at Purdue were in the English department, and some of my greatest supporters were in engineering and veterinary medicine. Is that evidence of my being a liberal indoctrinator? God, I hope so.
These blunt instruments in the anti-woke school of populist frenzy ought to be foam-fingered fans of the current university system. Big Ten universities like Purdue are selling their souls and their Colleges of Liberal Arts to become mere trade schools. They're widget factories, a right-winger's wet dream. But what so often happens when some conservative gets what he wants? He whines for more. He claims the liberal who sold out to centrism and gave away the store--from us to him--is a communist.
You chose a great subject and wrote a great piece on it, John. Thanks for indulging me here.