Americans were shocked when, after the October 7 Hamas massacres, many campuses exploded—not in outrage against the perpetrators, but in support of them.
Promotion of “Palestine” became the new leftist cause célèbre, particularly on campuses. It didn’t matter that Hamas stood for everything the Left supposedly was against: genocide, hate, bigotry, and the subordination of women and homosexuals. Leftist organizers’ ultimate goal is not tied to particular issues. For them, issues are merely tools to destroy barriers to centralized power and to create enough chaos to enable them to seize that power.
Why the Campuses?
For someone who wants to foster chaos, college campuses are ideal recruiting grounds. A college campus collects masses of energetic, uninformed, naive, and naturally rebellious young people all in one place. In recent decades the flow of federal dollars—grants and student loans—has further engorged the campuses, thereby making it easier to spark mob behavior.
Students at colleges and universities often are exempt from the civil justice system that governs the rest of us. Campuses often negotiate arrangements that exclude the ordinary police, and the campus police usually treat disruptors very gently. Thus, when a student acts like a thug, the consequences are likely to be less serious than if you or I did the same.
Still another reason colleges and universities are ideal recruiting grounds for leftist organizers is that many of those institutions indoctrinate their students into sympathy with leftist causes.
It’s Been Going on for a Very Long Time
Some have suggested that campus bigotry is a recent development—becoming a problem only after the George Floyd riots, when college administrators began to practice “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” by hiring intellectual barbarians as administrators and teachers. This suggestion is wrong. Campus intolerance and indoctrination began long ago.
My personal college experience—over 50 years ago—is representative. I attended Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Lafayette was reputed to be somewhat more conservative than most of its rivals, but the program was not conservative or even balanced. When the school cancelled classes for a symposium on the Vietnam war, the nine-person panel featured eight faculty and students against our effort to defend South Vietnam and only a single student—yours truly—in support. In fact, I do not recall hearing a single paid conservative speaker at the college during the four years I was there. But I do recall being inflicted by a parade of liberals and leftists: Ramsey Clark, Stokely Carmichael, James Farmer, Michael Harrington, and many others.
As I understand it, this situation continues at Lafayette. Recently, a fellow alumnus responded to the lack of conservative speakers by offering to pay all expenses if the college invited one to campus. The school’s administrators evaded the offer.
My department—history—was one of the better ones. But every history professor was liberal, and most of them pushed the liberal line. I remember that I received improved grades if I included liberal cliches in my term papers.
Textbooks also contributed to indoctrination. The principal text for the freshman American history course was Thomas A. Bailey’s “The American Pageant.” This book was assigned widely at colleges and universities throughout the country, and may have been the single most important tool for teaching history at Lafayette.
As a historian myself, I know that college history texts should provide students with central facts, and then inform them of different possible interpretations. “The American Pageant” was not composed that way. Although it was written in an entertaining manner and made occasional bows to objectivity, it was largely propaganda—and very effective propaganda, too.
I recalled “The American Pageant” recently when asking myself how I’d internalized the idea that progressive icon Woodrow Wilson was a great president—which he certainly wasn’t.
I still have my copy. It tells us that progressives like Wilson are good and government regulation is good, but conservatives, businessmen, and free enterprise are usually bad.
Here are a few illustrations from the pages of the second edition. They address domestic policy from 1901 to 1921—the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Wilson, as well as the beginning of the term of Warren Harding:
Page 651: “The many-webbed railroads, having grown arrogant like the trusts, were . . . badly in need of restraint.”
Pages 653 through 656: a fawning description of Theodore Roosevelt’s federal land grabs, held to be necessary to end “the squandering of our birthright.” The passage contains no acknowledgment that extension of private property rights might have better controlled the “squandering,” or the constitutional and political problems resulting from massive federal land ownership.
Page 658: Progressive actions to facilitate monetary inflation were “long-overdue fiscal reforms.”
Page 662: New progressive laws were “A basketful of badly-needed legislation.”
Page 665: New progressive laws were “Landmarks in Social Progress.”
Page 666: Capitalism is the “old dog-eat-dog philosophy of free enterprise.”
Page 697: “Other enlightened social reforms were signed by Wilson’s busily scratching pen.”
The bias extends to individual personalities as well as to issues. Thus, “Wilson was a moving orator who could rise on the wings of spiritual power to soaring eloquence” (page 688). But the more conservative Charles Warren Fairbanks was “a frigid standpatter” (p. 656). The 38-year old Franklin Roosevelt was “tall, handsome, vibrant” (page 762). But in the more conservative Warren Harding, “the warm, smiling exterior concealed a weak flabby interior [w]ith a mediocre mind . . . ” (page 767).
Rest assured that these are only a few examples of college text book propaganda.
Conclusion
If you don’t think this sort of presentation indoctrinates young minds, think again. This kind of material, reinforced by the professors themselves, converted multitudes of young people from conservative backgrounds to liberal views. They might have converted me, had I not been more intellectually grounded in conservatism. Even so, in subsequent years I credited Wilson’s programs with virtues they did not have.
And it was many more years before I learned that free markets usually can address monopolies and business malpractice better than government ever could.
Rob Natelson is senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at the Independence Institute in Denver and a former constitutional law professor at the University of Montana. He is the author of “The Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant” (3rd ed., 2015).