Until last week, we used to speak metaphorically about United States campuses becoming the main battleground in the culture wars. As the heartrending assassination of Charlie Kirk proves, we have become a darker nation, and that is no longer just a figure of speech.
The assassination, the place where it was carried out, and the places of work of most of the soulless savages who have celebrated the crime since then, all confirm that education is ground zero in the battle for the soul of America.
The effort to take back our cultural institutions starts with universities, as Kirk understood, because that’s where the Left started its “Long March Through the Institutions.”
The culturally Marxist Left understood early on that capturing education was the only way to convince people that society needed to be transformed. Their task was to reframe societal norms, to make deviancy seem wholesome, and vice versa. This task could only be truly done in classrooms and by professionals. Workplace training sessions can only go so far.
Bill Ayers, the University of Michigan student radical who in 1960 co-founded Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left’s main institution, and then a decade later the terrorist group the Weather Underground, got a PhD in education in the 1980s and today personifies the capture of education.
He gamely quotes on his website this line by Antonio Gramsci:
“The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. … popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem.”
And so it was done. Schools have indeed been placed under the control of leftist teachers’ unions. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 70% of all public school teachers belong to a union. The numbers can go as high as 90% in California, 97% in Washington, and 96% in Hawaii and Illinois.
The unions would qualify under Gramsci’s idea of “great workers’ unions.” The two largest ones, which almost monopolize the industry, are faithful supporters of the Democratic Party. The National Education Association gives 99% of its political contributions to Democrats and affiliated causes, while the equivalent figure for the American Federation of Teachers is 99.9%.
The teachers themselves have to be deeply indoctrinated before they are allowed to face a single student. To get certified, they need to go to schools of education that have become the equivalent of madrassas.
Three years ago, the Martin Center for Academic Renewal published a long report detailing how the Left has captured our schools of education, where teachers are taught. The best-known of these is Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Jay Schalin’s 101-page study, The Politization of University Schools of Education, examines school syllabi from three top universities: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
It found that the three most assigned authors at the schools were, in this order, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Linda Darling-Hammond, and the Brazilian Paulo Freire. The three are way to the left of the political spectrum.
The National Academy of Education described then-president Ladson-Billings as being known “for her groundbreaking work in the fields of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Critical Race Theory.” Meanwhile, Darling-Hammond was an adviser to President Barack Obama and is a nationally recognized champion of multiculturalism.
But they’re both Adam Smith compared to Freire. The Brazilian Maoist believes in using the classroom to change society, and his main textbook, the one our children’s teachers are forced to study, is called Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and is more of a manual for revolution.
“Politics is now so ingrained in the education schools it seems almost impossible for reform to occur,” Schalin concludes. “And while not every education professor is politicized, almost no professor of education objects to the wildest schemes of his or her radical colleagues.”
And that is just K-12 education. After the student graduates and heads into college, he or she will encounter an equally lopsided environment.
At Harvard alone, 80% of faculty identify as liberal, with 37 of those calling themselves “very liberal,” while only 1.46% say they are conservative or very conservative.
But it’s not just the Ivy League. The National Association of Scholars conducted a study that found that 78% of academic departments in 51 top-tier liberal arts colleges “have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.”
Overall, the Democrat-to-Republican ratio in the faculty lounge is 12.7 to 1. In some departments, such as anthropology and communications, there were no Republicans.
Kirk was a threat to this monopoly. He would go to campuses individually and debate anyone with opposing views. He was the definition of the happy warrior, and his group, Turning Point, played a key role in getting Gen Z to turn out to vote for President Donald Trump in November 2024. Trump did not win 18-29 Gen Z voters in every state, but made significant inroads over the 2020 vote in nearly all states.
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This recapture of campuses and the youth the Left that took over the universities cannot abide, and what we have seen, here, here, here, and in many other examples, is professors or K-12 teachers acting like pigs and reveling in the assassination of a young father who wanted free debate.
This is all the reason we need to push harder to retake the cultural ground we so foolishly yielded to the left.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position of Heritage or its board of trustees.