In addition to believing that aspiring to a higher education is snobbish, Rick Santorum also believes that colleges and universities are places of liberal (left-wing) indoctrination, where people are re-made in the political image of President Obama.
Sociologist Neil Gross, among others, has done a fine job of challenging the validity of the claim that higher education indoctrinates students to become more liberal and less religious; but for those who will dismiss Gross' work as just another instance of the bias of a liberal college professor, let's examine the logic and assumptions underlying the claim that college is indoctrination.
It would be hard to disagree with the fact that, over the course of a lifetime, or even over the course of a childhood, there are many things that can influence someone's political affiliation, religious beliefs, notions of how to live a just and fulfilling life, and general worldview. The views and regulations of parents can of course shape the views of their children; the books children read or have read to them, the television shows they watch, the people (including the children of other parents) they speak with, the teachers they have, the priests or religious officials they see, and even the cashier at the corner store where a child stops every day after school for chocolate milk or a candy bar, all represent varying degrees of opportunity for influence over the way a developing person thinks about the world.
When someone like Rick Santorum singles out the experience of attending a university specifically as a form of (liberal) 'indoctrination,' he's not simply talking neutrally about the influence of one formative institution (which happens to be liberal) in the life of a young person versus that of another. By using the word 'indoctrination,' not merely influence or teaching, but influencing or teaching something uncritically and with negative effects, Rick Santorum and his compatriots are making a claim that the influence of a college experience is qualitatively different from and more insidious than other influences in the life of a young person. Further, by characterizing this influence as negative and insidious, he's making a claim that the way you learn things in college is worse than the way you learn things through other institutions and from other people in your life. To put it another way, what and how you learn from your parents is innocuous learning, but what and how you learn from your college or university is 'indoctrination.'
Let's consider this further. What exactly is the substantive difference in value between what and how one learns from one's parents and what and how one learns at one's college? Certainly parents can 'indoctrinate' their children every bit as much as universities can, and probably more. After all, even if we concede what has already been disproven by Gross et al.--that the political affiliation of college professors, who are mostly left-of-center, has the effect of making students more liberal during the college learning process--there remains the question of whether indoctrination in college is necessarily worse than indoctrination by the people who preside over one's childhood by accident of birth, the parents. Putting aside that college explicitly functions to expose young adults to a range of ideas and subject matter, many of which are competing even if the professors teaching them are less politically diverse, the possibility remains that just as liberal college professors could theoretically indoctrinate students, so too could students' parents indoctrinate their children, raising them in one household political environment, bringing them up in one religious tradition, feeding them one type of diet, etc. We often make the assumption that 'indoctrination' is something that happens from the outside, once someone has already acquired a worldview and has been compelled to change it; but it's quite possible that the purest form of indoctrination is that which occurs in youth, before one has any opportunity to independently seek out and comprehend new ideas not as a child, but as a developing adult.
Underlying Santorum's comments, then, is the assumption that a child's mind is rightfully the property of his or her parents, and that the ideologies in which parents raise their children are inherently more valid than others, in and of the fact that they belong to the parents. This is a belief that, even with the acknowledgement of the obvious fact that parents cannot be the only shapers of their childrens' worldviews even in early childhood, parents nevertheless ought to have the right to be the primary shapers and controllers of the way their children see the world. What follows is that anything else that violates or contradicts the set of ideologies under which a parent raises his or her child is 'indoctrination.' When Santorum laments the university as a place of liberal indoctrination, what he's really saying is that a university education and experience threatens the ideological monopoly that parents whose values align with his own have, think they have, or wish they had, over their children. But what would Santorum, or anyone else who accuses the university of liberal indoctrination, say to the following line of questioning: so what? Why is the 'indoctrination' of parents and other pre-university institutions more valuable and more desirable than what students learn and experience in college? How is the college experience more limiting and less ideologically diverse? Why should a child be made in the ideological likeness of his or her parents, and at what age is a child permitted to have thoughts and ideas that deviate from the parental or childhood-innocence-age ideology without such a deviation being characterized as 'indoctrination'?
Lost in all of this, of course, is the child (or the young adult) as a thinking agent, a concept that the likes of Santorum must not believe in. For to argue that colleges are places of liberal indoctrination is also to argue that people who have reached young adulthood at the ages of 17-19 years, and who have been educated enough by that point to qualify for admission at an institution of higher education, are nevertheless incapable of thinking for themselves. 'Indoctrination,' if it works the way Santorum and others suggest it does, means that young adults who have been raised in a given family tradition for the better part of two decades, young adults whose parents and pre-college social institutions have had a 17-19 year head start on universities in shaping the values and worldviews of their children, are nevertheless overpowered, their entire set of values and life experiences overturned, by the university experience. That being the (supposed) case, we must then ask two very obvious and very important questions: first, how strong were the parental values and ideas, really, if they were so easily broken down by liberal college professors?; second, how feeble are the minds and resolve of our young people, and how feeble is our belief in them and their integrity, if they can be so easily 'indoctrinated' over four years of undergraduate education?
Following from these two questions, logically, is a third: could it be that the ideas themselves that young, thinking adults are exposed to in higher education are as great a factor (if not a greater factor) as the so-called 'indoctrination' program in whatever change of heart a student might have over the course of a higher education? Is it not, for example, the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, but the 'liberal ideology' of a professor of American history, that has the greatest potential to change the hearts and minds of students?
Those who argue that a college education is an exercise in liberal indoctrination do so perhaps without full knowledge of the disturbing assumptions that underlie their accusations: one, the assumption that the mind of a young adult, likely away from home and independent for the first time, developing and learning to deal with new ideas and new experiences, should rightfully continue to be the property of the institutions that raised him; two, that ultimately college-aged people are not thinking agents, lacking the ability to account for their two decades on Earth and think independently enough to avoid 'indoctrination,' and unprepared to deal with the realities of ideological difference and contestation. My final question for the likes of Santorum, then, is: when? At what age, exactly, are young people capable of engaging independently in critical debate with other thinking agents, however liberal, without such engagement being considered 'indoctrination'? I suspect that, following the logic of Santorum and others who believe that college is liberal indoctrination, the answer is never. Because the charge of college as liberal indoctrination comes down to one thing and one thing only: there are a lot of people at universities--students, faculty, staff--who disagree with the ideas of Rick Santorum. And for an ideologue like Santorum, everyone who disagrees with him is suffering from 'indoctrination' of one sort or another.
