On social media where faculty ostensibly gather, whether in relatively “verifiable” form as on Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram, or on a platform like Reddit, where the ostensible “professors” of r/Professors are often just as likely to be trollish provocateurs enacting various stereotypical complaints about students and the like, there is nothing more baffling to faculty than the right-wing accusation that they “indoctrinate” their students. Like many such far-right accusations, it mostly seems like a confession of future action by the accusers, almost to the point of being a plea to professors: could you please show us how to indoctrinate? Because we’re going to try now that we’re taking over universities.
Julie Reuben has written a very even-handed overview in the Chronicle of Higher Education of the entanglement of “indoctrination” with ideas about professorial comportment in the classroom and whether or how a faculty member should reveal their political commitments. As Reuben notes, up until the 1970s, many faculty believed it was important to be scrupulously neutral about “politics” when they were teaching. This generally just meant that they defined their very apparent “politics” as rational, neutral, objective or fair and all other perspectives as “politicized”. (Every single time I mention this point, I always cite Garry Wills’ Nixon Agonistes as offering a stupendously effective skewering of this stance, which is as valid today as it was when it was first published.) So many other faculty subsequently just argued that everybody has a politics and it is better to be transparent about that.
To which I would add that good teaching involves being a human being in the classroom working with other human beings: you should bring your whole self with you, even if you also observe important professional obligations and restraints, much as you might also in your production of scholarly knowledge. The idea of trying to be some kind of scrupulously neutral figure who never even hints at their working point-of-view on any issue is synonymous with being a bad teacher—you are surrendering a vast range of possible connections and tensions that would be highly productive if you carried them with you.
In this entry, I’m thinking more about whether you actually could indoctrinate a student into a political or social position that they would otherwise not have been inclined to advocate or inhabit. Is such a thing even possible within the conventional workflow of professors in most universities or colleges? That’s the hook inside the propagandistic citation of “indoctrination” by the American right: they are arguing, in effect, that many students coming into higher education have natural political and social affinities that they unnaturally lose during that experience. That’s their explanation of why the college-educated skew to liberal or progressive politics, much as some on the left look to misinformation, social media or mass culture as an explanation for the enduring power of far-right ideas. In both cases, critics are looking to avoid an explanation of political affinities that is either rooted in the self-interests of those who hold them or is a result of their own agency and conscious working-out of their political and social commitments.
The best way to answer the question may be to examine whether there are any cases where almost everybody agrees that something like “indoctrination” has successfully taken place, that provide a clear definition of what we commonly mean by the term? I think there is broad agreement that many authoritarian states and even democratic ones undertake what might be called programs of indoctrination, where the state aligns itself with multiple civic and governmental institutions and agencies to disseminate a uniform message across many domains of everyday life and routine and perhaps to create punishments or negative incentives for failing to learn and internalize the message. That might be as simple and specific as “don’t play with fireworks in the middle of a pine forest during the summertime in a dry area” or “tobacco causes cancer so don’t smoke”, or it might be as comprehensive and vague as “ignorance is strength” or “let’s arm ourselves strongly with Kim Jong-il’s patriotism!” Arguably all powerful institutions, including companies, do a certain amount of what might be called indoctrination in this sense, of trying to use repetition and ubiquity to make a novel proposition or idea into something generally known and even something that is ‘common sense’ in the Gramscian meaning of a truth that’s been internalized. “Men and women need their own kind of deodorant” or “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”.
At that level of generality, I think “indoctrination” loses a lot of its meaning—it’s slid into being a synonym for learning more generally. Even if you clarified that it only applies to learning to regard something as true that is actually false (or at least highly contestable), that falls well short of the strongly negative associations most people have with the word.
What I think most of us have in mind when we hear the term is a model where the indoctrinating individual or institution consciously intends to thoroughly break down people and to remake them with a comprehensive new vision of the world, to equip them with a fully applicable dogma that applies to all aspects of life, and to make them loyal to whatever movement, faction, party, institution or government embodies this new truth. The indoctrinator is usually seen as consciously intending to do so, and as programmatically targeting people who are not presently indoctrinated using specific highly effective techniques that reliably achieve the aim of the desired transformation.
The modal example that would appear most often in any description of indoctrination would be a religious or political cult.
Which right away explains why claiming that professors are capable of indoctrination in this sense is just so silly. As faculty so often comment when confronted with this attack, “I can’t even get students to turn papers in on time or to read the syllabus, how am I going to indoctrinate anybody?” A cult leader dominates everything in the lives of their followers, and isolates them from the rest of the world. In almost all American academic institutions, faculty are so little present in the lives of their students outside the classroom that they couldn’t begin to have the kind of influence that an aspirant indoctrinator has to have even if they wanted to.
You see your students for a limited number of contact hours every week. If you tried to gate the way to a particular desired credential by requiring the equivalent of a loyalty oath or through explicit required repetition of a dogmatic orthodoxy, students would just avoid you unless everyone involved in that program of study did the same. And that would only guarantee grudging obedience in the short-term while producing alienation and resentment, the very opposite of indoctrination. To even have the capacity to indoctrinate, a professor would need to be heavily involved in the non-classroom lives of students while retaining some form of formalized authority over them at all times. It’s not impossible but it runs completely counter to the normal logics of institutional labor and the normal inclination of almost all faculty, whatever their politics, and all the more so over time. If there ever was a moment where the material possibility of indoctrination in this sense presented itself within the rhythms of teaching in residential institutions, it was decades ago when faculty and student life was more regularly intertwined, including when faculty in some institutions lived in dormitories or alongside them. And even then, the social distance was generally vast by both design and inclination. Mr. Chipping wouldn’t have dreamed of running a dormitory cult. About the only time I’d ever find an accusation that someone was indoctrinating students credible might be in a particularly bad kind of tight-knit professor-and-grad-students circle, and that would rarely be about dogma and more about power in a more drearily quotidian sense.
From the standpoint of your average college classroom, armed with your average college pedagogy, you couldn’t manage to remake students from one political conviction they had on entry into something dramatically opposite via the employment of any technique or style. The more obvious you were about wanting to do that, the more likely the outcome to be perversely opposite of what you were seeking. Ask me to ensure that students entering my class depart with a particular ethical commitment or moral perspective and I will tell you that I can’t. The best I can do is say, “We talked about it”. Just as attempts at dialogue and persuasion in the real world rarely leads to a real change of heart, so too does pedagogy always fall short of being able to deliver a specific change in how students think about issues or politics beyond the scope of what’s on the test.
This incidentally goes just as much as when folks on the left ask to add some new requirement to a curriculum that’s instrumentally intended to insure that students leave with some new awareness of diversity or some commitment to fighting inequality. It doesn’t matter what you’re asking me to insure in that sense, I can’t do it. Not, “I refuse to use my power in that fashion”, but “it doesn’t work that way, whether I will it or not”.
If students do change more generally when they go to college, it’s really not about the classroom except in very particular narrow respects. It’s perhaps more about life: the people they live with, the lives they see every day in the dorms, the experiences they have and the experiences of others that they learn about, the experiments in self-fashioning they attempt, the aspirations they develop, the adulthood they cultivate. The curriculum is only a small part of those processes, and how it figures into them is not up to faculty to control, whether they want to or not. Students in American higher education are still very substantially the agents of their own transformations, and if they tend to emerge from the experience with strong disdain for contemporary American conservatism, look no farther than conservatism itself for the reasons.
Again, I'm in general agreement. I suppose that my unstated point was that the caricatured version of ideas—whether post-modernism, Marxism, liberalism, psychoanalysis or fill-in-the-blank—is as often as not the one that gains influence, especially among students.
Always enjoyable to read your posts. I have a counter example, from days of yore. In the early 1980s I did my masters degree in economics at a school that was not the University of Chicago, but whose faculty wished to emulate the “Chicago School”. And the consistent effort across the curriculum to get us to think in a certain way really did have an effect that was, without wanting to overstate things, indoctrination: utilitarianism + methodological individualism as the only moral system that made any sense; the efficiency of markets except in a well- and narrowly-defined set of “market failures”; political decisions that could be explained through the method of “public choice”, and the only real disputes being empirical ones that could be settled through econometrics. Remembering those days, my friends and I really did change - we all mellowed and diversified later on, when we left school, but our professors without doubt had an impact.
In any case, this week our legislators passed a bill thinking we have all manner of indoctrination going on in Indiana’s public universities. But I’m going to guess the Econ department can carry on as before (which, although I have increased my own skepticism over time, is in my view up to them to decide).
https://iga.in.gov/legislative/2024/bills/senate/202/details