My political epiphany came in a tile classroom on the top floor of a building that the New York City public school system referred to as Junior High School 167.
At the time, I was old enough to know I was fascinated by politics, but too young to have figured out my own opinions. My views, insofar as they could truly be considered mine, were default views, absorbed from my family, television, and the surroundings in liberal Manhattan.
One day, my teacher announced that each student would have to prepare a three-minute talk on a current events topic and present it in front of the whole class. My assigned topic was nuclear disarmament.
Although the Soviet Union would soon crumble, the Cold War was America’s main existential threat at the time. Ronald Reagan was president, and nuclear scare stories were still a staple of network television. When it came to the topic I was assigned, I had picked up enough signals from my environment to understand that nuclear weapons were Bad, and, therefore, to be Good was to favor the elimination of those weapons.
I believed I was a Good Person, so naturally I shared the same political views as other Good People. No further thinking was required. This presentation was going to be a piece of cake!
Eventually, deadline day came and the teacher started calling students at random. As I sat with my hands tensely clasped inside my desk, butterflies began fluttering inside my stomach. Each time another name was called, my heart accelerated to the point of near-explosion until enough sound escaped the teacher’s lips for me to recognize that it was not my turn. Whew! Dodged a bullet.
But then I remembered I still wasn’t off the hook, and now I had to endure three more minutes of another goofball kid droning on about the space shuttle, acid rain, or endangered tree frogs.
Finally, my name was called.
My heart skipped a beat and the world stopped. As I pushed my seat back from my desk, life slowly spun back into full speed. I stood up, walked to the front of the room, and went on autopilot.
I talked passionately about our Republican president, that dangerous cowboy, and how worried I was that his ancient finger hovered over the nuclear launch button. I spoke about peace and how we could achieve it if only we had the courage to get rid of our weapons. I promoted peaceful coexistence and mutual understanding; if only we were more tolerant and kind, maybe the Soviets would stop seeing us as enemies. I whined a plea to the adults of America, imploring them to Please Think of the Children, because We Are the Future!
About halfway through, it occurred to me that I didn’t believe a damn thing I was saying.
The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons pointed at us. So if we got rid of ours, how would that make us safer? Would the Soviets really give up their weapons just because we did? I may only have been approaching pubescence, but I certainly wasn’t that naive.
This realization was happening at an inconvenient time. I was halfway through giving a speech I now thought was bullshit. I started fumbling my words. The index cards in my hands started to shake.
But I had a presentation to finish, and the only words available to me were the ones on those cards. All I wanted was to be done with it so I could sit down and cope with my cognitive dissonance. So I sheepishly followed my scrawled talking points, the ones I now regarded as lies.
Only later did I recognize the significance of that little speech: that’s when I stood up a liberal, and sat down a conservative.
This episode also opened my eyes to something else: the social dynamic that leads to groupthink, the propensity for people to adopt opinions from those around them rather than through their own critical thinking.
If a person hasn’t thought very much about a given topic, if it’s something they’re not terribly passionate about, that person will tend to reflect the views that they hear expressed most frequently by people they like, respect, or want to emulate. The more often people are exposed to a particular line of thinking through their approved channels, the more likely they are to adopt those views without much thought.
That’s what led to my classroom epiphany. By the time I was in junior high, I hadn’t spent any considerable time thinking about the political implications of nuclear weapons, but the people I looked up to all seemed to have the same views on the subject. Because I hadn’t really ever been exposed to contrary positions from trusted sources, I had no reason to spend any time thinking about it. Their opinions became my opinions, by default.
Given the sheer volume of information our world generates every day, the dynamic behind groupthink makes perfect sense. If we tried to carefully think through every concept we’re ever exposed to, we’d be in a constant state of analysis paralysis. It simply isn’t feasible to approach absolutely everything in life as a hypothesis needing to be scientifically proven. So, we quite naturally adopt thoughts from those around us, thereby short-circuiting the need for our own analysis.
When dealing with provable matters of fact, this saves us a lot of time and annoyance. Without even realizing it, we accept the concepts of gravity and acceleration and are generally content to assume that jumping off the top of a skyscraper is more dangerous than jumping off the couch.
Opinions are a different matter entirely. Once a critical mass of a community begins sharing the same opinions, those opinions get socially transmitted in the same way that facts do. But opinions are not facts, and groupthink doesn’t account for this distinction. Groupthink merely demands thought conformity, and when it runs amok, dissenters start getting punished. To see this in action, look no further than the typical college campus.
Today, the core of academia suffers from the rot of political correctness, the belief that certain political opinions are inherently correct or incorrect. Nowadays, many professors believe their role is to ensure that students graduate with the “correct” set of views.
Enforcing the correctness of opinions is something dictators do, and the toxic combination of groupthink and political correctness has turned many American campuses into prisons of the mind, places where even the mildest speech can get you in a whole mess of trouble.
I directed a documentary film called Indoctrinate U that looks at groupthink and how it can lead school officials to punish people who hold disfavored opinions. In making the film, I spoke with students, professors, and administrators all over the country at every level of academia. I visited dozens of schools, from Ivies to small private campuses, from big state schools to tiny community colleges. No matter where I went, at each of these schools, the environment was virtually identical: Left-wing political views were favored, and anything else could be grounds for punishment.
Republicans and conservatives aren’t the only ones who run afoul of the thought police. Libertarians, independents, religious Christians and Jews, and even liberal Democrats have gotten into trouble for straying from the flock.
One of the more appalling cases in Indoctrinate U occurred at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Cal Poly, as it’s commonly known, is a part of the California State University system. As such, it is legally a part of the state government, which means that if Cal Poly interferes with constitutionally protected speech in any way, the school is breaking the law.
Against this backdrop of legal certitude, a former student named Steve Hinkle was subjected to harassment by the Cal Poly school administration for a year and a half, during which time he lived with the threat of expulsion hanging over his head while he was trying to successfully complete his coursework.
Steve unintentionally committed a thought crime: he posted a flyer announcing an upcoming speaking engagement.
The flyer itself was quite simple. Saying, “Come Hear Mason Weaver,” it promoted an appearance by an author that the College Republicans had invited to campus. Alongside a small picture of Mason Weaver, the flyer listed the date, time, and location of the event. The flyer’s headline highlighted the title of Weaver’s most recent book. Nothing else appeared on the flyer.
Although that seems rather benign, the apparent problem with the flyer was that the author happened to be black, and that his picture was shown alongside the title of his book, which happened to be It’s OK to Leave the Plantation.
This imagery—despite being factually accurate—did not sit well with several students in Cal Poly’s Multicultural Center. Never mind that Steve had a clear constitutional right to post the flyer. Never mind that the words were chosen by the man who was supposedly being degraded by them. What the flyer actually meant was beside the point; at Cal Poly, the primary concern was that the flyer offended someone.
Poor Steve Hinkle. If he had understood the power dynamics at play, he would have known that as a blond-haired, blue-eyed white male member of the College Republicans, he was prejudged a racist long before he ever set foot in the Multicultural Center.
All this might be a bit hard to understand if you haven’t spent much time on college campuses in the last few decades. So perhaps I should explain a few concepts first.
As it is practiced in academia, multiculturalism holds that all cultures are equal, except Western culture, which has a history of oppression and war, and is therefore worse. All religions are equal, except Christianity and Judaism, which are both worse, because they informed the beliefs of the capitalist bloodsuckers who founded this racist, sexist, homophobic country. According to multiculturalism, all races are equal, except Caucasians, who long ago went into business with slave traders in Africa, and therefore they are worse. The genders, too, are equal, except for those paternalistic males, who with their testosterone, greed, and aggression have turned this planet into a polluted, war-torn living hell, so therefore they are worse.
Multiculturalism is a way of claiming to support equality while at the same time engaging in blatant discrimination. It is a philosophy that requires people to be sorted into groups so that a political pecking order may be established among them.
I call this the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism, and it is governed by these simple rules:
If a person is a member of a group guilty of past oppression (Oppressors), that person has no moral standing in relation to people in any group that’s ever been victimized by those Oppressors (Victims).
Oppressors are always assumed to be guilty in relation to Victims.
An Oppressor can only avoid presumed guilt by expressing agreement with the political aims of those who claim to speak for the Victims.
Working on behalf of those political aims is the only way for Oppressors to redeem their inherent immorality.
Victims can lose their moral standing by expressing a preference for individual rights instead of group rights.
A Victim who comes to the defense of an Oppressor is a traitor and is therefore even more morally repugnant than Oppressors themselves.
According to the Multicultural Hierarchy, the desires of Victims always take precedence over the rights of Oppressors. So it’s no surprise that when a few students in the Multicultural Center objected to Steve’s flyer, his constitutional rights no longer mattered; what mattered was that Victims were offended.
Steve’s violation was twofold: not only was he an Oppressor, but he was promoting Mason Weaver, a black conservative who argued that self-reliance and free markets constituted “a new Underground Railroad” capable of lifting people out of poverty and weaning them from government dependence.
Mason Weaver represents the ultimate threat to the Multicultural Hierarchy because he points out the illusion of perpetual victimhood. Weaver was to be detested, because not only was he a shill for capitalism, but, as a black man, he was supposed to favor group rights at the expense of individual rights. But because he didn’t, he’s a sellout, an Uncle Tom, and a traitor to his race. And as such, he is to be even more reviled than Hinkle, who at least had no choice in the matter of being born a white male.
So, when Steve posted that Mason Weaver flyer, the students in the Multicultural Center did what any open-minded, tolerant people would do: they called the police.
Steve was gone by the time the police arrived, but the students filed a complaint anyway. One officer stated that the Multicultural Center reported “a suspicious white male passing out literature of an offensive racial nature.”
Eventually, Steve became identified as the “suspicious white male” in question. But even after the students in the Multicultural Center were explained the meaning of the flyer, they pressed on with their complaint.
Faced with angry Victims, the administrators at Cal Poly did what administrators at many schools do: they bent over backward to appease the Victims, even if it meant branding one of their own students a racist and trampling on his First Amendment rights. The Victims demanded that Cal Poly punish the Oppressor, and the school began disciplinary proceedings against Hinkle.
Even in the midst of final exams, the school pulled Steve into various meetings and disciplinary hearings, one of which lasted more than seven hours. For a while, even though Steve had been threatened with expulsion, the charges against him weren’t quite clear. At times, the school subjected him to questioning by an attorney, but Steve was allowed no legal representation of his own. The school’s strategy seemed to be to get Steve to talk as much as possible and hope he would say something incriminating that could be used to justify a punishment.
But it wasn’t working, and eventually the school realized it had a problem: in order to punish Steve, they needed to charge him with something. They knew he couldn’t be disciplined for the content of the flyer; it was constitutionally protected speech. After a while, the administrators decided to charge Steve with “disrupting a campus event.”
The original student complaints couldn’t support a charge of disrupting a campus event. There was no record of any campus event in the Multicultural Center during the time Steve was there. None of the students mentioned an event at all, much less one being disrupted, and they never characterized Steve’s behavior in a way that could be considered remotely disruptive.
A newer angle was needed, one that would bolster the disruption claim. The new logic was even more tenuous. The police arrived at the Multicultural Center some time later, after Steve was gone. Because there was a scheduled meeting in the Multicultural Center when the police entered, the students claimed that their arrival constituted a disruption. But it was Steve who was held responsible for the supposed disruption, not the students who actually called the police.
Eventually, Steve contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which helped get media attention for the case. National coverage came from CNN, Fox News, and the Los Angeles Times. The absurdity of the case was obvious for all to see, and Cal Poly became a national laughingstock.
FIRE also helped Steve find a lawyer. Steve’s legal representation was provided by the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit law firm that filed suit against Cal Poly in federal court.
Thanks to the negative media attention and the added pressure of a lawsuit, after putting Steve Hinkle through eighteen months of disciplinary hearings and legal maneuvers, Cal Poly listened to the advice of a federal judge, finally recognized that they had a losing case, and threw in the towel. They dropped all charges against Steve, cleared his disciplinary record, and agreed to pay a $40,000 settlement.
Steve prevailed in the end, but he paid a huge personal price. A large chunk of his college career was scarred by the daily agony of wondering whether he was about to be expelled. Meanwhile, Steve walked around campus branded a racist by the Multicultural Center and the administrators at his own school.
Steve’s student accusers paid no price at all. Neither did the Cal Poly administrators, who spent hundreds of man-hours and obscene amounts of taxpayer money in their quest to destroy Steve Hinkle.
The only price paid by Cal Poly was the damage to the school’s reputation. The original public backlash was devastating, and each time Indoctrinate U appears on TV, a new round of negative attention is cast on the school.
The Steve Hinkle case was one of the reasons I wanted to make Indoctrinate U. It was a perfect illustration of what can go wrong when groupthink takes over an institution: fairness, logic, and basic decency all go out the window in an attempt to enforce thought-conformity.
The only way to cure academia of groupthink is to combat it with intellectual diversity. Diversity of thought is not just something that should be a rallying cry of libertarians and conservatives; it should be supported by everyone who values a rigorous education. And, if only for selfish reasons, today’s academic tyrants should be careful with their power: their views may not always dominate. Creating an environment that doesn’t tolerate dissent could end up backfiring some day.
In the mid-1800s, a potato famine in Ireland led to an estimated 1 million deaths of starvation. The famine was caused when Phytophthora infestans, a potato blight, spread across Ireland and led to widespread crop failures. But the seed of the problem was a lack of diversity.
Before the famine hit, each successive potato crop in Ireland had been grown using agricultural clones of the previous generation of potatoes. Certain varieties became favored, and, over time, potatoes were grown from an ever-smaller universe of plant strains. Eventually, the gene pool stagnated, and most of the potatoes in Ireland shared common genetic code.
Because most of the potatoes were essentially the same, they possessed the same vulnerabilities. There may have been many strains resilient to the form of potato blight that swept Ireland during the famine years, but they had been weeded out by man’s unnatural selection. So, when Phytophthora infestans hit Ireland, crops of the country’s main food staple were destroyed for years on end. And, as a tragic result, a million people starved to death.
Today, the lack of intellectual diversity in academia has left it vulnerable to the most destructive tendencies of its own ideology. One astounding aspect of the Hinkle case is that at no time did anyone in a position of power at Cal Poly put a stop to the injustice being done.
The disease of groupthink led administrators to do serious damage to the school’s reputation. If Cal Poly had treated intellectual diversity as seriously as they treated diversity of appearance, rational minds would have recognized the flyer for the innocent event announcement that it was, and there never would have been such a thing as “the Hinkle case” perpetually tarnishing Cal Poly’s name.
The Achilles heel of groupthink it that people under its spell always end up doing something stupid and thuggish. And, as a result, they’re constantly exposing their own behavior for what it is.
When that happens, it must be fought. But when it’s all over, sometimes the best response is just to point and laugh. Groupthink requires a perception of power, and that perception can’t survive sustained derision.
At public screenings of Indoctrinate U, one of the scenes that gets the most laughter is my attempt to question the president of Cal Poly in his office. Instead, I was blocked by one of the president’s flunkies, a short, mumbling, mealy-mouthed man whose manner of speech was so mellow and monotone that he makes Senator Harry Reid sound like Robin Williams.
In the film, this gentleman became the living embodiment of Cal Poly. And boy, does he make people laugh!
It may take many years to bring intellectual diversity back to higher ed. But in the meantime, small victories can be won by shining a light on the offenders. Video recording equipment is cheap enough now to be within the reach of many people; most reasonably modern home computers are powerful enough to edit video, and, often, simple video-editing software comes preinstalled.
I hope my film is the beginning of a trend on a thousand campuses. Students, grab your cameras and point them at your tormentors! Make them defend what they know they cannot. Hit them with some of that South Park snark, and upload it all to YouTube.
If there’s one thing a power-tripping academic’s ego can’t stand, it’s full-throated mockery.