Casual Cruelty, The Hidden Curriculum of Modern Universities
How normalized humiliation and ideological rigidity in classrooms teach all the wrong lessons
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The Tennessee hills have been unseasonably cool the last week and a half, and Nazi stolen art has been back in the news. Both seem appropriate as I have been on something of a WWII bender, trying to get a feel for how the shifts in policy and public norms would have felt to average people.
After sitting with the Whitelash study for the last two weeks, I’ve found myself curious about how those professors along with similar DEI and counseling instructors were able to convince themselves that their point of view justified hurting other people. What made it a matter of course that a pattern of complaints stretching over a decade was easily dismissed. How was it that sadistic responses to these classes were documented, but not acted on?
Zimbardo’s prison experiment was shut down in less than a week.
In wrestling with these questions, I’ve twice watched the movie Conspiracy. This HBO offering dramatizes the Wannsee Conference, where the details for implementing the Final Solution were hammered out. If I can finish my current writing quickly enough I’ll watch it again tonight.
With the sound off, the Wannsee Conference could pass for a corporate retreat. The location was beautiful, the flowers lovely and the catering that opens the film is rich with soft cheeses. The meeting itself, could have been any gathering to discuss the logistics of laying cable or improving the train schedule. Troubled expressions could be easily ascribed to haggling over deadlines.
The Whitelash study has a similar pedestrian quality. Surrounded by a university environment obsessed with race it would feel alienating not to think on those terms. After teaching in the same way for 12 years, Villescas wouldn’t be surprised that white male students would take issue with the material, that reaction so common by then it was laughable.
With so many DEI programs moving forward in near lock step during the Biden administration I suppose all that social proof made it seem that any harm caused was worth the believed rewards, like the pain of a vaccine staving off a worse disease.
And when you never test that the assumed benefit was real, if you raise doubt that an objective reality even exists… well…willful blindness prevented seeing any disconfirming realities.
Though rarely dramatized, I’m sure similar meetings and trainings went on in Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and even other instances right now.
Admittedly, it’s not that planned violence is all that rare. Two hours of Dateline is usually enough to prove that organizing a murder isn’t exactly beyond the pale even in the U.S.
The scale of casual dehumanizing seen in Whitelash and other DEI inspired programs isn’t unique either. China, the USSR and Germany were quite large. Even the assassination of Julius Caesar involved a crowd of 60 to 70, senators no less.
No doubt there have been times in history where the callous disregard for others favored survival. As most who grow up near military bases will tell you, war is such a time, but that is also its distinctive feature.
If we are to move forward in a way that avoids repeating the worst of human behaviors, there must be some acknowledgement that dark drives are universal, and it’s when we think we’ve figured it all out and risen above such animalist tendencies that we are most likely to act on those brutal impulses.
Since I passed puberty no horror movie has truly scared me. Witches, ghosts and monsters seem laughably implausible, if entertaining. But these real events, the Wannsee Conference, Soviet gulags and Mao’s great leap forward, are abhorrent.
The institutionalized humiliation I experienced at the University of Tennessee and have been reading about in the Whitelash study, both originating from university departments that purport to teach others to provide therapy with unconditional positive regard, are terrifying.
The everyday dismissal of humiliation and ostracism as normal, necessary, even funny is disturbing in a way that I find impossible to shake.
Like everyone else, I’d love to believe that humanity has grown past barbaric atrocities, that we have learned from the past how easy it is to vilify or be vilified to disastrous consequences, that it’s only the profoundly unwell few that could be capable of acting on a dehumanizing message, with the mandate that the end justifies the means.
I’d love to believe those things were true.
But they are not.
And the Whitelash study proves it.
Housekeeping
I didn’t finish writing this early, but I think the extra hours paid off. I do have news, but it will have to wait til next week. Alas.
On the Bookshelf
I read nothing on this bookshelf in the last week, but I did get some laundry done. Sometimes it’s like that. Wag any finger you wanna. No shame here.
Accreditation on the Edge: Challenging Quality Assurance in Higher Education by Susan D. Phillips
The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan
The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong by Rebecca Haw Allensworth
Moral Calculations: Game Theory, Logic and Human Frailty by Laszlo Mero
The New Know-nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature by Morton Hunt
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard by Marc Brettler, Carol Newsom, Pheme Perkins
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman
We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of the New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi
“Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher Education by Brian Rosenberg
Your Consent Is Not Required by Rob Wipond. ←— READ THIS BOOK!
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About
Diogenes in Exile began after I returned to grad school to pursue a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Tennessee. What I found instead was a program saturated in Critical Theories ideology—where my Buddhist practice was treated as invalidating and where dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy was met with hostility. After witnessing how this ideology undermined both ethics and the foundations of good clinical practice, I made the difficult decision to walk away.
Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to exposing the ideological capture of psychology, higher education, and related institutions. My investigative writing has appeared in Real Clear Education, Minding the Campus, The College Fix, and has been republished by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. I also speak and consult on policy reform to help rebuild public trust in once-respected professions.
Occasionally, I’m accused of being funny.
When I’m not writing or digging into documents, you’ll find me in the garden, making art, walking my dog, or guiding my kids toward adulthood.