I was going to do a book review of Brutal Minds a few months back, but Ed not only reviewed the book but did a show with its author Stanley Ridgley. Since Ed had covered the topic, I thought it best to give it a pass. Don’t annoy the boss.

I was a bit disappointed at the time because I went to graduate school with Stan Ridgley and thought it would be cool to help him promote his book, especially so because his book is actually worth promoting. Help out a buddy and do a solid for my readers.

Now I have reconsidered, both because Ed’s show was back in May and because more people are wondering what has happened in academia and why it occurred. Stan has had a front-row seat as a professor and is currently at Drexel University.

Stanley lays bare just how bad things are and why the decline happened.

As most of you know, I was an aspiring academic long ago and not so far away. Both my parents were astronomers and taught physics, and my specialty was going to be political philosophy. I went to Duke for grad school, taught a bit there, and then spent a few years teaching at my alma mater, Carleton College, here in Minnesota.

I loved teaching but grew to hate academia. It is a closed world, and academics are often incurious about anything but their own little (often ideologically motivated) worlds.

And Carleton was an academic nirvana compared to most schools. But I saw the writing on the wall, gave up on writing my dissertation, and bailed from the academic world. Of course, I landed in politics, which has turned out to be a cesspool as well, so if you question my life choices, you have reasons to do so.

Stanley’s book has the virtue of providing a specific analysis of academia’s ideology problem, demonstrating the actual harm that is being done, and providing some practical advice about how to reverse course. I am skeptical that anything will be done to improve things in the short to medium term. It would take mass firings to change things dramatically. Firing a college president or two will bring us momentary satisfaction and little more.

Stan’s book is called Brutal Minds for a reason. He rightly sees that the stakes are high indeed when it comes to academic corruption. And the means that are used to enforce ideological conformity are indeed brutal, if not physically, then intellectually and economically. One might not be shot or imprisoned for violating the ideological rules, but one’s life can be altered or ruined if the powers that be put a target on your back.

This is a brutal book about brutal people. It’s about the people who eagerly “live within the lie” and who even more eagerly coerce
others to yield to that lie, particularly the most intellectually vulnerable persons on the college campuses—our undergraduates.

Given this, I determined to write a book of the sort we used to see much more often—honest books that called out the fakes in our society. The charlatans, the snake oil salesmen, the cultists, the mystics, the romantics, and the paranoiacs. We have many on the campus.

Stanley identifies a group that too few people are even aware of as the worst culprits: the bureaucrats who run the universities. Most people think of the professors, Deans, and presidents as the worst culprits–and they bear much of the responsibility–but the people who shape the campus environment are the bureaucrats who set many of the rules by which the campus runs. They can more easily cancel you than any professor and are more inclined to want to.

Most professors, even the mediocre and incurious ones, still have a vague commitment to the university’s ideals. But the hiring processes, rules of student life, and the distribution of resources are in the hands of faceless bureaucrats who now dominate school life and even the employee class of universities.

Many universities have almost as many administrators as students and far more than the number of actual educators. Attention should be paid to their influence because these midwits actually run most things.

Much of American academia constitutes a world populated by paranoiacs, by their duped followers, by amateur psychotherapists, by
neo-Marxist totalitarians, by unqualified faculty apprentices, by ancillary support personnel with delusions of grandeur, by student
affairs staffers imbued with autocratic mentality, and by thought reformers who violate federal law against human subject experimentation to attack young people in workshops, to destroy their relationships with parents and friends, and to clear the way for new relationships grounded in a hate-filled racialist ideology. I happen to think of this as a dark world.

This is the unsavory cast of characters who populate today’s university. They are academia’s brutal minds, straight out of a Kafka fantasy, and they’re on every campus.

This is a superb insight. If you look at what has happened on college campuses, the most striking fact is how dramatically the back office staff has expanded. Huge numbers of administrators have quickly taken over the campuses and imposed a set of rules that restrict even the most intellectually curious and open at the school, and encouraged those who want to get along and succeed to become enforcers of an ideological uniformity that is incompatible with intellectual life and our democratic society.

Marxists took over not primarily by infiltrating the ranks of the professoriate, but the ranks of the professoriate became flooded with Marxists because administrators made it so. They stacked the deck and enforced uniformity.

There is much more to Stan’s analysis than I can possibly present here, which is why you should read the book. The Preface and Introduction are up on his website to give you a taste, and I highly recommend it.

And if you are truly ambitious, you can add to your reading list Christopher Rufo’s book, which dives deeper into the intellectual roots of the movement that Stanley so brilliantly describes in practice. Together, they make a great intro into the modern campus’s whats, whys, and wherefores.