Today I conclude my series on the politicized academic bureaucracy with a consideration of how that bureaucracy attempts to administer not just education, but belief.

Higher educations's administration of conscience begins at freshman orientation. Along with toothpaste samples and free condoms, first year students are frequently issued an official set of beliefs at orientation, which routinely includes sessions on how to think about race, sex, power, and oppression. These sessions supply students with a political orientation to match their academic one, instructing unsuspecting freshmen in the ways and means of multicultural sensitivity. Invasive, offensive, cultish, and doctrinaire; run by professional "diversity trainers" or even student "peer educators;" these sessions cloak their abrasive and illegitimate agenda in the wholesome language of "awareness," "tolerance," and "community." They do not raise awareness; they do not promote tolerance; and they do more to destroy community than to build it. They have rightly been identified as a type of thought reform. Their message is that there is one right way to think and feel about race and gender relations. They reward students who accept their message; they belittle those who don't.

Orientation is just a small, initial aspect of the university's largescale administration of collective conscience. "Diversity" and "multicultural awareness" license everything from ideologically loaded freshman reading projects (UNC-Chapel Hill is presently being sued for requiring its incoming freshmen to read a book that presents a whitewashed and one-sided picture of Islam) to course requirements (studies indicate that somewhere between 60 and 70% of colleges and universities have a diversity requirement on the books) to area studies programs to hiring decisions to the allocation of funds.

The result is a sort of emotional welfare state, one where students become so dependent on an atmosphere of controlled belief that they cannot cope with difference. Within the rigid conceptual uniformity of the "diversity" project difference of opinion is often experienced as cognitive dissonance (those who think differently--devout Christians, orthodox Jews, Republicans, and so on--are incomprehensible and thus demonized) or even as a threat (those who think differently are dangerous, and must be stopped). The idea that dissent and debate are forms of aggression--that words can "wound"--is embedded within campus speech codes and harassment policies, which attempt to protect fragile sensibilities by policing words, looks, jokes, and even gestures.

Such codes are the logical corollary of university administrations' attempts to plan, implement, and control a collective conscience. Collectivizing conscience--particularly in an environment that is also in the business of eroding individual accountability--is a mechanism of disempowering individuals while at the same time empowering the groups that are formed by like individuals. Thus it is that if a member of an oppressed group is upset by something someone else says or does, that person is not responsible for dealing with that upset on his or her own. In the multicultural university, social control is achieved through an elaborately administered psychic dependency in which school rules extend their reach past illegal and injurious actions to words and looks that could be misconstrued. Speech codes, overbroad harassment policies, and hostile environment policies all encourage and even mandate dependency on the system: if someone offends you, instead of ignoring it, or responding in kind, you run to the administration and demand redress. Administrators respond with alacrity, reinforcing the astonishing message that within the model campus community, you do indeed have the right not to be offended. That is, as long as you are female or gay or a person of color; a different standard applies to white men, who are presumably so insulated by patriarchal privilege that they alone can never be seriously wronged by harassing words.

Infantilization is the price one pays for the social privilege of victimhood. Victimhood itself, however, is richly rewarded on today's campuses. Oppressed groups have learned to leverage "hate," using racial tension on or around campus to demand ever more funding for their group and ever more sensitivity training for everyone else. Penn State is a typical example: in the spring of 2001, threatening e-mail was sent from an AOL account to several gay students and one black student leader. Defined as "hate crimes," they became an extraordinarily powerful lever for demanding that Penn State sink money into its already extensive diversity bureaucracy. Penn State administrators responded promptly to demands that they address homophobia and racism on campus. By the end of spring term, a massive diversity initiative was in place. It included allocating $900,000 for a new Africana Resources Center, nearly doubling the number of faculty in the Af-Am Studies department, increased funding and scholarships for Af-Am scholars and black students, and mandatory diversity training for all incoming freshmen. Penn State has made good on these goals. It has also launched a "report hate crime" web page and a 24-hour hotline for reporting hate crimes. And it has even created a 3-credit course that teaches students to be diversity trainers, and that includes "outreach" in residence halls as part of its course requirements. Offered through the Af-Am Studies department, "Peer Education for Social Change" is designed to "offer students an extensive curriculum of social justice issues, diversity leadership and group facilitation skills as related to educational programming." It is now possible to get academic credit at Penn State for joining the campus crusade for diversity.

The pattern at Penn State, in which "hate" (I put it in quotes because hate is neither a crime nor something that can be clearly well-defined) becomes the linchpin in beleaguered groups' demands for more money, more minority faculty, and more diversity programming, has become a common one on campuses around the country. Indeed, so effective is "hate" as a means of making the multicultural campus bureaucracy grow that it is frequently faked. A cynic would say that the timely emails at Penn State delivered some really valuable hate.

We should not be surprised, then, that within the emotional welfare state of the multicultural university, the punishment for violating the norms of campus sensitivity is often psychiatric in nature. As in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, students who are found guilty of "hate," "harassment," and "insensitivity" are often sentenced to "sensitivity training"--a term that speaks volumes about the lengths to which campus administrators will go to use emotional conditioning to enforce proper political views. The only thing more chilling than a school's willingness to engage in such invasive behavior is the frequency with which students themselves demand that those who disagree with them be subjected to it. But then, the most successful totalitarian regimes are those whose subjects loyally defend it as the mechanism of ultimate good. Richard Bernstein has aptly called the modern regime of multicultural education a "dictatorship of virtue."

Like any police state, the borders of the dictatorship of virtue are rigorously patrolled. Schools mandate a multicultural curriculum (sometimes in patent violation of individual rights). They require their faculty to toe the political line, blackballing and even firing those who refuse. They even turn down gifts that are flagged for uses that do not accord with the institution's ideological stance. During the late 1980s, anti-Reagan Stanford faculty prevented the Reagan Library from being built on Stanford's campus. In 1995, Yale caved in to multiculturalist agitators and refused to accept a $20 million donation dedicated to the development of courses in Western civilization. Recently McGill turned down a million dollar gift intended to create an Ayn Rand Chair in objectivist philosophy. The official reason for the refusal was that the chair was too narrow in focus. But as McGill student David Mader reports, at least one professor protested the donation for political reasons, opining in a letter that has found its way into the media,

"I was shocked to learn ... that my department had even considered an offer to endow an Ayn Rand Chair... Imagine the department of political science considering an offer to endow the Adolf Hitler Chair in International Politics, or the department of psychology discussing whether to accept an offer to endow the (H.S.) Chamberlain Chair in Eugenics... Ayn Rand ... is the heroine of an extreme right-wing group in the U.S. whose motto is selfishness. The egoism she preaches is so radical that no one takes it seriously in the ethics literature."

It's useful at this point to recall that Harvard has accepted over $2 million from the Saudi bin Laden Group. It's also worth noting that a large chunk of that is dedicated to funding scholars working in Islamic Studies.

Today, more and more professors and administrators are simply mouthpieces for received ideology. As a result, what passes for "education" is increasingly no more than indoctrination. This is not a secret. Professors dedicated to the cause are proud of their work as political re-educators. As Andrew Ross, a prominent English professor, once tellingly put it, his pedagogical aim was to radicalize "the children of the ruling class." On too many campuses, too many teachers, counselors, administrators, and even student "peer educators" are engaged in the risky and unforgivable business of teaching people how not to learn.

Having taken on the role of moral guide and political advocate, higher ed stands increasingly to cripple the minds of young adults in the name of educating them. Instead of preparing young adults for civic life, many colleges and universities are deliberately denying them the knowledge, understanding, and practice that they need to function effectively as adult citizens in a free, highly competitive country.

This concludes my series on the politicized bureaucracy of contemporary academe. I've written at length on this topic, and in doing so I have no doubt tried the patience of my readers. I have done so because I have wanted to lay out some admittedly rough, but also important, points about why we should all care about the institutionalization of leftwing bias in higher education. I have wanted to show how the problem I am describing is much more serious, and goes far deeper, than politics, or even parity. I have wanted to demonstrate how the politicized academic bureaucracy has made the administration of conscience its official business. And I have hoped, too, to show how, in arrogantly attempting to control souls rather than shape minds, American higher education has betrayed us all.