How Academia's Ideological Indoctrination Works

 Now is the time of year that graduating college students leave their dormitory rooms behind. I can imagine a graduating student leaving behind a note for the next freshman occupant of his dormitory room. It might read like this: 

Greetings, new college student! I thought you might appreciate a candid look at what you will be involved with over the next four years, from the last student who occupied this dormitory room that you are now occupying.

I bet that when you accepted admission to this university you thought you had signed up to learn almost entirely facts and objective truth. Ah, such naive freshman college newbie notions!  You will certainly learn many facts and much objective truth in the next four years. But in your classes you will be a taught a mixture of objective facts and the dogmas of a belief community. By joining this university, you have unwittingly signed up to become an acolyte of a kind of surreptitious religion.  Like some recruit to a cult, you will be expected to fall in line, and accept without question the gospel being preached to you.  The ideology that will be taught you is mainly one we can call Darwinist materialism.

There will be no ministers or priests or nuns who teach you this faith-based ideology. Instead the authorities who preach you this religion will have names such as professors, assistant professors and lecturers. The creed you will be taught will include these tenets:

1. "Earthly biology can be explained entirely by naturalistic explanations such as natural selection and random mutations."
2. "The human mind can be explained entirely by brain activity."
3. "Charles Darwin provided some brilliant insight that eliminated the need to postulate any design or purpose in nature."
4. "Life appeared on our planet purely because of lucky random combinations of chemicals."
5. "Everything is pretty-well explained by science professors who assume there is just matter and energy; so there's no need to believe in anything like souls, spirits, or the paranormal."

You may object that you did not consent to be indoctrinated in such a set of tenets, and that you can avoid such indoctrination. But given the rules of this university, you will be forced to undergo such indoctrination. Here's how it works: the university has a requirement for a minimum number of credits that must be science classes. Now it is true that you can avoid taking a Biology course or a Psychology course by earning six credits in Physics and six credits in Chemistry. But college physics courses and chemistry courses are known to be some of the hardest courses at this university, involving very much difficult math. So unless you are some math whiz, to meet this university's minimum number of required Science credits, you will find that for all practical purposes it will be necessary for you to earn six credits in Biology and probably three more credits in Psychology.  

It is in such classes that you will be indoctrinated in the creed of Darwinist materialism. You will be required to sit in “lecture” classes in which you will be taught the dogmas of Darwinist materialism. When your professor teaches you these dogmas, you will not have much of an opportunity to dispute your professor by saying, “That's not reasonable,” or “That's not true,” or “You don't know that to be true – it's just something you believe.”  The rule will be: students must be silent until a five-minute question and answer session at the end of the lecture. 

You will be given virtually no time to bring up facts contradicting the claims your professor makes. And if you bring up any evidence from a long list of Forbidden Topics (such as the huge evidence for clairvoyance and ESP), you will be instantly ridiculed or gaslighted, to prevent serious discussion of such topics. What you must remember is that science professors are People of 100 Taboos, and those taboos include discussing any of a long list of topics that are on a kind of List of Forbidden Topics. 

Your professors are not objective judges of truth. They are vested interests that have made very heavy investments in the belief system they are promoting. They typically have ties to corporations such as medical device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. But it will be very risky for you to call attention to such conflicts of interest and sources of bias. Much of the time you will be like some Sunday school student expected to meekly accept the tall tales you are taught.

It will be kind of like this in the classes in which you are indoctrinated:

If you are not a biology major or a psychology major, you will only have to face such indoctrination in a few of your college courses. If you are a biology or psychology major, you will face such indoctrination throughout a large fraction of your college experience. Should you seek out facts and observations and intelligent viewpoints that conflict with the belief dogmas you are taught, you will find that it is hard to find them in your university library, which makes it hard for you to learn very many important things that it should be easy for you to learn. 

Keep in mind that many of the most important-sounding things you will be taught are groundless boasts or lies. You will be taught that biologists understand what caused the origin of man. They don't. You will be taught that neuroscientists understand what causes your mind and its mental processes. They don't. You will be taught that scientists understand the composition of the universe. They don't. You will probably be taught outright lies such as the lie that DNA is a blueprint or recipe or program for making human beings. It isn't. 

All kinds of diversity of dress and appearance will be tolerated at your university. There will be little toleration for those who challenge the ideological dogmas and unfounded speech customs and groundless triumphal boasts of science professors. Such persons will be treated as heretics to be shunned.

Enjoy your four years, and remember: your professors view you as some lump of dough to be carved out by the cookie cutter of their ideology.  If your professors succeed, they will give you a "ball and chain" of dogmas that you will drag around for the rest of your life, and this "ball and chain" will greatly decrease your chance of learning the most important truths you can learn. 

But there are ways to prevent them from putting such a chain on your foot. I will leave it to you to figure out what these ways are.