Book Review: ‘Brutal Minds’

A way to get past radical indoctrination in our universities and colleges

The three-headed monster of higher education is exposed in “Brutal Minds” by Stanley K. Ridgley. (Allbuyzpics/Shutterstock)

Historically, colleges and universities have been known for civil discourse and intellectual debate—but something has changed. Clinical Full Professor of Management at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business Stanley K. Ridgley shares what that something is in his insightful and candid book “Brutal Minds.”

“Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities” offers incisive analysis, impressive detail, and counter-confrontation tactics for fixing America’s universities today. The author blows the whistle on how universities have been infiltrated and captured by authoritarians who support censorship, cancel culture, and an academic fraud called “antiracist pedagogy.”

Stanley K. Ridgley contends that education schools often have over-politized curriculum. (Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock)

Six years in the writing, the book demonstrates an impressive command of his topic, buttressed with scores of examples, 24 pages of footnotes, and a literary sniper’s eye for the covert educational activities, cult-like practices, and emotional manipulation practiced on students today.

The author describes how those working to transform education portray themselves as “marginalized voices” off limits to criticism.

“The fact is that they are not marginalized. They are lionized, they are feted, they have a canon of books and seminal thinkers, they have a zealous following, and some earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for diversity consulting,” he writes.

Behavior Modification and Emotional Distress

“Brutal Minds” exposes in great detail how “thought reform,” or the reeducation model performed on campuses today, was simultaneously championed in the 1950s by German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin and the communist Chinese. Due to the reeducation model’s unsavory reputation of coercive ideological indoctrination and association with communist China, Mr. Ridgley notes that label has been renamed as “transformative education.”

"Re-Education" has a sinister meaning in communist China. Shayang Re-education through Labor camp in Hubei province. Laogai Museum, October 2016. (CC BY 3.0)

Following “Levin’s Three-Step Model, Mr. Ridgley explains how these transformative educational techniques break down into three distinct phases: ”Unfreezing” is designed to break down a student’s sense of self, their loyalty to family and the values they’ve been taught, and establishes a sense of guilt. “Changing” involves teaching the desired thinking by embedding a new belief, creating a compulsion to confess, and channeling that guilt into strident activism. “Refreezing” involves a rebirth into a new belief system that disdains critical thinking, doesn’t question the new ideology, and confirms that it is successfully implanted and operational.

Notably, Mr. Ridgley believes such techniques violate federal regulations and constitutional protections afforded against psychological experimentation and behavior modification.

Beware the Three-Headed Cerberus

University professors have been suspected for years of indoctrinating students in a variety of racial pedagogies like critical race theory, social justice, and gender-obsessed courses. Mr. Ridgley does fault specific academicians by name and university for those practices, but “Brutal Minds” focuses extensively on a three-headed Cerberus subverting the American university: university schools of education and education departments without standalone education schools; student affairs offices; and nonprofit associations partnering with education schools.

Together, these entities constitute what Mr. Ridgley calls “a brutish apparat” on university campuses that are responsible for the intellectual decline of universities.

Mr. Ridgley contends education schools are overly politicized with ideologues and plagued by low academic standards. In an effort to increase their influence in academia, around the year 2000, education schools began promoting the grievance industry and social justice to students. The education schools have also cleverly generated key roles for themselves in university administration that have resulted in vacuous programs like diversity counseling and equity and inclusivity workshops.

The author believes that student affairs offices found on every college campus are ripe with bureaucratic “amateur psychotherapists” and “neo-Marxist totalitarians” who peddle a co-curriculum, or counterfeit curriculum. “Instead of teaching in the curriculum, they get to fake it in the co-curriculum,” he writes.

Mr. Ridgley writes that the American College Personnel Association and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators clubs are “the fever swamps of ideological conformity” and help ensure opposing opinions and educational reform never see the light of day.

Student Affairs offices have a big impact on influencing impressionable students. (Ground Picture/Shutterstock)

Recognize, Resist, Report

The author offers students confronting overzealous academic authoritarians some key advice: Avoid unfamiliar situations in which you have little control and freedom; recognize contrived symptoms of guilt and guilt trips; never act from guilty motives; reject and expose illegitimate authority; never accept framework issues that don’t allow alternative solutions; question simple solutions to complex personal, social, and political problems; and don’t make yourself vulnerable by revealing personal information about yourself or your family.

Mr. Ridgley concludes his damning critique of universities on an optimistic note, reminding readers that without the collaboration of faculty and staff, boards of trustees and alumni, state legislators and, most importantly, parents and students, the Cerberus teeters.

Only by reclaiming universities can higher education be recaptured from the brutal minds running them today, and rebuilt on the original Enlightenment principles of merit, equality, and fairness.

It’s this kind of straight talk and candor that makes Mr. Ridgley’s narrative both compelling and refreshing.

Stanley K. Ridgley's book "Brutal Minds" discusses the changes in higher education in recent decades.

‘Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities’      By Stanley K. Ridgley Humanix Books, May 16, 2023 Hardcover: 290 pages

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