Colleges & Universities Produce Left-Wing Ideologues, Not Educated Students
The sad state of PhD programs ruined by Marxism, poor research standards, and purity tests.
Zach McClanahan was a second-year marketing PhD student at the University of North Texas (UNT), but after writing this essay he indicated he is likely to abandon his PhD aspirations given the left-wing homogeneity across academia. As he related to me, “giving up any chance to work at a university is worth exposing their pathetic, intellectually bankrupt institution.”
Liberal Ideology Pipeline
The professional world today is largely shaped by an openly left-leaning class. For many who align with liberal ideologies, their beliefs are not just “right” but the only acceptable ones to publicly endorse. This perspective has become deeply ingrained in academia, where students are frequently required to take courses that emphasize a liberal worldview. They hold up things like critical theory, which is thinly veiled marxism, as a serious discipline.
Meanwhile, the few conservative-leaning students learn quickly that expressing their views openly can lead to social ostracism. They’re often left to quietly endure the ideological messaging they’re compelled to absorb. You’d think that Texas, of all places, could have escaped the blue brain rot, but alas, there is no safe haven that this ideology hasn’t infected. Personally, keeping quiet wasn’t an option for me; my attempts to speak openly only confirmed my suspicions. As a white male, the expectation was clear: know my place or pay the price. In a country where 1 in 6 hiring managers has been told to stop hiring white men, I should have just felt honored that they bestowed the honor upon me (they likely brought me on because I am a veteran and as a state institution they have a mandate to hire veterans).
This “pipeline” of ideological training extends to stereotypes and narratives fabricated to fit a victim narrative. For instance, there was a persistent stereotype mentioned in classes that “women are bad at math”—a stereotype that doesn’t exist in the modern discourse, except in the mind of psychology, and oddly, business professors (I originally posited it did not exist ever however, Dr. Haltigan correctly pointed out to me that this was a common trope in the 80s. That being said I have not ever heard it, especially not in the 2020s). While this stereotype did once exist, it’s obvious it’s been resurrected to find the never-ending female victim narrative, which was used across multiple universities I attended. If professors really cared about women, perhaps they would focus on the absolutely shocking rape statistics that unmitigated and unvetted immigration has led to unimaginable levels of sexual assault across Europe. It’s become clear to me that a liberal ideology has nothing to do with protecting women at this point, it’s simply a tool for signaling moral superiority.
Another fun anecdote, a woman in a psychology course I attended cited the “model minority myth” to depict herself as a victim, given that she is of Asian decent, despite the discussion being about positive stereotypes. Wow, I’m so sorry that people look up to you as a model student, that must be tough. Imagine trying to be a victim when a stereotype is portraying you in a positive light. These cases underscore the amplification of grievances when they don’t even reflect real experiences.
Infantilization of Students
As we can see, many students today seem to require an environment filled with "Legos, chockie milk, and nap time" to handle emotional stress (Block, 2024). It’s a surreal picture—these are adults, yet they’re treated like children in need of constant mollycoddling when the bad man wins the election. Would there have been a day off had Harris won? This raises a question: who would feel confident hiring individuals who need a vacation when they need to process their feelings?
The implications are troubling. First of all, you don’t read any real books. I had to strike out on my own and read The Wealth of Nations, a seminal book in modern economic theory. I didn’t understand why it wasn’t part of core learning. Of course, it is because occasionally the book uses some antiquated language that could be seen as racist. God forbid we read a word that we don’t like written hundreds of years ago. We should embrace new-age books that obsess over the bad words from the old books! So these students aren’t learning anything from their classes, other than how they are somehow a victim. Imagine how useless these new students are going to be; you don’t have to because I already tried to hire one.
I hired a master’s student to help me with the editing of a paper. When this student failed to even start by the due date, citing emotional problems, I was furious. The expectation of professionalism wasn’t just unmet—it seemed completely foreign to this person. When I confronted the person she could not understand why I was angry, after all she was having a bad week. The sad part is one of the reasons I hired her was because she was in financial distress and I wanted to help. This was not a one-off and I make a habit now not to use university students to help with anything. A $20-a-month ChatGPT subscription is more useful than an entire classroom of undergrads or a handful of masters students.
Adding insult to injury is how PhD students are treated, both financially and administratively. In my case, my department informed me in the middle of the Fall semester of the second year that I wouldn’t be continuing in the program. Why in God’s name would you wait until the semester has already started to inform me of this? What reason would anyone possibly do that? This lack of notice cost me both time and money that I can’t get back. Financially, the situation is even worse. We are paid less than a McDonald's worker making $15 an hour—someone working that wage would make $800 more than I did in 2023. Even though PhD programs like to run your life, they still classify you as “part-time,” which legally allows them to pay below minimum wage in many places. The irony is striking: While teaching us about all the injustices in the world, they want to pay us starvation wages. Truly a Marxist paradise, listen to what I say, don’t pay attention to what I do.
Marxism and the Rise of Critical Theory
Of course now you have the latest stupid trend idea, Critical Theory, which started as Marxism but somehow got even more pathetic. At least Marx was looking at something real: class differences between people who owned factories and people who were working and dying in them. He was wrong about a lot of things, but at least he could identify an actual power dynamic.
Now we've got trust fund babies sitting in $70,000-a-year universities lecturing working-class students about "privilege." The sheer audacity of these mansion-dwelling "victims" explaining oppression to people who grew up on food stamps would be hilarious if it wasn't so insulting. You’re working two jobs trying to afford textbooks while these kids are at the university mental trauma center explaining how the lack of ethnically diverse Disney princesses (that they watched in the family penthouse in Zürich) is a sign of oppression. These "scholars" wear around oppression like a Cruella de Vil wears a white fox fur coat, completely for performative fashion.
But here's the real kicker - universities treat this garbage like it's legitimate scholarship. They're creating whole departments dedicated to professional victimhood, where wealthy students can pay top dollar to learn how oppressed they are. These useless programs are churning out graduates whose only skill is finding new ways to complain while contributing nothing to society. Meanwhile, the actual working-class students they claim to care about are drowning in debt, working multiple jobs, and getting lectured about their "privilege" by kids who've never had to work a day in their lives. A perfect example of Rob Henderson’s “Luxury beliefs” theory.
The whole thing is a scam, plain and simple. Marx would be rolling in his grave watching these privileged brats appropriate class struggle to justify their persecution complexes. Welcome to modern academia, where being born into wealth is no barrier to claiming victim status - as long as you can find the right victim checkbox to tick.
Stop Wasting Time with Useless Fake Genders
From the start of my survey research, I had to include “non-binary” and was asked to add “subjective genders.” Why? Biologically, there are two genders and I am asking for their gender so I can understand how their sex hormones associated with their biological sex impact behavior, psychology, and physiology. If a man identifies as a woman or the fake “non-binary” option I could care less, that is not relevant to my data. I only care about one thing, how do your biological markers correlate with differences between the sexes?
You could argue that someone taking cross-sex hormones might display tendencies typically associated with the opposite sex, but even that theory is on pretty shaky ground with no longitudinal study to back it up. We might have one study, but unfortunately, that study didn’t go so well for the gender fascists and showed that the poor mental health spuriously attributed to a much-needed “transition” doesn’t improve mental health outcomes. That study won’t see the light of day, of course. It seems, as was totally predictable, cross-sex hormone treatments cause emotional and mental strain rather than fostering a transformation into the opposite sex. This makes using subjective gender completely useless, if not highly damaging to research.
Even for those who “believe” in subjective or multiple genders, it seems less a genuine belief and more an act of self-preservation. In academia and professional circles, acknowledging “third” or “non-binary” genders is often a social expectation rather than a scientific conviction. Those who publicly endorse these ideas might be doing so simply to avoid professional repercussions and align with a prevailing narrative, whether or not they actually believe it.
Shut Up About Tenure, Shut Up About Tenure
Oh my god, the amount of times we talked about tenure. I have never had a job in my life that offers a free ride ad infinitum. If you’re that focused on finding a way to never get fired then I find you fairly pathetic.
Jordan Peterson correctly said that if you’re afraid to speak up as an undergrad, you’ll be afraid to speak up as a graduate student. Then you’ll get you’re first job at a university and of course, you can’t speak up because you don’t have tenure. By the time you get tenure, what will be left?
Academics are so Fucking Racist
First of all, there is no such thing as reverse racism; insinuating that racism experienced by a person with white skin and European ancestry carries a more positive affective valence is incredibly racist. If you have promulgated this lie, as many in the academy have, you are a racist and I probably hate you. I remember my first time experiencing this in 2016 living in New York City. While going out for drinks some woman who was a friend of a friend at the time asked me about myself. I expressed gratitude that I had made it so far in life, from a farm to the university. She, for no apparent reason, decided to say, “Well, it must have been easier because you are white”. She was white. What. The. Fuck? I didn’t believe what I heard so I said “Excuse me.” She replied, “Well, you know it’s easier because you’re white..” I immediately cut her off and told her I did not want to speak to her and did not turn to my right for the rest of the night. I don’t associate with racists.
Flash forward to one of my PhD classes, and I am in a room with three white persons: myself, another student, and the professor. There were also two non-white students in the class. Of course, a rich white student starts expounding white privilege. It is always the rich white students who would love to tell us poor white students about privilege, ALWAYS. I was not going to be lectured, so I of course, objected. What happened next was a 30-minute struggle session between the white student and the white teacher, religiously calling upon the spirit of white privilege to enter me and absolve me of my white sins. The ultimate irony was the two non-white foreign students had no idea what white privilege was until that class, nor did they care. But that day, college taught them how to be racist. (Jeb Bush voice) “Please clap” for the University of North Texas, ladies and gentlemen.
I remember hearing about the concept of internalized racism in relation to black communities, but I hadn’t been sure how real it was. Seeing what I saw in that classroom made me realize that it is most certainly something you can brainwash people into. Every academic acquiesced to the Ibram X Kendi manifesto en masse. Now, all white middle-class and rich communities manifested this internalized racist brain rot all at once. If you say something racist you should be fired, not for reverse racism, just the regular kind of racism you’re doing. I don’t know how this isn’t already happening. Maybe we should be filing lawsuits like literally anyone else who is not white would be completely justified in doing.
P-Hacking and Research Integrity
I remember my first day learning about survey research and how sketchy it is. First of all, the students samples are useless. The students do the surveys for academic credit and they don’t care at all. They just rush through the surveys in order to get course credit. One professor at UNT stated “I have never used a single student sample in my career.” That’s the quality of students we’re bringing to our 40,000 enrollment campus (The quality is not different at most major colleges). How are you going to get an American to fill out surveys for under $4 an hour? Yea I don’t buy it either, Prolific is supposed to be a premium research data site. No fucking way. No American is going to fill out surveys all day for less than minimum wage, there is no way these people aren’t from a developing country and using a VPN.
One of the most pervasive issues in academic research today is p-hacking—the manipulation of data analysis to achieve statistically significant results. This practice can involve selectively reporting data, altering sample sizes, or testing multiple variables until reaching desired outcomes, often without disclosing these methods. Research on p-hacking has shown that it’s alarmingly common across disciplines, partly due to the immense pressure on researchers to publish frequently, secure funding, and advance their careers.
In the social sciences, where subjective interpretation can easily creep into research, p-hacking becomes even more problematic. Studies motivated by ideological or social agendas can be subtly or overtly biased, as researchers may adjust their analyses to align findings with prevailing narratives. The result is often research that sacrifices rigor for relevance, presenting results that support a desired view but lack genuine validity. Ultimately, p-hacking erodes the trustworthiness of academic findings and promotes a culture where publishable outcomes are prioritized over objective discovery.
Theory is Verboten!
No one is interested in theory. If you make a conjecture everyone jumps on it and chastises you. How dare you think, what do you think this is a place for ideas? It’s so pathetic, you can’t say a single sentence if you didn’t verbally cite 20 academic papers before you said it. Some idiot always pulled that one on me. These hacks are so afraid of theory you can hardly call them philosophers. They’re mostly just mathematicians who conduct a few lab studies with students who are half-in the lab, half-daydreaming about taking a nap instead of doing the reading for their classes. Not that it matters, the professors won’t call them out on it anyway. I’ve been sitting next to multiple professors who bump every D and F to a C so they don’t have to explain to the administrators why they failed a customer… I mean student.
Reflecting on My “Mistakes”
In retrospect, I can acknowledge that I probably made some “mistakes” in navigating the PhD program—mistakes that stemmed less from academic failings and more from failing to conform to the implicit rules of the game.
Ambition and Achievement: From the start, I had the goal of securing a placement at a university superior to UNT. But ambition, I quickly realized, is essentially a crime as a PhD student. Rather than pushing toward genuine academic achievement, it seems the real job is to feed the fragile egos of faculty members while enduring arbitrary critiques of your work. Ambition is viewed as problematic—perhaps even as a sign of “white supremacy,” akin to other supposedly “white” traits like showing up on time, a theory from the brilliant minds at Stanford.
Expressing Conservative Views: While I am a registered libertarian, my views sometimes align with the conservatives when the policies make better sense. However, voicing these opinions was clearly a mistake in the groupthink environment of academia.
Not in the US yet, but the hate speech lovers would cream their pants for this. Challenging Racism: Another mark against me was that I had the confidence to challenge the “white privilege” narrative. More than once, I found myself in “struggle sessions” where the existence of white privilege was taken as an indisputable fact. I didn’t shy away from questioning this assumption and even pointed to data, such as income statistics by race, to back my arguments. This was evidently another misstep on my part. Coming from a low-income farming family didn’t help either; nothing is more annoying to communists than people who grow their food.
They think they’re going to be writing poetry after the revolution. Adorable. Initial Academic Performance: Admittedly, my academic record wasn’t flawless. My first semester included two C’s, and I struggled with statistics. However, I took responsibility for these shortcomings and worked to improve, rallying in the following semester. But the faculty told me my paper wasn’t good enough for their oh-so-high standards, the same ones where they bump up students from F’s to C’s right in front of my eyes. So, to them (I hope you’re reading :), “Fuck you”. My first-year paper was, certainly not amazing, but it was good.
Conclusion
Let's be honest - academia isn't just disappointing, it's a fucking joke. I walked in expecting the best and brightest, a place where ideas would be challenged and tested in the pursuit of truth. Instead, I found an echo chamber of mediocrity where conformity is the only real prerequisite for success. These supposed bastions of free thought have devolved into ideological assembly lines, churning out copies of copies, each one more watered down than the last.
The problems go way deeper than just the rampant racism. The entire research infrastructure is built on a foundation of bullshit - from p-hacked studies, nobody can replicate to survey data from students who couldn't care less. Meanwhile, professors are too busy coddling emotional kindergartners masquerading as college students to maintain any real standards. God forbid someone actually tries to develop a new theory - they'll be crucified faster than they can say "citation needed."
The real kicker is how this system perpetuates itself. PhD programs aren't producing scholars; they're manufacturing consent machines. They pay poverty wages while demanding absolute compliance with whatever fashionable ideology is trending that semester. They'll bump up every failing grade to avoid confrontation with their precious "customers," but heaven help the student who dares question the sacred texts of critical theory.
What we're left with isn't education - it's a credentialing racket that would make a medieval guild blush. The tragedy isn't just that I wasted my time; it's that these institutions are actively destroying the pursuit of knowledge while patting themselves on the back for their "progress." Until academia pulls its head out of its ass and remembers its actual purpose, it will continue churning out graduates who are experts in grievance studies but couldn't think their way out of a paper bag. But hey, at least they'll have their safe spaces and therapy Legos to comfort them when reality comes knocking.
 | A guest post by
|
Still amazing that they haven't taken any lessons from the past year, and they are accelerating their downward spiral. The elimination of the Grad Plus Loans is going to be devastating for their bullshit degrees.