Wake Up: Our Cultural Crisis is A Graduate of the American University
As a 19-year-old, I was led to believe I was crazy when I began to suspect that my university was attempting to re-educate me.
Indeed, I doubted my own sanity for thinking something so obviously conspiratorial. I suffered periodically from what I can only describe as severe epistemological anguish — bouts of terrifying mistrust in my own ability to clearly perceive and interpret the world around me. The idea made me feel silly, my friends suggested I ought to start wearing a tin-foil hat. But in truth, I was afraid — afraid that the institution to which I had entrusted my education, intertwined my life, and indebted myself for the foreseeable decades was in the business of systematically radicalizing myself and my peers for political ends.
Political bias on university campuses, let alone Berkeley, where I graduated in 2018, is hardly news. Most are familiar with the fairly homogenous politics of academia, as well as the data showing that such uniformity has increased over the last twenty years. What truly frightened me, however, was not the obvious bias, but the ideology to which this bias had come to serve.
I was young and astoundingly ignorant, but after two years of college, I noticed that the prevailing ideas on campus were not merely “liberal,” nor even within the scope…
