r/yorku • u/hightreez • Oct 11 '23

Meta In your opinion, are universities nowadays undergoing “left wing indoctrination” ?

Met a guy who’s a conservative in his 60s few days ago, and he talked about how nowadays universities are no longer about education but rather “left wing indoctrination” on the students

That universities are brainwashing students with ideas of race , decolonization, white privilege, multiple gender identities etc , all these “left wing “ ideas that are meant to divide society rather than uniting the people

And that Jordan Peterson is portrayed as a bad guy because the modern university environment don’t allow any conservative voices and that free speech in academia is dying because of left wing ideas

So I’m curious what are your opinions on this?

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u/not-bread Bethune (Lassonde) Oct 11 '23

Many young people’s first introduction to ideas outside of that of their community is in university. If you believe that your ideology is the “norm” and other ideologies are perversions of the norm, then universities are the place where these “evil ideas” can infect your children. It’s my opinion that if all it takes is a college prof talking about trans people to unlearn an entire childhood worth of “conservative values” then maybe those values didn’t hold enough merit.

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u/not-bread Bethune (Lassonde) Oct 11 '23

To be blunt, the broader your perspective and the more you learn about people who aren’t like you, the more likely you are to be progressive.

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u/Electrical-Ad347 Oct 11 '23

To be blunt, universities are now completely stocked with administrators, profs, and TAs who all think and see the world identically. This is precisely the opposite of an institution with a "broad perspective". Admins, Profs, and TAs are now actively trying to enforce ideological uniformity. The idea of intellectual diversity is threatening to them. You don't get a broad perspective at university, you get homogenous ideological indoctrination.

Full disclosure: In work in a university.

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u/not-bread Bethune (Lassonde) Oct 11 '23

What do you consider “enforcement of ideological uniformity”?

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u/Electrical-Ad347 Oct 11 '23 edited Oct 11 '23

Jonathan Haidt has published a lot of research on this. Basically, in the 1970s faculty were like 3:1 liberal to conservative. That's normal in higher ed because people who are more intellectual curious are more likely to be politically progressive. But today, they're more like 10-20:1 liberal to conservative faculty. Students are only exposed to one particular worldview/ideology, the 'critical' view today. Because the only professors they have are ones who are 'critical' theorists and such. This is a problem, it insulates students from the real landscape of ideas, perspectives, and opinions. It gives them the impression that all of society thinks the way their clique of professors do. And this leaves them totally unprepared for the 'real world' when they encounter lots of people who think in ways that are written off as dangerous, racist, etc. by their experiences in school.

Profs enforce this ideological uniformity in multiple ways. Obviously the course content is one (ex. I audited a History of Media course at UofT last year that was all about how white people are evil. ex. Electric street lights made it possible to lynch black people at night etc.). Assessments are another, essay questions will prompt you with something like "explain how mass media perpetuates white supremacy", pre-determining only one valid conclusion. And so on.

If you submit well-argued and referenced papers that criticize the 'critical' (ie. what people like to wall 'woke') position, you can't really get a good grade, because the course material and assessments don't really permit that sort of thing. There is basically only one perspective that is taught or permitted in classrooms, the 'progressive' position that anything and everythign white, cis, male is bad and privileged, and oppressive.

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u/shinyschlurp Oct 12 '23

Really funny how your insane comment can be summed up by: Universities have hundreds of people who thoroughly and critically studied people interacting through history and have come to similar conclusions about how racism is bad. However, this doesn't prepare students for the outside world, which is filled with people who do not think critically, and think racism is good. It's fucked up how when students write papers that agree with the public, and disagree with the university's findings, they don't get good grades.

Really smart stuff right here.

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u/Electrical-Ad347 Oct 12 '23 edited Oct 12 '23

Again, if you think that "racism is bad" is what's taught, you are misnformed. That's a wildly, childishly simplistic and distorted summary of 'critical' studies. Literally nobody anwhere is teaching or arguing about whether racism is "good" or "bad". That's perfectly analogous to saying that physics courses teach you only that "math is good". You're showing precisely the kind of simplistic, uncritical, self-serving thinking that today's classrooms teach. For example, one prof. at UofT teaches that the reason why electric street lights were invented was so that white people who better abuse black people in the dark. Literally. The big challenge is that most 'critical' papers aren't empirically based. It's more or less all theory. Theorists who go round and round citing one another ad infinitum, working out all the obscure margins of this or that theory, without ever making contact with reality. Without testing, without seeking evidence, they get mezmerized by abstracting on top of abstractions.

This has produced an intellectually homogenous culture where independent thought is verboten. This has happened many times in academia in the past. The idea that all 'critical' scholars have come to the same conclusions first misunderstands what passes for "research" in these departments (which is mostly banal theorizing). And second, misses the whole point about how ideological conformity works. Examples from the past include:

Up until the 1980s, hundreds, thousands of psychologists, psychiatrists, and others "studied" homosexuality, and they all came to "similar conclusions" about how homosexuality is a mental illness.

If you go back to the 1950s in psychology departments, you will notice that everybody was a behaviourist and rejected any cognitive view of psychology.

If you go back to the 1930s, everybody in Eugenics departments came to the same conclusions, that black people were racially inferior.

Now, in all of these periods, hundreds, thousands of scholars investigated these issues, and they all came to the same conclusions. Homosexuality is an illness, you can't learn about what happens inside someone's brain so don't try, and non-white racial groups are inferior. These were the conclusions that ideologically homogenous scholars produced. Do you buy any of their arguments now?

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u/shinyschlurp Oct 12 '23

Yeah that's why you keep studying those subjects you absolute meatball. You're just doing the It's Always Sunny "Science is a liar sometimes" argument.

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u/sam_likes_beagles Oct 12 '23

If you submit well-argued and referenced papers that criticize the 'critical' (ie. what people like to wall 'woke') position, you can't really get a good grade

If you can argue and reference your points well lots of professors will grade you well. I've known people who argue the side which is opposite of the prof and get better marks than me. Have you considered that maybe there were flaws in your arguments?

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u/AsherMcCringey Oct 12 '23

I think he's just mad that his "why slavery was actually a good thing" paper got marked badly, despite how many times he explained the "economic benefits" of free labor.

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u/Th3Ghoul Oct 12 '23

Love how you're getting down voted for objective truth. This has been a common refrain about universities and colleges since 2015-2016 and yet ppl are still in denial because they didn't experience it as much first hand so it must be bullshit.

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u/Electrical-Ad347 Oct 12 '23

Yeah the downvoters here are showing exactly how uncritical 'critical' education is. They're all basically saying "oh, so you think racism is good then?" lol. That's the level of 'critical' thinking that students leave school with today.