I spent almost two decades at a state university in the deep South, leaving just a couple of years ago. I had colleagues who gave extra credit to students if they would attend church socials or even church services. The state college board interrupted a meeting devoted to the impending bankrupcy of the system to affirm that all dorms had to be single sex, and that single sex by floor or by tower was unacceptable. There were random room checks for men in the women’s dorms at night. (But not for women in the men’s dorms.) Many university functions,including graduation, opened with prayers to Jesus.
Overly zealous indoctrination comes from both ends of the spectrum. Ironically, I went from being regarded as a dreaded secular humanist radical at a state university in the South to being viewed as a conservative reactionary at a religous university in the West. My views did not change when I moved, the politics did. At both schools, there were many faculty members, especially in the sciences, who viewed all of the indoctrination – left and right – as utterly inappropriate for a university. The loud braying of leftist, multi-culti ideologists drowns out the moderate and centrist views often held by the majority of faculty members. Also, just as some very conservative faculty members welcome vigorous debate and eschew indoctrination, so do some of the folks on the left.
