The American University Would Make a Soviet Proud

The ideological capture of the American University system by the Left is a given. The effects on everything from curriculum to social life on campus has been covered extensively. It is still surprising to find out how extensive campus monoculture has corroded the student soul.

Vaclav Havel’s essay, “The Power of the Powerless” speaks to how a system of totalitarian ideology, which it knows it will never convert everyone, can control and mute any dissent. His example is a greengrocer …

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? (snip)

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life.

In other words, the greengrocer is engaged in performative morality in order to get along. Not much different than an American university student.

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.

The result is not conviction but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost.

Yes, something is lost. A little bit of each student’s soul knowing they are betraying their own internal beliefs because they feel they have to. What used to be the mission statement of ‘intellectual freedom and inquiry’ has, for at least the last 30 or more years, become a mockery of that mission. They are huge cash machines where teaching and non-teaching staff are close of 90% pure in Leftwing ideology.

Publicly, they conform; privately, they question — often in isolation. This split between outer presentation and inner conviction not only fragments identity but arrests its development.

And like the shopkeeper(s) in Havel’s essay, this is a feature, not a bug, of a totalitarian system. We don’t care about your beliefs, just comply.

This dissonance shows up everywhere. Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation.

This is the ‘keep your head down and don’t aggravate the crazies’ response. The ceding of whatever space the crazy/bully/professor/administrator demands, the greengrocer or student will give just don’t hurt me. The “University” is a skinsuit worn by the institution’s nomenklatura. But even that thin veneer has been stripped away by events even the normies cannot help but notice. Whether it was the insane Maolings at Evergreen State or the recent rampant Jewhate across campuses, these Leftwing seminaries are not indicating they wish to really change at all. DEI programs are being renamed and shuffled under new headings, administrators and professors raise their fists and yell “Resistance!” with no sense of irony that they are The Man.

They know the stakes are high because they are conditioning the New Soviet Man Person for a Western Civ-free future.

this fragmentation doesn’t end at the classroom door. Seventy-three percent of students reported mistrust in conversations about these values with close friends. Nearly half said they routinely conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout. This is not simply peer pressure — it is identity regulation at scale, and it is being institutionalized.

Being? To quote Stephen Sondheim, “But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns. Don’t bothеr, they’re herе.”

featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license

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