America’s college and graduate experience is disintegrating before our eyes. What we think of as a “good education” is disappearing, a sort of communism-light replacing it. If this shocks you, it did me – until I had read so many new policies, new offices, rules, and mandates being pushed out, it no longer does.
While good students and good facility on good campuses still exist, the beachhead of a non-political American education is fast eroding. On many campuses, objectivity has been replaced – intentionally and belligerently – by straitjacket conformity with subjective new norms and mandates, many leftist.
All this is happening under our noses, many not realizing it. Almost overnight, on state and Ivy League campuses, leftist political ideology has replaced traditional emphasis on hard learning, original thought, meaningful life lessons, broadening of the mind, deep dives into hard or challenging ideas, and any sense that objective, non-political academic discipline is welcomed. Everything is now – by policy – leftist.
Today, institutional “group-think” is not just swelling, encouraged, but mandated. Anyone who dares challenge leftist norms risks suddenly being investigated, fired, removed, forced to resign, retire, humiliated, or the student level given a poor grade, bad recommendation, no awards, reported to the administration for discipline, prejudice, racism, or just ignored, insulted, ostracized, mocked, or excluded.
Thus, if someone challenges the Marxist term “equity” – look it up if your browser allows – as a concept diametrically opposed to traditional American belief in the individual, free speech, free exercise of religion, individual thinking, individual rights, and our Constitution’s premises, instead pushing group-think, group-anger, group-identity, and leveling or forced redistributive justice, they can be fired.
Likewise, if anyone dares say that “diversity,” historically and in fact, does not refer just to skin color or origin or sex habits, but involves inviting different ideas to the table to get a better understanding of truth or mutual understanding, spurring debate among controversial views, they can be fired.
Thus, so pervasive and perverse is this new push nationally to silence those who defend traditional individual liberties and equality, vocalize their faith, speak for settled biology, genetics, free markets, or demand individual thought or merit supersede conformity and mediocrity – to say these policies are just wrong – that even criticism is often swiftly punished. Lawsuits percolate, but are few.
In short, the old understanding that a college and graduate education was about learning to think and think harder, was the next step in a solid, life-relevant, non-political, objectively sound, and nationally respectful life, is fading.
Gone is respect for free speech, for the original and thus uneasy development of competing ideas, for critical review and criticism of these perversely conformist norms, or any reference to where they came from, what damage they are doing, how they undermine, dishonor, and even mock original thought.
Administrative offices – sometimes called DEI or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – become, by definition Orwellian and excluding, of what they do not want to hear, se, acknowledge, understand or permit.
They become oppressors of individual thought, of free, open, often controversial exchanges of strongly held views, punishers of honest dialogue, real thought, and anyone who is a critic for objective reasons of this movement away from merit and reality for subjectivity and enforced conformity.
In effect, by using terms no one knows the history of, by redefining these terms to make them seem innocuous, friendly, and fair – then demanding all accept the new definitions, that the policies cannot be debated, that objectors will be fired, demeaned, isolated, or sued, they intimidate all fresh thought.
These heavy-handed offices and leftist policies are effectively killing the whole idea of the liberal arts academy, which was formed – from the days of Dante at Oxford – to stir controversy, to surface truth from a fierce debate over what it was, whether from a religious or secular perspective, from pro or limited government, from Ptolemy to Copernicus, from Newton to Einstein.
If I could look every one of the administrators in the eye, face them squarely and point out the truth to them, it would be this: You either know what you are doing, you are bought into freedom-suppressing ideology, which perverts words to suppress individual equality, robust learning, diverse ideas, and inclusion of all – that is, you not want free and open thought, are afraid of it – or not.
A real educator is not afraid of individuals being individuals, but wants that, not group-think. A real educator does not spurn diverse ideas in the name of diversity. A real educator does not exclude asserting that is inclusive. A real educator does not fear losing in the marketplace of ideas, but wants truth.
More bluntly whatever God, Godless power, or Government these newly assertive, anti-free speech, anti-traditional, anti-individual, anti-educational administrators and educators think they are serving, they disserve the country and truth. To me, that warrants a very serious relook.
Bottom line: Educators afraid of ideas are not educators, they are indoctrinators. Suppressing free thought and speech is not only anti-educational but un-American.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
