This essay is adapted from the preface of Brutal Minds and appears on Informed.org with the author’s permission. Nothing has been softened.
This is a story of one of the great subterfuges in American history.It is a tale of how one of history's great institutions — the American university — is undergoing an infiltration by an army of mediocrities whose goal is to destroy it as an institution of knowledge creation and replace it with an authoritarian organ of ideology and propaganda.
If you want to understand what is happening on America’s college campuses, don’t reach for George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. That book is grounded in the coercive realities of communism — but it’s still fiction.
Read Václav Havel instead.
The Greengrocer’s Sign
Havel was a Czech dissident who understood authoritarianism not as an abstraction but as a daily lived experience. In his landmark essay The Power of the Powerless, he gives us a greengrocer in 1970s Czechoslovakia who places a sign in his shop window.
It reads: “Workers of the World, Unite!”
"Workers of the World, Unite!"
"Diversity is our strength!"
He doesn’t necessarily believe it. He may never have thought about it at all. He puts it in the window because everyone else does. Because refusing might bring trouble. Because the system expects the gesture. He does it, Havel tells us, because “these things must be done if one is to get along in life.”
The sign is not persuasion. It is conformity. It signals loyalty. It communicates that the shopkeeper understands the rules and will not challenge them. Havel called this living within the lie.
Now consider the modern American university.
The sign in the window no longer reads “Workers of the World, Unite!” Today it reads: “Diversity is our strength!”
The function is identical. These slogans are not arguments. They are loyalty tests. They exist not to motivate the faithful but to identify the unfaithful for special attention. Silence is suspicious. Skepticism is dangerous. Dissent invites consequences.
Faculty repeat them. Administrators enforce them. Students learn quickly which questions are permitted and which are not.
The greengrocer is still putting up his sign. He just updated the slogan.
Who Are the Brutal Minds?
Who is responsible?
Not primarily the professors, though many have willingly participated. The deeper responsibility belongs to a rapidly expanding class of university bureaucrats — particularly those operating under the banner of student affairs.
You can see them everywhere on a bustling campus: student affairs offices staffed with activists, believers embedded among the faculty in various studies enclaves, the whole apparatus rooted in schools of education and sociology departments. The most obnoxious of them strut on social media platforms, competing for the title of most hateful.
These are not scholars. They are not intellectuals. They are, as I have described them, brutal minds — distributed across campuses as faculty and administrators, frozen into a totalist belief system, distinguished only by their devotion to policies that absolve them of personal responsibility.
They are not stupid. That is the critical point. They outsmart the faculty the way the hedgehog outsmarts the fox — through singular, relentless focus. They have their hands on the levers of power. And they are using those levers deliberately.
They are open about their goal when they believe no one important — especially parents and donors — is watching: to boldly transform the university into an instrument of ideological propaganda for the nation’s young people.
Their notion of “social justice education” consists of applying the ideology of antiracist pedagogy and assorted other alien variants of critical theory and wishful, magical thinking. Their ideology is embedded in their policies, which provide them anonymity.
These are the charlatans, the snake oil salesmen, the cultists, the mystics, the romantics, and the paranoiacs. Many of them call themselves “marginalized voices” and are declared off limits to criticism. They are lionized. They have a zealous following. Some earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for diversity consulting.
And they self-celebrate as they finally get a chance to use their master’s degrees.
The Long March Through the University
Back in 1972, the neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse called for a “Long March through the institutions” — an incremental seizure of the institutions of free societies in service to an authoritarian, anti-Enlightenment ideology. This is the project of today’s brutal minds.
The university is not entirely there yet. But it is succumbing — clearly and measurably — to a clearly expressed agenda of an identifiable group of mediocrities who embrace an antiscientific, anti-Enlightenment ideology and impose it on undergraduate students with impunity.
If people think the university remains an aristocracy of the learned, of the best and the brightest, the reality in the bureaucracy is increasingly that of a ruling clerisy of the worst and the dullest.
How It Ends
Havel understood something that applies here directly.
Systems built on conformity depend on participation in the ritual. The greengrocer’s sign has power only as long as greengrocers keep putting it up. When individuals refuse — when they stop repeating the slogans, stop attending the trainings, stop nodding along — the system begins to lose its grip.
The story is ongoing right now. It nears its denouement — the final resolution.
How it ends is up to you.
