Student Affairs: The Real Threat on Campus

While college empties your wallet, it can divide your family.

During a recent discussion of my book Brutal Minds, someone remarked, “It never occurred to me that deviant worldview training began at university welcoming events. I thought it emanated from professors, not office bureaucrats.”

Likewise, many folks routinely pummel the faculty for “indoctrination” in colleges and universities, when another, mostly anonymous group is responsible. A cadre of thinly educated support staff serves up most of the primitive, toxic ideologies for our students, including critical racialism and the euphemistically named “social justice education.”

How could this be so? Let’s explore.

Many are unfamiliar with the university bureaucracy known as “student affairs.” This bureaucracy disseminates the lion’s share of academia’s noxious ideologies through its so-called “co-curriculum,” which the average person outside the university has never heard of.  And that’s exactly how the fake faculty in the co-curriculum like it.

This co-curriculum exists on almost every college campus. It includes fake faculty, fake courses, and, at some schools, even a fake transcript. The point of this elaborate façade is to blur the distinction between the actual curriculum taught by actual faculty in academic affairs, and the faux curriculum taught by fake faculty who call themselves “college educators.” Many, if not most, of the persons who teach this fake co-curriculum are campus clerks, advisors, coordinators, DEI commissars, enrollment managers, and other “student affairs” staffers who hold the increasingly ubiquitous “master’s degree in higher education” and various online certificates.

The actual professoriate is often ignorant of the student affairs bureaucracy and, in most cases, has no influence on—and certainly no oversight over—this “co-curriculum.” Typically, the only actual faculty who are concerned with this fake curriculum are education school types, usually those who administer the ed school graduate degrees in “student affairs” and “higher education management.”

The student affairs co-curriculum typically includes workshops, “Difficult Dialogues,” “Courageous Conversations,” “Privilege Walks,” and “Safe Spaces.” The bureaucracy behind it is permeated by a monolithic racialist ideology that 1) embraces the primitive Manichean ideology of critical racialism; 2) originates in education schools, which train the vast majority of these bureaucrats in Freirean/Maoist theory; and 3) informs two off-campus professional guilds—the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA)—which maintain and augment the “antiracist” and “decolonization” efforts of academe’s ancillary support staffers.

ACPA and NASPA run workshops, hold conferences, and publish a raft of anti-intellectualist literature. They are completely overrun with crypto-Maoist education theory that they attribute to an educationist by the name of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist whose education theory is promulgated in American education schools.

These two groups are thoroughly doped with fringe ideology, which they believe has imbued their members with “critical consciousness.” They also set the standards for ed schools’ advanced degree programs in “student affairs” and in what is euphemistically called “educational leadership.”

[Related: “Brutal Minds and Brainwashing: A Close Look at Leftist Mind Control”]

Most of this Marxist critical theory, critical racialism, and “social justice advocacy” is purveyed through the incessant messaging that saturates various student affairs activities. Much of it is imposed in the student dormitories by a student affairs office called “residential life.” Indeed, those with access to students have written whole books on how to foster “student learning” in dorms.

Student affairs runs an entire enterprise called the “curricular model” of instruction, which is designed to create an inescapable campus milieu that influences students 24-7. The thinly credentialed persons who employ the curricular model believe themselves to be—and, indeed, call themselves—“college educators.” They also refer to the actual faculty at their institutions as “college educators,” conflating as much as possible their own sophomoric efforts with those of the genuine faculty. They mask their efforts with ambiguous references to “student learning” and “student development,” uniformly omitting the actual content of this “learning and development.”

The content of this rickety co-curriculum is determined not by actual faculty (except, perhaps, education school types, “public sociologists,” and the occasional errant “counseling psychologist”), but rather by non-academic support staff.

One of the more abusive techniques that these non-faculty clerk-instructors use is so-called “identity development.” Typically deployed during freshman year through workshops and fake classes, identity development is a rhetorical mask for the opening attack on the student’s sense of self.

In the guise of “student development,” these clerk-instructors question the student’s self-conception and identity, which are methodically destabilized as a prelude to the routine thought reform methods advocated in books like Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice and Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives. The eventual goal, of course, is to guide the student along a path to what education school apparatchiks call Freirean “critical consciousness.”

Critical consciousness is the intoxicating belief that one possesses arcane and privileged knowledge. It enables one to see clearly into the contradictions of society, while others—probably parents—are afflicted with “false consciousness.” As with so many of Freire’s ideas, this one did not originate with him. For more on the concept of understanding “contradictions,” see Mao Zedong’s famous 1957 essay “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People.”

It is even more intoxicating to use the original Freirean Portuguese formulation for critical consciousness: conscientização. This confection is little more than a Marxist/Maoist version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave—the metaphor for so many crackpots and cultists throughout history, who believe that they have acquired keener perception than others and have discovered some hidden “truth,” and who combine this with a messianic mission to lead others into the light.

[Related: “The Conspiracist Fantasy of University Bureaucracies”]

Unfortunately, the thought reform program administered by these enlightened souls is designed explicitly to alienate students from their parents and friends and to enlist them in approved ideological struggles: “A new set of beliefs become ‘home base’ for interpreting experience and creating meaning. The past is reinterpreted and reconstructed into a new frame of reference.”

It’s only natural that freshmen are targeted—they are the most vulnerable. As one student affairs educationist notes: “This makes freshmen orientation—a time in which new students are more likely to listen because they are frightened—a special time for education.”

It is this cadre that welcomes new students to campus.

Some parents and students might actually believe that the programs that characterize this “special time for education” are right and proper—that clerks and enrollment managers should psychologically manipulate freshmen outside the purview and awareness of academic affairs, and certainly without the informed consent of those targeted. If so, they may well be delighted to fund this unsolicited, amateur psychotherapy, exorbitant price tag and all.

On the other hand, if it strikes you as unacceptable that this therapeutic “curricular model” is administered deceptively by sketchy non-faculty to covertly uproot your student’s identity . . . perhaps you should inquire with the folks at your chosen university. Those inquiries should be as sharp and insistent as needed to cut through the public-relations boilerplate of “student development” and “student learning.”

Perhaps it’s time for universities to share this “co-curricular” material with parents on their ubiquitous online “parent portal”—the portal that informs parents of their tuition payment deadline.

How refreshing to connect those who pay the bills with what they’re paying for. You can’t lower tuition, but you surely can prevent the campus apparatchiks from dividing your family. Transparency, anyone?

Image: Adobe Stock