“The Department of Curriculum and Instruction is committed to advancing social justice through research, teaching, and service alongside the students and communities we serve. We engage in reflective practices to prepare educators, researchers, and professionals to build a more equitable world.” This was the mission statement of the department within the College of Education tasked with producing future K-12 teachers at the University of Kentucky when I was a student there.
If you were to scour the College of Education’s website for this type of rhetoric today, you wouldn’t even find a mission statement for the department of curriculum and instruction. All you would find in terms of a mission statement is for the college as a whole, which is a highly sanitized version of the aforementioned statement. This is likely due to people during the first couple years of this decade bringing attention to the fact that the department within the education college at the flagship university in the state is openly admitting that they’re hardcore leftists. Which, needless to say, doesn’t exactly jive with the worldview of most Kentuckians. We’re not California. And even most Californians probably wouldn’t want a bunch of leftists, and exclusively leftists, responsible for producing the people who go on to teach the children.
But even though raising attention to what’s going on within our education colleges and universities as a whole, and, therefore, getting them to change their messaging is a win, it still doesn’t ameliorate the problem of the faculty consisting of hardcore leftists. Therefore, the thinking within our universities still remains. And this thinking has been prominent in our universities for decades, and it’s only become more dominant in recent years. The result? American universities are ground zero for the problems in American society. Well, at least, the problems that are ideological in nature.
How in the hell did we get here?
Think of a parasite. Think of how a parasite works. It attaches itself to its host, leeches off of it, using the host’s strength against itself, and, eventually, after so much eating away at it, kills it.
This exact process is what America has been enduring for decades and is still currently enduring. This process has been foisted upon all of our institutions, but our education institutions in particular. And the honing in on education has been deliberate.
Now, I’m about to take you on a journey where the central topic is Marxism. But before I do, I want to make something crystal clear first. The following will not be your typical boomer-conservative rantings and ravings about Marxism—or socialism or communism—where any one of those three terms is just thrown out as a sort of boogeyman that should automatically inspire fear in your hearts and minds. It’s not the Cold War anymore. The Marxism that is relevant now is Cultural Marxism, or Wokeness, if you like, so I’m going to keep the focus there.
Cultural Marxism, and its impact on education, can ultimately be traced back to the work of one man: Antonio Gramsci. Now, I’m not the first person to draw attention to Gramsci. James Lindsay has been talking about him for years. And, yes, I know James, because he’s an ideological liberal, has gone a bit off the rails with his “Woke Right” thinking over the past year or so, but that doesn’t diminish the important work he’s done in researching and educating people on the origins of the ideological craziness in our society.
Gramsci’s ideas regarding culture and education can be summarized in just a few short quotes from an article about him from Teachers.Institute:
“At the heart of Gramsci’s theory is the concept of cultural hegemony. According to Gramsci, the ruling class maintains control not just through force, but through the manipulation of culture—ideas, values, and beliefs. This “hegemonic” control allows the ruling class to shape the worldview of society, making their interests seem natural or common sense. Education, in this sense, plays a key role in maintaining or challenging this dominance.”
“He believed that the working class could only achieve political power by first gaining cultural power. This would involve challenging the ideological dominance of the ruling class and creating new cultural institutions that reflect the interests and values of the working class. Education, for Gramsci, was a key site for this transformation. Through education, individuals could learn to challenge the cultural norms that perpetuate inequality and injustice.”
“For Gramsci, the process of social change begins with the development of ‘counter-hegemonic' ideas—ideas that challenge the dominance of the ruling class. Education plays a crucial role in this process by providing students with the tools they need to engage in critical thought, to analyze the world around them, and to question the assumptions that underlie the dominant social order. Gramsci envisioned education as a force for social change, one that could empower the oppressed to create a new cultural hegemony based on justice, equality, and collective well-being.”
In short, Gramsci, unlike Marx, understood that cultural coercion is equally as important and effective, if not more so, than forceful coercion, and education is an institution central to the process of cultural coercion. Gramsci is absolutely correct about the power that having cultural influence has on society. And many intellectuals realized this, and that Gramsci was onto something. So his ideas began to gain traction, and intellectual bedfellows, like Gygorgy Lukacs and, much later, Paulo Freire, who is much more directly related to education, began popping up.
His ideas became entrenched enough that by the time leftist furor became mainstream in the 1960s—Gramsci was operating primarily in the 1910s and 20s—thinkers like Rudi Dutschke were proposing similar ideas to his without even being influenced by him directly.
Dutschke was the man who uttered the famous “long march through the institutions” phrase in a 1967 speech:
“Revolution is not a short act when something happens once and then everything is different. Revolution is a long, complicated process, where one must become different…The process goes along this way, which I have once named “The Long March through the Established Institutions,” in which (institutions), through clarification, systematic clarification, and direct actions, awareness is brought to further minorities in and outside the university, in schools, in trade schools, in engineer schools, also technical universities and finally in factories, where workers are currently worrying about their jobs. The process has begun, and that is a long story, which right now has been set on its course by us.”
Sounds pretty similar to Gramsci, doesn’t it? And, unfortunately, Dutschke was correct about “the process” having begun. Yet, unlike the process for the Philadelphia 76ers, the process leftists set about to embark upon has been successful. They have claimed our institutions in society. And education is the chief victim of this conquest.
Look at the average college campus in America today. It’s very likely openly left-wing, and everyone knows it. And these campuses certainly are not welcoming environments to anyone who doesn’t fit into the left-leaning ideological box, despite these very same people on campuses claiming tolerance and diversity as virtues.
But don’t just take my word for it.
Take a look at some of this data from the Independent Institute. And, yes, it’s a lot, but it’s important, so bear with me:
“According to the most recently available HERI survey, liberal and far-left faculty members grew from 44.8 percent in 1998 to 59.8 percent in 2016-17. Liberal and far-left faculty no longer make up a plurality of American academics. They are now the clear majority.”
“The primary driver of this leftward shift is the growth of faculty members who identify as far left. Since 1992, this group has expanded from 4.2 percent to 11.5 percent of all university faculty. In sum, far-left faculty tripled in size and now sit at parity with all conservative faculty.”
“Although this trend is more pronounced in some academic disciplines than others, each domain has increased in left-wing identification since the 1990s. Samuel Abrams (2017) analyzed the HERI survey data across all disciplines and found a uniform leftward shift in every discipline between 1989 and 2014. At the same time, he confirmed the gap between the liberal arts and hard sciences, first noticed in Lipset and Ladd’s work, had dramatically increased. Whereas most STEM disciplines and professional degrees in fields such as healthcare and business still maintain a semblance of viewpoint diversity among their faculty, the humanities and social sciences have become monolithically left-leaning. In some fields, such as English and history, self-identified moderate faculty have diminished to a tiny minority, and conservatives are practically nonexistent.”
This perfectly explains the “history”—i.e., nonsense—we’ve seen over the last decade in that field. And as someone who got a humanities/social sciences degree (education), I can confirm that all of the faculty in this field are left-wing, at least at the University of Kentucky. Basically every professor had something related to Black Lives Matter, a rainbow flag, or pro-LGBTQ+ messaging on their office door, and it was all over the bulletin boards in the hallways.
But let’s keep going:
“In the 1989-90 HERI survey, only 21 percent of faculty indicated that their institutions placed a high priority on ‘helping students learn how to bring about change in American society.’ This figure increased to 33.2 percent in 2004-05 and 45.8 percent by the 2016-17 survey. The 2007-08 HERI survey added a question asking faculty whether they saw it as their own personal role to “encourage students to become agents of social change,” with 57.8 percent placing a high importance on this task. By 2016-17, this number increased to 80.6 percent of all faculty. Together, these data indicate that the leftward ideological shift among the professoriate has been accompanied by a clear rise in instructional approaches that prioritize political activism in the classroom.”
“Second, while Tyson and Oreskes correctly point to the growing popularity of business and STEM majors, they neglect the heavy curricular presence of mandatory general education classes in almost all undergraduate degree requirements. Humanities classes enjoy a disproportionate presence on the general education curriculum and, accordingly, have a much larger footprint within the faculty on most campuses. Almost all students take several semesters of mandatory courses in English, history, and other heavily politicized disciplines. By contrast, business and STEM classes are far less likely to be required as a condition of graduation. This implies that the average college student will experience extensive mandatory instruction in the most heavily skewed disciplines, irrespective of major, whereas only business and STEM majors will encounter the comparative political balance that is found within their chosen fields.”
The effects of this are measurable, by the way. Yuriy Karpov, in his academic article, “Elite Universities: Incubators of Leftist Ideology,” makes reference to the fact that “Georgetown University students openly announced they were ‘embarrassed’ to be Americans, and some of them admitted that ‘going to college shaped their anti-American perception.’” He was referencing an article from the New York Post.
But again, let’s keep going. Here’s one final quote:
“As Samuel Abrams (2018) has documented, left-leaning administrators dominate their conservative counterparts by a ratio of twelve-to-one, compared to a six-to-one ratio for university faculty…We suggest one probable explanation: administrative hiring tends to draw more heavily from the most politically skewed disciplines, many of which have an enormous glut of Ph.D. graduates and few faculty jobs to hire them.”
Whew, that was a lot. But I think I made my point about the successful leftist takeover of our institutions, particularly education, didn’t I?
But what’s the problem with the universities being firmly dug in on the left? Why does this matter?
Well, the Jeffersonian part of me tells me that uniform power typically isn’t a good thing for society, regardless of who or which side has power. But one side does have uniform power over our educational institutions, so we can’t restrict ourselves to intellectually residing in people’s abstract ideals of either power being evenly distributed or power being quite localized rather than centralized. And since one side does have uniform power, it begs the question as to which side can handle uniform power better.
Obviously, I’m biased, but I believe the right can handle uniform power significantly better than the left, particularly secular forms of left-wing thinking. And I don’t have to resort to the realm of the theoretical, like a left-winger, to prove this point. Like a true conservative, I can just point to reality.
Look at what happens whenever the left has uniform power, especially the hard left, which is more relevant for the purposes of this piece. Well, the Marxists got us over 100 million corpses last century, and the Marxists who took over our education institutions—the more Gramscite types, whether they know it or not—gave us the modern college campus in America. By contrast, the right adhere to the worldview which sprung out of Christianity, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome. You know, the worldview that built the civilization in which we all reside. Given these facts, does any independent minded individual genuinely still believe it possible that the left A) can handle uniform power? or B) adheres to a worldview that is either moral or grounded in reality? Maybe I’m being too favorable to my own argument, but I don’t think so. Everything these people touch turns to crap.
So this begs the ultimate question, the question that everything thus far has been building towards: What do we do about the fact that these people have complete control over our educational institutions?
Well, the ideal answer is to not let these people hold a position of power in any institution, but especially in those pertaining to education. Now, let me clarify this further. I’m not advocating these people be completely silenced or have violence come upon them. I’m not saying these people shouldn’t be permitted to express their hard-left views in the public square, which is social media now; go for it, I don’t care. I’m not saying students shouldn’t be allowed to express hard- left views; students should be allowed to. But what I am saying is that, ideally, positions of institutional power should not be allowed to be occupied by people with societally parasitic ideologies or worldviews because reality has irrefutably proven at this point that they can’t handle power. Plus, their worldview is deeply immoral, something else that, ideally, shouldn’t be allowed to possess institutional power.
But I wholly acknowledge how unrealistic this likely is, even though it would make our society infinitely better, because of probable lawsuits and a societal furor around “wrong-think” from our country’s true liberals (not the leftists—who are the people running these educational institutions). And let me discuss these liberals for a moment. You know how marijuana is sometimes referred to as a gateway drug? Well, that’s what liberalism is in the U.S. and the West more broadly now for the more hard-left forms of thinking. And that is so because liberalism today is secular. The secularism of today’s liberalism essentially all but guarantees you’re going to get, well, the types of people running our universities and educational institutions, because the moral framework of the worldview, which, obviously, is secular, doesn’t have the strength of an objective moral foundation to push back against the hard-left in the same way Christianity-based worldviews do. But I digress.
So if it’s likely unrealistic to totally bar these people from positions of power based purely on ideological or legal grounds, how can we feasibly get these people out of positions of power? The best answer I can come up with is going after the finances of these universities. Tax the living hell out of universities’ endowments, and threaten to cut funding. Bring universities to their knees financially. In other words, do a lot of the things the Trump administration is currently doing.
I wholeheartedly believe this is the best path to take because the people making money decisions at universities—not the administrators or professors, but the board of directors—are more driven by money than a commitment to ideology. As long as the money situation looks healthy and students keep attending the school, most university boards are perfectly happy to let crazy hard-left administrators and professors run rampant. What do they care? These people are often much too old and wealthy to have to worry about the long-term societal implications of the ideologies and worldviews engrossing their university. But if the money situation starts to go sideways and students stop showing up, I genuinely believe some, if not a majority, of these boards might be willing to start making some changes and listening to our demands. But I’ve never been the best predictor of things, and I’m stupid, so what do I know?
But regardless of what path we take, we must choose to actually take one because, again, our universities are ground zero for our problems in America today. I mentioned that the Trump administration is going after colleges, which is a good start, but we have to do more. We must take action and use all possible legal, legislative, political, ideological, societal, and cultural levers to cut out the parasite trying to kill our precious American body.
Sources:
https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-23-winter/the-hyperpoliticization-of-higher-ed/
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/37/2/elite-universities-incubators-of-leftist-ideology
https://teachers.institute/understanding-adult-education/antonio-gramsci-educational-theory-critical-thinking-cultural-hegemony/#cultural-hegemony-the-role-of-education
https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2018-11-29/boris.pdf