[Hot Air] At one point, the American higher education system aspired to that nomenclature — higher education. It largely followed classical thought, Enlightenment principles, and at the same time allowed for a broad range of views, perspectives, and and freedom of thought. Until very recently, a college degree signified a higher plane of intellectual heft and readiness for success in American and international markets.Within just a couple of generations, however, the American system of higher education transformed itself into a base indoctrination system for a system of thought so narrow that Dr. Stanley Ridgely likens it to a cult. American Academia brooks no debate, punishes dissenters with the passion reserved for heretics and apostates in religious cults, and instills a neo-Marxist party line rather than deliver the broad and textured education that parents still expect when they send their young men and women to college.
In the preface to his new book Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities (also on Barnes & Noble), Dr. Ridgely offers a gloomy assessment of just what that investment delivers in today’s Academia: