This is the second in a series of local columns that seek to defend higher education against recent political attacks.
Since 2015, both Gallup and the Pew Research Center have documented a significant decline in Americans’ confidence in higher education. The most commonly cited reason for this decline is the perceived rise of liberal or political indoctrination in college classrooms.
As someone who has taught more than 2,000 college students over the last 18 years, I know how difficult—if not impossible—it is to indoctrinate students. How can we expect to fundamentally reshape a student’s worldview when we often can’t even get them to read the syllabus? The unfortunate reality is that many students engage with course material only to the extent that it affects their grade. For them, higher education has become a means to an end, not an end in itself.
To illustrate this point to my students, I often ask them a simple question: “Would you read the required textbook for this course if there were no quizzes or exams on it?” In nearly 20 years of teaching, I have yet to see a single hand go up. If the purpose of college is to pursue knowledge, why wouldn’t students want to absorb as much information as possible?
Does this mean that students graduate without learning anything or changing any of their views?
Absolutely not. Whether they intend to or not, students do learn — and one of the most important things they learn is how to think critically. College isn’t about telling students what to think; it’s about teaching them how to think.
A healthy belief system should be poked, prodded, questioned, and tested against facts and evidence. If a belief can’t withstand that scrutiny, it should be reevaluated. A person who refuses to engage in that process and clings to their beliefs regardless is, by definition, indoctrinated — the uncritical acceptance of a set of ideas. In this sense, the true purpose of higher education is to undo indoctrination.
An example is the “contentious” issue of gender. Recent federal and state directives make it clear that the difference between sex and gender is not widely understood. To oversimplify, sex is a biological trait while gender is a social characteristic. Think about how we treat babies. Before they are even born, boys are bought things that are blue or covered with cars, construction vehicles, and other “boy” things. Girls, of course, get pink, unicorns, princesses, and other “girl” things. Why do we do this? Does the anatomy one is born with determine whether they should get blue or pink? No – these are social expectations, gendered expectations. Gender is about how society views and what it expects of boys/men and girls/women. Any college course that discusses gender will begin by explaining this to the students – which is why the complaints about gender being taught tend to come from people outside of the classroom, not inside of it.
It’s a bit like walking past a house with the curtains drawn. You hear a man yell, “I’m going to beat you!” followed by children screaming. From the outside, it sounds alarming. But inside, the reality is far different: a father is simply playing Mario Kart with his kids. In the same way, people outside the university often hear about classroom discussions without understanding either the subject matter itself or the context in which it is taught.
In my view, the fear of indoctrination in higher education stems largely from fear of the unfamiliar. Many people don’t understand the concept of gender, the lived experiences of minorities, or what actually happens in the kinds of college courses that are frequently misrepresented in the media. The only real antidote to this fear is, ironically, more education.
Dr. Raymond Barranco is a Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University where he has been a faculty member since 2012. He currently lives in Caledonia, MS with his wife, three children, and two dogs.
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