From Campus Debate to Campus Assassination: The Deadly Logic of the Pedagogy of Discomfort
How a theory meant to “challenge beliefs” paved the road to silencing dissent—sometimes violently.
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It has been a difficult week. Many have been facing the morning with a sense of apprehension and resolve not present before last Wednesday. While we pick our way out of the darkness of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, some will wonder. How did the United States, a country that enshrined the right to speak freely in our constitution, find itself in a place where a public figure was shot down in cold blood in front of a large crowd on a state university campus?
It used to be a point of pride for the college campus to be a place of spicy debate where virtually any opinion was fair game to discuss as long as you could make a good argument to support it.
Those days are all but over.
The university has become a place where divergent thought goes unspoken, lest you join the ranks of those cancelled in higher education.
This has happened in part because faculty gave themselves permission to manipulate and harm if it delivered the result they wanted. This permission slip is called the pedagogy of discomfort.
Getting the Backstory Straight
Pedagogy is a word that encompasses the study of teaching methods and strategies used to help students achieve specific learning goals. A superior pedagogy would blend the art and science of teaching. The rough goal is to foster learning, but a first-rate pedagogy also explores the philosophical and ethical implications of its approach, with an eye to what kind of person is shaped by the process being used to teach.
Pedagogy has been a subject of inquiry going back to the Ancient Greeks, with many weighing in, from Socrates to John Dewey.
The Pedagogy of Discomfort sprang from feminist writing in 1999. In the book Feeling Power, Megan Boler opined on emotions, education, collectivism, and how resistance to ‘seeing the world differently’ is the real barrier to changing worldviews.
Using quotes from Bob Marley and descriptions of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, Boler presents a collectivist case for questioning the Western dominant culture.
What the Pedagogy of Discomfort Claims to Be
Using oppressor and oppressed language that would sound familiar to many stuck in DEI and ethnic studies classes today, Boler dances around her central point like a huckster trying to bewitch a crowd with hand shadows.
She opens her chapter on the pedagogy of discomfort, describing the challenges of ambiguity in ordinary life as terrifying. She paints a picture of educators as the savior from conformity who must ‘rattle complacent cages.’ If only people had the courage to ‘see’ things differently, we could rid ourselves of the racially and sexually biased views imposed on us by the dominant culture.
She details the plan thusly:
I outline a pedagogy of discomfort to foreground the question, What do we–educators and students–stand to gain by engaging in the discomforting process of questioning cherished beliefs and assumptions? I begin by definition a pedagogy of discomfort as both an invitation to inquiry as well as a call to action. As inquiry, a pedagogy of discomfort emphasizes “collective witnessing” as opposed to individualized self-reflection. I distinguish witnessing from spectating as one entrée into a collectivized engagement in learning to see differently. A central focus of my discussion is the emotions that often arise in the process of examining cherished beliefs and assumptions. I address defensive anger, fear of change, and fears of losing our personal and cultural identities. An ethical aim of a pedagogy of discomfort is willingly to inhabit a more ambiguous and flexible sense of self.
Boler states that she wants to “understand how collectively it is possible,” to explore charged topics like race and sexual orientation, and “come out as allies and without severe injury to any party.”
The Real Mechanics: Guilt, Shame, and Forced Vulnerability
Like a marksman trying to shoot around a corner, Boler uses the language of invitation to seduce educators and students to question their values and cherished beliefs within a group.
Whether “collective witnessing” means speaking in front of the entire class, or writing papers that are shared and read aloud, as dissident students now report, is not specified. But she does call out solo self-reflection as permitting the ‘well-meaning white liberal to “feel better”’ as one would after confessing, while side-stepping actual change.
Boler believes that “pedagogical strategies must push beyond the usual Western conceptions of the liberal individual,” and frames objections to this course of action as ‘defensive anger.’
Talking from both sides of her mouth, she lays it out:
I anticipate the reader who believes that a call to action lies beyond the appropriate bounds of education. From the starting premises of Feeling Power I have argued that education always involves a political or social agenda. A pedagogy of discomfort is not a demand to take one particular road of action. The purpose is not to enforce a particular political agenda or to evaluate sutdents on what agenda they choose to carry out, if any. Further, given the “constraintes” of educational settings, we may not always see or know what actions follow form a pedagogy of discomfort.
Boler admits the intent is to disturb and prod students to action. While it may seem like she’s not tied to students taking a specific sort of action, she ends the paragraph with the following:
But ethically speaking, the telos of inquiry does not provide sufficient response to a system of differential privileges built upon arbitrary social hierarchies.
Here she tips her hand. For Bolar the ‘system’ requires a significant response. The intent to change the system is left implied.
The Whitelash study, my personal experience, and the stories of many other students and professors harassed, bullied, and driven out of their professions show how this works in practice.
Students are inudated with racialized material painting white people as oppressors. They are pressured to overshare past mistakes and shortcomings, and then guilted and shamed with public apologies demanded for trivial or non-existent errors. Objections are delegitimized as defensive.
Privilege walks, indigenous land acknowledgments, DEI pledges, and public apologies are the reality.
Why It Works: Psychological Manipulation in the Classroom
While Boler professes that the purpose of the pedagogy of discomfort isn’t “to enforce a particular political agenda,” she places no importance in exploring opposing viewpoints. In fact, earlier in Feeling Power, she mentions that ‘critical thinking’ has been reconceptualized. She says:
I see education as a means to challenge rigid patterns of thinking that perpetuate injustice and instead encourage flexible analytic skills, which include the ability to self-reflectively evaluate the complex relations of power and emotion. As an educator I understand my role to be not merely to teach critical thinking, but to teach critical thinking that seeks to transform consciousness in such a way that a Holocaust could never happen again. Ideally, multiculturalism widens what counts as theory…
However noble the goal, any educator who attempts to transform consciousness to prevent some possible future wrong is violating the trust of students. No one can see the future, nor do educators know what may or may not prevent atrocities. With the inherent power imbalance between teachers and students, there is only one word for this practice, indoctrination.
Indoctrination works by systematically and deliberately instilling a specific set of beliefs, values, or ideas while discouraging critical thinking, questions, or alternative perspectives. It leverages tactics like repetition, emotional appeals, social pressure, and creating isolated environments to make individuals more receptive to required viewpoints.
Indoctrination can use public confessions, group ridicule, and alienation from others who don’t conform to foster a strong sense of belonging to the group and its ideology.
Sound familiar?
Hidden Assumptions and Double Standards
From beginning to end, Feeling Power is filled with unproven assumptions. To list just a few, Boler either states or implies that”
Ordinary life is terrifying.
That teachers have the right to pressure and humiliate students if they believe it is for a just cause.
That teachers have a right to destabilize students’ cherished beliefs.
Creating a collectivist identity is a legitimate goal for education.
That constant questioning of one’s beliefs, values, Western values, or other internal minute details of habits and thought is beneficial, and not a risk factor for mental illness.
That the end justifies the means.
These ideas are not neutral or objective, but they are presented as such, alongside the claim that the discomfort involed in the process will lead to some sort of growth.
In reality, where these techniques have been put into action, as seen in similar accounts in Counseling the Culturally Diverse by Derald Wing Sue, discomfort is manufactured for the white or dissenting students, not for ideological insiders.
Consequences for Education and Democracy
If we consider the intent and objective of a pedagogy, the most important question to answer is what kind of person is shaped by the process being used to teach?
Looking around at college campuses today, nearly 30 years on from the advent of the pedagogy of discomfort, you can see, open antisemitism, encampments, riots, countless other incidents where students have harassed faculty, speakers, or vandalizing campus property. There has even been doxxing and threatening dissenters,
It should come as no surprise that a divergent thinker like Charlie Kirk was cut down on a state university campus. Ideologically, there is a through line from the pedagogy of discomfort right to our current moment.
When the end justifies the means, when students are taught through experience that pain and humiliation are a required gauntlet on the pathway to truly ‘see,’ when the administration of the university tacitly condones this pedagogy by allowing it to be used on their campus, of course our universities will produce students that cheer for assassins like Luigi Mangione or find joy in the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Every year higher education turns out more graduates who are shaped by a pedagogy of discomfort.
You tell me, what does a government dominated by such individuals look like?
What Real Education Should Be
Real education is not a loyalty test. It does not demand that students prove their worthiness by parroting the views of their professors. Instead, it requires rigorous testing of ideas.
A classroom should be a place where competing arguments clash openly, and students are encouraged to pursue the truth—even if that truth challenges the instructor’s own worldview.
The discomfort that leads to growth comes from hard questions: questions that force a student to stretch their reasoning, sharpen their evidence, and confront complexity. It does not come from being shamed into silence or humiliated for holding the “wrong” opinion. When discomfort is rooted in intellectual challenge, it builds resilience. When it is rooted in personal denigration, it only builds compliance.
Most of all, real education protects the freedom to dissent. A student should be able to disagree—whether on politics, philosophy, or culture—without being treated as morally suspect. True growth cannot emerge from coerced guilt. It emerges from an environment where freedom of thought is honored, and where ideas rise or fall on the strength of their reasoning.
Conclusion: Naming the Tactic for What It Is
The pedagogy of discomfort dresses itself in the language of moral awakening, but in practice, it functions as indoctrination. Its purpose is not to expand minds but to reshape them—turning students into ideological foot soldiers trained to repeat a single worldview.
By using guilt and humiliation as tools of instruction, this method smuggles propaganda into the classroom under the guise of liberation. It is a bait-and-switch: students are told they are being “challenged,” but what they are really being asked to do is confess, conform, and comply.
Parents, policymakers, and educators must see this tactic for what it is—a manipulative distortion of education—and refuse to accept it as normal. If we value education as a space for free inquiry, then we must name and resist these practices. To preserve the integrity of our schools and universities, we must reclaim the classroom as a place where ideas are tested, not people.
Love or hate his opinions, that’s exactly what Charlie Kirk was trying to do.
If you care about protecting real education—and refusing to let classrooms become indoctrination centers—then this is the place for you. Subscribe now to get sharp analysis, clear-eyed reporting, and the tools to push back. Free minds need allies.
Further Reading
Feeling Power by Megan Boler
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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.