More on college indoctrination

Before Easter I had started a blog on the indoctrination occurring on college campuses. I wanted to continue this idea in a second blog today.

It’s not just outsiders who think there is a change in attitudes of teachers and their roles in colleges. Many faculty groups themselves declare indoctrination as their chief goal. A recent study by UCLA's prestigious Higher Education Research Institute found that more faculty now believe that they should teach their students to be agents of social change than believe that it is important to teach them the classics of Western civilization. Think about that for a minute—ignore our foundations in order to create sweeping changes in the social fabric of our culture. Scary.

Some university programs also unashamedly proclaim their political presuppositions and objectives openly. Here’s just one example: the mission statements of the Women's Studies program at UCLA prejudges the issues by declaring that it proceeds from "the perspectives of those whose participation has been traditionally distorted, omitted, neglected, or denied." Here’s another example: the Critical Race Studies program at the UCLA School of law announces that its aim is to "transform racial justice advocacy."

Even the well-known American Association of University Professors has changed dramatically in its understanding of its mission. In 1915, the AAUP affirmed that in teaching controversial subjects a professor should "set forth justly without suppression or innuendo the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue." But this changed recently. In 2007 and 2011, the AAUP came up with a new focus. It now says that restricting professors to the use of relevant materials and obliging them to provide a reasonably comprehensive treatment of the subject represent unworkable requirements because relevance and comprehensiveness can themselves be controversial. As an example of how far this group has come, last year the leadership of AAUP officially endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Again, this is a big issue deserving of more space than just this blog. So in a few days I’ll run a third blog that covers more of this concern.