Conformity Colleges

The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America’s Universities

By: David R. Barnhizer

Narrated by: James Gloucester

The United States' education system, especially its universities, is under attack by the ideological Left, dominated by advocates of Wokeism and Critical Race Theory.

Marshall McLuhan was a brilliant thinker best known for his insight that “the medium is the message." Universities, as well as our entire educational “medium” including the K-12 system that feeds its graduates into the university and societal systems, are powerful and overarching mechanisms that we use to shape our understanding. For Western nations, the ideal of the university and of education generally has been to provide us with analytical skills, knowledge, and the ability to create and nurture a healthy society that benefits as many people as possible. That ideal, and the university as educational and social “medium,” is under severe attack.

The power to use the university as an overarching “medium” that offers a strong sense of legitimacy to even flawed and overstated arguments and assertions is why the institution is a target of an ideological Left that is now dominated by advocates of Wokeism and Critical Race Theory. Once obtaining a strong power base in university disciplines and administrations, the revolutionaries of race, gender, and other radical interests metamorphosed from heroic moral beacons fighting and railing against injustice, and revealed themselves as ideological dictators. The truth is that what we now refer to as the Woke/Critical Race Theory activist movement—particularly that controlled by those who came to power in the past thirty years or so—were not simply seeking to expand the nature and content of the university curriculum, or even what is taught in the K-12 system. Their intent was and is to “destabilize,” “transform,” and supplant what is taught. They seek to create a culture that elevates their interests while aggressively repressing anything they see as an obstacle to power, including healthy discourse and debate.

The activists of the Woke/Critical Race Theory Movement are not an honest intellectual movement. They are intense and aggressive political strategists, self-styled “revolutionaries” seeking to use our educational systems with the framed narrative of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) that is actually one of "Division, Enmity, and Intimidation/Indoctrination," all the while claiming their interests are benign and aimed at healing. In reality, they are fracturing our fundamental social order, sowing discord, and deliberately suppressing the freedom of speech and thought essential to the well-being of our democratic republic. Conformity Colleges: The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America’s Universities will help you understand what is happening and come to grips with the need to challenge, counter, and reverse this “revolution." Nothing of significance can be done to stop what is going on unless the DEI administrative bureaucracy that now controls universities is dismantled or substantially weakened.

©2024 David R. Barnhizer (P)2024 Skyhorse Audio

Critic reviews

“As someone who writes frequently in the mainstream press about the ruinous effects of woke ideology on society, I truly appreciate David Barnhizer’s unique contribution to the literature on this subject. Conformity Colleges: The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America’s Universities is 'a one-stop shop' for journalists, often working under time constraints, who seek well-organized, intelligently triaged evidence that is essential ballast in the creation of persuasive columns.”

—Barbara Kay, opinion columnist for Canada’s National Post and the Epoch Times

“It is grimly satisfying to read the words of an observer who understands the value of the university in American life and the extent of contemporary threats to it. David Barnhizer has produced an exhaustive roster of decay, a source book that contains little good news and lots of depredation. The ideals of academic life—disinterested judgment, peer review, Ivory Tower seclusion—have fallen again and again to identity politics, resentment, and cowardice. This book is a sobering compilation of events on the road downward, valuable because people who wish to defend the traditional conception must understand exactly how far we've fallen and how ruthless are the vandals still at work.”

—Mark Bauerlein, senior editor, First Things magazine, and professor emeritus, Emory University