The Specter of ‘Indoctrination’

Who is radicalizing our students? This is an old question, but it has once again become an urgent one among a cross section of politicians, law-enforcement personnel, and parents. In the wake of the protests at Columbia, New York City’s police and mayor quickly seized on a narrative that the impetus for the protests was not with the students themselves but must be traceable to some shadowy cabal of outside organizers and agitators. “Who is funding this? What is happening? There is an unknown entity who is radicalizing our vulnerable students,” Chief of Patrol John Chell wrote on X, referring to the campus encampments. Mayor Eric Adams, meanwhile, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “I just want to send a clear message out that there are people who are harmful and are trying to radicalize our children.”

As the opinion columnist Philip Bump asked in The Washington Post, “Why is the simplest explanation of campus protests so hard to accept?” One need not reach for outlandish theories, Bump noted, when the “reality is simpler: Many young people (and many Americans) object to how the war” in Gaza “is conducted. The encampments are an inexpensive way to demonstrate those objections.” In terms of public opinion, the college students protesting over the past few months are by no means outliers; a March Gallup poll revealed that a full 55 percent of Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza, up from 45 percent in November. (Nor is this trend entirely partisan: While Democrats and independents are more likely to disapprove, approval rates among Republicans are also down.) As far back as February, Pew was reporting that most Americans under 50 opposed American military support for Israel.

Whether one agrees with it or not, the political position taken by college students opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza is not unfathomable. What comments like those by Chell and Adams suggest is that when college students espouse a certain set of views, it triggers a reaction that isn’t applied to older Americans, or Americans who aren’t enrolled in four-year institutions. The word that gets used again and again at such moments is “indoctrination.” It can come from the left — as with feminist writers who’ve long warned against “patriarchal indoctrination,” for example — but as of late it’s being pushed hard and relentlessly by the right. Rep. Rick Allen, a Georgia Republican, has claimed on the House floor that college students are “being indoctrinated by these professors” to disregard the covenant made between God and Abraham to protect Israel, and as a result are being “cursed by God, the God of the Bible, and the God over our flag.” The New York Post compiled a list of faculty members supposedly behind Columbia’s “pro-Palestine indoctrination,” and a more recent opinion essay in the same paper by Betsy McCaughey, a former Republican lieutenant governor in New York, accused American colleges and universities of neglecting their “core mission,” education, and operating instead as “mere indoctrination factories.”

The audience here is neither faculty members nor the college students themselves; the goal is to dupe unwitting parents and higher-ed administrators, many of whom have been caught entirely off guard by a bog-standard playbook that has been run — largely unchanged — for over 70 years.

The word “indoctrination” appears in the American lexicon fairly late. It enters regular usage only the 1930s and ’40s, and then only in a military context and with a largely neutral or even positive cast. “Indoctrination,” before 1950, was almost exclusively used to describe how the military got its soldiers and new recruits in line with military policy and up to speed on the latest developments. Testifying about the Air Force’s “indoctrination centers” before Congress in 1951, Gen. Gabriel P. Disosway described the purpose of such centers as primarily to convert cadets “from civilian life to military life.” But this relatively neutral use of the term changed with the Korean War, when news began filtering out that some captured American soldiers were cooperating with their captors, even possibly defecting.

In 1950 the journalist Edward Hunter became the first to popularize the term “brainwashing” to describe this phenomenon, alleging that China had techniques to convert someone’s ideology. Soon “brainwashing” was being used interchangeably with “Communist indoctrination,” and Americans were seized with panic. In February 1956, Maj. William E. Mayer, an Army psychiatrist, told U.S. News & World Report that POWs were susceptible to brainwashing because they were uninformed about their country and its values. “It is tragically clear,” he argued, “that the American educational system, fine as it is, is failing miserably in getting across the absolute fundamentals of survival in a tense and troubled international society. This failure needs to be publicized.”

By 1957 the military had concluded that Communist indoctrination was ineffective, and despite decades of research, psychologists have never been able to definitively prove that anything close to the popular conception of brainwashing works. Nevertheless, indoctrination had become a powerful metaphor and was being deployed increasingly across American culture. In books like E. Merrill Root’s Brainwashing in the High Schools: An Examination of 11 American History Textbooks (1958), right-wing activists advanced the claim that not only was American pedagogy failing to instill the kinds of American values that would prevent young people from being indoctrinated; they were also actively being targeted by subversive educators. In June 1952, The American Legion Magazine published Irene Corbally Kuhn’s “Your Child Is Their Target,” which warned that a “small, well-organized minority is attempting to manipulate our public schools to condition our children for what they call ‘a new social order.’” Kuhn argued that

there has been a subtle, dangerous movement inside our educational system … a deliberate, calculated action by a small but powerful group of educators not only to change the character of American education radically, but to capture the “whole child,” usurp parental authority, and so nullify moral and spiritual influences.

Kuhn’s essay drew an intense backlash during the annual National Education Association convention, where 3,500 delegates protested the American Legion’s association with her ideas.

Fear of indoctrination via textbook spread rapidly. From 1949 to 1953, Lucille Cardin Crain, a New York City political activist, published The Educational Reviewer, a clearinghouse backed by William F. Buckley Sr. that was devoted to identifying communist indoctrination in high-school and college textbooks. Crain and her freelancers received hundreds of requests to investigate and evaluate textbooks being used throughout the country. As June Melby Benowitz explains, “Any books that appeared to be anti-business or anti-capitalist, or to support recent New Deal or Fair Deal policies or ideas were deemed to be part of a conspiracy to lead the United States into communism.” Crain and her allies “were particularly fearful of ideas they considered ‘collectivist,’ that encouraged people to surrender their individualism and work together in common causes and, consequently, would influence them to be supportive of governmental policies that might tend toward socialism or communism.” Mary Louise Allen’s Education or Indoctrination (1955), for example, argued that summer camps and group projects were both part of an insidious slide toward full-blown communism.

A Chicago Tribune editorial praised Crain’s Educational Reviewer as a bulwark against indoctrination, lamenting that “many young people finish their schooling without once hearing or reading a coherent explanation of how and why this country became the greatest and most prosperous on earth. Americans who are trying to keep their country great have been slow to find out what has been going on in education, and it is good to see that they are waking up.” The goal of education, the unsigned editorial proclaimed, was to make America great again. It was a war between differing forms of indoctrination: Educators, these critics argued, had to “properly” indoctrinate students with pro-capitalist, pro-American values.

But increasingly, a rhetorical and semantic shift took place. As the title of Allen’s Education or Indoctrination suggested, “indoctrination” was no longer being used positively, to refer to the instilling of American values; that work was “education.” Correspondingly, “communist indoctrination” had lost its adjective, becoming simply “indoctrination,” a word that carried an ominous, negative charge all by itself. The problem with “indoctrination” remaining a morally neutral term was that partisans would then have to argue for why their respective brand of indoctrination — the indoctrination of American capitalism as opposed to Soviet Communism, for instance — was preferable to their opponents’. Rather than bother with debate, right-wing agitators found that it was simpler to bend language to their uses. If it was bad, it was indoctrination; if it was good, it was education.

The accusation of academic indoctrination has been a mainstay of culture warriors ever since. The conservative activist David Horowitz, in his 2007 book Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom, encapsulated much of the party line, arguing that “social-justice teaching violates the professional obligations of teachers in a democracy to educate students and not indoctrinate them.” If students complete their educational experience with beliefs that align with yours, they’ve received a good education. If they come to other conclusions, they must have been indoctrinated by their teachers.

Among those pushing the latest version of this conspiracy theory is Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and board member at New College of Florida. “Although the left-wing cultural revolution had self-destructed in the Third World, over time it found a new home: in America,” Rufo writes in America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (2023). “This new revolution patiently built itself in the shadows, and then, after the death of George Floyd in the spring of 2020, exploded onto the American scene.” In Rufo’s dark vision of American history, the far-left radicals Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis attempted a violent overthrow of the United States in the late ’60s; when that failed, they turned to higher education, establishing subversive sleeper cells within academic institutions that gradually seized power. Rufo has repeatedly called diversity, equity, and inclusion “an indoctrination cult.” Meanwhile, in the real world, a majority of Americans support DEI initiatives in higher ed. As with the Gaza protests, the goal is to take ideas with genuine popular support and demonize them as the result of nefarious indoctrination.

Conspiracy theories work by reducing complexity, subsuming complicated social realities into simple cause-and-effect logic. Their goal is to provide an overreaching, unfalsifiable explanation for the day’s events, no matter how chaotic, unexpected, or ambiguous they may be. They also work to blunt social change. Whenever members of a new generation come to believe different things than their parents, there is an immediate hue and cry from the conservative commentariat that these cultural shifts are illegitimate and must be the work of indoctrinating figures of authority — usually college professors.

Going to college is a complex experience, and students frequently graduate with different views and beliefs than they had when they went in. Faculty members have some control over what their students come to think and believe, but any individual’s journey through American higher education happens not just in the classroom, but in many other areas of their lives: social pressures, financial realities, dating, unexpected personal tragedies, world events, and on and on. Even the most effective educators cannot hope to have complete control over what their students think and how they see the world. For that matter, many faculty members these days struggle to get their students to simply do the reading or show up for class. The Chronicle recently reported on a “stunning disconnect” among current college students, many of whom, professors said, are struggling to do basic work: “Far fewer students show up to class. Those who do avoid speaking when possible. Many skip the readings or the homework. They have trouble remembering what they learned and struggle on tests.” In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, one study found, over half of college faculty members reduced their expectations for their students, and in many cases, colleges have yet to fully re-establish pre-Covid levels of student success.

Now, more than ever, the notion that college professors have the power to “indoctrinate” their students seems far-fetched at best: How does one convert students into militant Marxists or antisemitic jihadists when they’re not even doing the reading or showing up for class? But conspiracy theories work by imposing an external (almost always, false) explanation for events, and then disregarding anything that doesn’t fit that model. The conspiracist ignores anything but the menacing figure of the dangerous, manipulative professor standing at the head of the class. Everything else is noise.