Of all the books that have been written about the alarming and even dangerous state of higher education in American universities, this is possibly the most important of them all. And if the reader assumes that he or she “has heard it all,” please be disabused of that notion, for Brutal Minds reveals shocking yet little-known details about an odious “co-curriculum” that college students are subjected to but ill prepared for and of which most parents are completely unaware.

Leftwing influences on both Ivy League and state university campuses are no secret, including indoctrination by many professors, but the common assumption is that those in charge of dorm life and extracurricular activities are there to make the university experience easier and more pleasant for students. In fact, however, nothing could be further from the truth.

While it must be acknowledged that “a new generation of radical faculty rejects the entire premise of traditional university instruction in favor of a political activist model,” it is also true that much of the intimidation, indoctrination, and brainwashing takes place both on and off campus outside the normal courses of study. But as Ridgely writes, the ideologues are coming after even the STEM students, for no area of the university is immune.

The author explains that what he terms “brutal minds” are “distributed across the campus as faculty and bureaucrats, and the worst of the lot go by the name of ‘student affairs....’” Their ideology is embedded in their policies, which provide them anonymity.”

And it is precisely this anonymity that makes the co-curriculum purveyors so effective and so dangerous. As noted, they often operate outside of regular curricula and programs under the vague umbrella of “student development.” They promote an anti-racist ideology that includes harassment, intimidation, and coercion in the form of “social justice workshops,” and “antiracist” programs. “Almost without exception,” Ridgely writes, “these programs constitute unauthorized psychotherapy sessions conducted quite often by unlicensed personnel under false pretenses.”

Brutal Minds describes in detail the behavior modification techniques used in thought reform, and notes that they are based on the three-stage model of brainwashing that was part of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Communist China, and which remains in use today.

The easiest prey for these activists and their agenda are the young students, and freshmen are logically “the most vulnerable.” The perpetrators deny that they employ a brainwashing program, and mask what they are doing with a variety of euphemisms such as “Education for Freedom,” “Transformative Education,” and “Social Justice Education.”

The author notes that the phrase “transformative education,” has been adopted to replace “the tainted label ‘re-education’ with all of its unsavory connotations.” He explains that the techniques used by thought reformers vary, depending on legal protections, which “are much more developed in the United States, and thus American thought reformers are more restricted in the methods they can use to achieve the goals of transformative education.”

Essentially, the process is to attack the moral values and beliefs with which the student enters the university, create in the student a significant sense of guilt, force him or her to divulge personal and family information for exploitation by the instructor or facilitator, and finally, to create a new mindset and way of thinking. Students must discard their former family-oriented values and embrace the new collectivist, Marxist views of the session facilitators, who admit: “[T]here can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches ... and it may hurt them that new ways of knowing may create estrangement [from their families] where there was none.” As Ridgely writes: “Critical ideology permits no middle ground between its poles of good and evil. In this case, those poles are antiracism and racism ... critical thinking and the asking of questions is discouraged; converts are taught to feel rather than think.”

Chapter Two is especially critical for parents in that it provides detail about the very real abuses perpetrated in these brainwashing sessions and the right of their children to resist them. Ridgely describes the programs and curricula as “psychotherapeutic interventions of antiracist pedagogy,” which are identified by various labels, including “Difficult Dialogue,” “Courageous Conversations,” “Intergroup Dialogue,” “Racial Caucuses,” and “Brave Spaces,” among others. The most important thing for parents and students to understand is that these sessions are generally not mandatory, and that students must refuse to become victims no matter the level of arm-twisting, intimidation, and coercion to participate.

Part II of Brutal Minds exposes the “iron triangle of higher education” and how it operates “in plain sight” to accomplish everything discussed thus far. Ridgely writes that like the creature imagined by the ancient Greeks—Cerberus—“this bureaucratic structure appears to have three separate heads, but has a single body.

The three heads are:

1. university schools of education, and individual departments of education without standalone ed schools
2. university student affairs offices
3. outside non-professional organizations

While it appears as three heads, it is a single brigade of persons who can, and often do, participate as members of all three. Ridgely examines how the three heads of the beast operate separately and together, from the heavily politicized schools of education to the student affairs offices to the external organizations that work in lockstep with them.

“Two primary professional clubs constitute this third head of the Cerberus,” writes Ridgely, the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA).... These clubs are like political party organs that maintain ideological purity.

The off-campus associations have as their chief goal “to undermine American higher education and transform it in accord with neo-Marxist doctrine....” These nonacademic clubs “generate incredible amounts of propaganda in the forms of articles, books, journals, seminars, conferences, awards, and participatory ‘institutes’” that train “those in the residence life wing of student affairs to install a fake curriculum in dormitories, one that reflects the tenets of critical racialist ideology. This curricular model mimics an actual academic curriculum, complete with assessment of student learning.”

In the face of all this, what reason for hope does Brutal Minds leave with concerned parents and grandparents? The final chapter of the book outlines Ridgely’s recommendations for “resistance,” “restoration,” and “renewal.” He writes that “strong countermeasures must be taken at several levels and by entities both public and private.”

For example, parents must realize they are being played, that they are to the student affairs staff, “a problem to be overcome.” The author asks: “Should you be suspicious of the student affairs cadre? Of the student success cadre? Yes, most certainly. You can’t afford not to be.” He then describes how upbeat, jargon-laden emails and newsletters will come parents’ way, absent of course “the ideological domination of student affairs by critical racialism and the consequent programs that attack students in the guise of developing them and fostering student learning.”

Given that critical racialism is entwined with coercive methods, complaints against institutions that receive public funds may provoke requirements of transparency. “If an institution receives federal funding,” notes Ridgely, “then these institutions must abjure the imposition of the critical racialist creed under penalty of law and threat of defunding.”

Additionally, “workshops and racial caucuses that attack or coerce participants on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality violate federal civil rights laws, and the persons who conduct these activities and who propagate racialist doctrine can be subject to legal sanction.” Abuses by state universities may also be brought to the attention of state legislators.

Finally, Ridgely writes, “the student must become the hero in this tale, and that ultimately will determine whether that tale will unspool as a tragedy or as an epic.” Students well informed of the dangers they will almost certainly face are well equipped to deal with the threats. “Armed with the knowledge of their legal rights and the legal prohibitions that restrict rogue faculty and workshoppers from much of their activities, students can seize control of their collective educational fate.”

Parents with children already enrolled or about to enroll in a college or university should avail themselves of the indispensable information in this well-researched, compelling book.

To read the entire book, go to Amazon or Humanixbooks.com to order!

The Education Reporter Book Review is a project of America’s Future, Inc. To find out more about America’s Future, visit AmericasFuture.net.

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