Making the Bad Lady Shut Up

This article is adapted from a previously published piece on abu al-fin blog

In an excellent demonstration of the motto of leftist higher education: "Free speech for me but not for thee," the Chronicle of Higher Education has fired a blogger who was paid to contribute a contrary viewpoint. She was fired for publishing a viewpoint that was too contrary for the comfort of the academics to whom the Chronicle of Higher Education caters.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has fired our former editorial-page colleague, Naomi Schaefer Riley, for a blog posting on the Chronicle's website that offended 6,500 professors. Well, they're not all professors yet, but they are members of what calls itself the "higher-education community," for which the Chronicle is its trade paper. As best we can make out, the Chronicle's editor, Liz McMillen, fired Naomi Riley for doing what she was hired to do—provide a conservative point of view about current events in academe alongside the paper's roster of mostly not-conservative academic bloggers. _WSJ

Ms. Schaefer Riley tells the story from her point of view:

Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story called "Black Studies: 'Swaggering Into the Future,'" in which the reporter described how "young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline." The "5 Up-and-Coming Ph.D. Candidates" described in the piece's sidebar "are rewriting the history of race." While the article suggested some are skeptical of black studies as a discipline, the reporter neglected to quote anyone who is.

Like me. So last week, on the Chronicle's "Brainstorm" blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and "a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap," at worst.

For instance, the author of a dissertation on the history of black midwifery began her research, she told the Chronicle, because she "noticed that nonwhite women's experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature." Another graduate student blamed the housing crisis in America on institutional racism. And a third argued that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and John McWhorter have "played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them."

The reaction to my blog post ranged from puerile to vitriolic. The graduate students I mentioned and the senior faculty who advise them at Northwestern University accused me (in guest blogs posted by the Chronicle editors) of bigotry and cowardice. The former wrote that "in a bid to not be 'out-niggered' [their word] by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on." (I confess I don't actually know what that means.) One fellow blogger (and hundreds of commenters) called my post "racist."

Gina Barreca, a teacher of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, composed a poem mocking me. (It begins "A certain white chick—Schaefer Riley/ decided to do something wily.") MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry spewed a four-minute rant about my post, invoking the memory of Trayvon Martin and accusing me of "small-mindedness."

Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a 500-word blog post. A number of the dissertations aren't even available. Which didn't seem to stop the Chronicle reporter, though. And 6,500 academics signed a petition online demanding that I be fired.

At first, the Chronicle stood its ground, suggesting that my post was an "invitation to debate." But that stance lasted for little more than a weekend. In a note that reads like a confession at a re-education camp, the Chronicle's editor, Liz McMillen announced her decision on Monday to fire me: "We've heard you," she tells my critics. "And we have taken to heart what you said. We now agree that Ms. Riley's blog posting did not meet The Chronicle's basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles."

When I asked Ms. McMillen whether the poem by fellow blogger Ms. Barreca, for instance, lived up to such standards, she said they were "reviewing" the other content on the site. So far, however, that blogger has not been fired. Other ad hominem attacks against me seem to have passed editorial muster as well. _Naomi Schaefer Riley_in_WSJ

The suppression of free speech on university campuses is being contested on a daily basis by FIRE -- the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But the suppression of ideas and speech by publications and information outlets is a more difficult enemy to overcome.

Fortunately, the internet provides a number of ways to expose and counteract the grand project of information bias that infiltrates and permeates modern societies.

Everything You Think You Know, Just Ain't So

Here are two ways in which we typically go wrong on a regular basis:

1. Cognitive hubris: each of us believes that his map of the world is more accurate than it really is.

2. Radical ignorance: when it comes to complex social phenomena, our maps are highly inaccurate. _American

We have learned from cognitive psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman that our intuition -- no matter how solid it feels -- is often built on a shaky foundation.

What's interesting is that many a time people have intuitions that they're...confident about except they're wrong. That happens through the mechanism that I call "The mechanism of substitution". You've been asked a question, and instead you answer another question, but that answer comes by itself with complete confidence, and you're not aware that you're doing something that you're not an expert on because you have one answer. Subjectively, whether it's right or wrong, it feels exactly the same. Whether it's based on a lot of information, or a little information, this is something that you may step back and have a look at. But the subjective sense of confidence can be the same for intuition that arrives from expertise, and for intuitions that arise from heuristics, that arrives from substitution, and asking a different question. _Edge

This phenomenon of "false expertise" is extremely common -- particularly among college professors, journalists, politicians, and others who are not typically held to a high standard of performance and proof. It is also a common part of everyday existence for virtually everyone.

Suppose you were to ask yourself how well you understand the world around you. How accurate is your map of reality?

If you interrogate System Two [slow, logical mind], it might reply, “There are many phenomena about which I know little. In the grand scheme of things, I am just blindly groping through a world that is far too complex for me to possibly understand.”

However, if you were to interrogate System One [fast, intuitive mind], it might reply, “My map is terrific. Why, I am very nearly omniscient!”

Evidently, in order to perform its function, System One has to have confidence in its map. Indeed, elsewhere Kahneman has told a story of a group of Swiss soldiers who were lost in the Alps because of bad weather. One of them realized he had a map. Only after they had successfully climbed down to safety did anyone discover that it was a map of the Pyrenees. Kahneman tells that story in the context of discussing economic and financial models. Even if those maps are wrong, we still feel better when using them.2

In fact, a number of the cognitive biases that Kahneman and other psychologists have documented would appear to serve as defense mechanisms, enabling the individual to hold onto the view that his map is the correct one. For example, there is confirmation bias, which is the tendency to be less skeptical toward evidence in support of one's views than toward contrary evidence.

System Two is evidently not able to overcome cognitive hubris, even in situations where one would expect System Two to be invoked, such as forecasting the difficulty of a major undertaking. _American

We have to rely upon our fast, intuitive, unconscious mind in order to get through a normal day. So much of our lives are performed on "auto pilot" simply because we cannot reason through every split second of our conscious lives. It would be a tremendous waste of very expensive conscious attention to do so.

And yet, so much of the time when we should give careful conscious attention to an action, choice, or verbal / written expression, we fail to do so. We are accustomed to trusting our intuitions, and we generally muddle through okay. But not always. And who can teach us when to take the time and make the effort to apply our consciousness, and when we can safely and effortlessly slide by on our unconscious intuition? That is where wisdom comes in.

Arnold Kling applies Kahneman's ideas to the political realm:

When two ideological opponents wind up on different hilltops, neither can believe that the other has sincerely arrived at a different conclusion based on the evidence. As Friedman puts it,

Consider the most reviled pundit on the other side of the political spectrum from yourself. To liberal ears, a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity, while well informed about which policies are advocated by conservatives and liberals, will seem appallingly ignorant of the arguments and evidence for liberal positions. The same goes in reverse for a Frank Rich or a Paul Krugman, whose knowledge of the “basics” of liberalism and conservatism will seem, in the eyes of a conservative, to be matched by grave misunderstandings of the rationales for conservative policies.5

Indeed, our cognitive hubris is so strong that, according to David McRaney, people believe they understand other people better than others understand themselves. He calls this phenomenon “asymmetric insight.”6

The illusion of asymmetric insight makes it seem as though you know everyone else far better than they know you, and not only that, but you know them better than they know themselves. You believe the same thing about groups of which you are a member. As a whole, your group understands outsiders better than outsiders understand your group, and you understand the group better than its members know the group to which they belong.

In our context, this would mean that liberals believe that they understand better than conservatives how conservatives think, and conservatives believe that they understand better than liberals how liberals think. According to McRaney, such beliefs have indeed been found in studies by psychiatrists Emily Pronin and Lee Ross at Stanford along with Justin Kruger at the University of Illinois and Kenneth Savitsky at Williams College. _Arnold Kling

These are very important insights which should be applied to our own everyday thinking. They could save you from a great deal of embarassment and unnecessary interpersonal friction. But just because "conservatives" and "liberals" make the same types of mistakes when judging the other side, does not make them equally right and equally wrong on every issue. Look for people who have changed their minds, and try to understand their reasons for changing.

Some changes may be a quasi-cohort effect. The old saying, "If you are a conservative at age 20, then you have no heart. But if you are not a conservative at age 30, you have no head," is a reflection of a common tendency for the "hard knocks" of life to beat a bit of conservatism into almost anyone, over time. If one is born into wealth, achieves early success, commits irrevocably to a cause in his youth, or acquires a sinecured position at a fairly early age, he is more likely to be able to avoid many of the uncomfortable changes in perspective which others may feel compelled to go through.

Simple observation over time demonstrates to most intelligent people that utopian ideas -- when implemented -- do not bring about the grand results they promise, but generally produce the opposite effect.

More on why this topic is important, to come.

A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste, As Is a Country

CarpeDiem_via_TaxProf

University tuition costs have been rising at least twice as fast as inflation and home prices. A large part of this higher education bubble-bloat is due to an explosive hiring of non-faculty staff members. People such as "sexual orientation counselors" and "diversity co-ordinators" are laughing about the bubble all the way to the bank.

The buyers think what they're buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.

Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn't.

Yes, this sounds like the housing bubble, but I'm afraid it's also sounding a lot like a still-inflating higher education bubble. And despite (or because of) the fact that my day job involves higher education, I think it's better for us to face up to what's going on before the bubble bursts messily." _mjperry_quoting_GlennReynolds

If the housing bubble brought down the economies of the western world, what will happen when the "higher indoctrination bubble" bursts? Overpriced university re-programming has been shifting away from providing a useful education in favour of providing a "consciousness-raising" brainwashing experience -- while simultaneously putting students and families in debt for decades.

This is a far more destructive process than buying an overpriced home and being foreclosed upon. In the case of institutions of higher indoctrination, it is your mind and the minds of your children that have been fore-closed by dogmatic professors and staff.

Get your download of the report on administrative bloat in higher education: the real reason for high costs in higher education. __ PDF Download __This is the report that is creating such a stir in the media and on university campuses.

Bonus: An interactive US map allowing you to examine the condition of K-12 education state-by-state. via_Jay P Greene

PLUS on the state of US K-12 Ed: 7 MB PDF report card on K-12 American Education via_Jay P Greene

Here is more coverage from US media on administrative bloat and rising tuition costs in US higher indoctrination:

Op-eds
Atlanta Journal Constitution
Baltimore Sun
Indianapolis Star
AOLNews
News
Dallas Morning News
Indianapolis Star
USA Today
Chronicle of Higher Education
Arizona Republic
Arizona Daily Star
Sunshine News
Phoenix Business Journal
AZ Daily Sun
Arizona Capitol Times
Inside Higher Ed
Modesto Bee
Time
Kiplinger’s
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
Baylor Lariat
Columnists / Editorials
The Economist
Forbes
Arizona Republic
Dallas Morning News
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Denver Post
Dallas Morning News
Selected Blogs
Instavision
National Association of Scholars
Instapundit
Cato@Liberty
Phi Beta Cons
Reason Foundation — Nick Gillespie
Reason Foundation — Lisa Snell
George W. Bush Institute
Pelican Institute
MacIver Institute
Nevada Policy Research Institute
The Five Year Party
Carolina Journal
American Council of Trustees and Alumni
The Volokh Conspiracy
Minding the Campus
And here is our rebuttal to ASU’s statement attacking the report.  The rebuttal works for most of the issues raised by other universities as well:
Our Rebuttal_JayPGreene

Making a Habit of Blowing One's Monkey Mind

Most humans never rise above "First Order Thinking" -- basic goal oriented behaviours, reading, computing, memorising, and fitting acquired comprehensions within a pre-existing, culturally inherited mental frame. At the most, a typical human will achieve "Metacognition," where he monitors his progress in first order thinking, and grades his progress. It is the unusual human who breaks through to "Transformative Learning."

The capacity for transformative learning develops in middle to late adolescence, although few persons truly experience it, and fewer still achieve mastery of the transformative process. Transformational learning involves breaking through cultural and paradigmatic constraints, to richer conceptual fields beyond.

The academic theory of transformative learning is almost entirely restricted to the field of "adult learning", because that is the field of learning where the theory originated and developed, for the most part. And perhaps those who teach adolescents and young adults in conventional institutions of education are just a bit too happy and complacent with the way things are in conventional education.

Transformational learning is not easy or comfortable -- for either teacher or student. But it is necessary, and those who care about the fate of humans in this part of the galaxy will begin to take it seriously.

Personal transformations often follow  the following phases:

1. Experiencing a disorientating dilemma, paradox, enigma or anomaly
2. Feelings of fear, anger, guilt, or shame
3. Questioning one's assumptions
4. Recognising the need for personal transformation
5. Exploring new roles, relationships and actions
6. Planning a course of action
7. Acquiring new knowledge and skills
8. Provisional trying of new roles
9. Building confidence in new roles and relationships
10. A re-integration of a new perspective into one's life

Ref. Mezirow, Jack et al. (2000) Learning as Transformation

_Hent.org

Most people do not take kindly to being "disoriented." Feelings of "guilt, shame, anger" etc. are not the half of it, for most ordinary monkey-minds. The full play of emotions can enter the dynamic process of transformative learning. Not exactly how you remember school? Join the club.

When a fundamentally disconfirming experience or a disorienting dilemma challenges our frame of reference, we are presented with the opportunity to dive to the deepest level of learning in an effort to make meaning of the catastrophic experience. So powerful is this kind of learning that Mezirow described it as "emancipation from libidinal, linguistic, epistemic, institutional or environmental forces that limit our options and our rational control over our lives, but have been taken for granted or seen as beyond human control." This experience can cause us to critically reflect on our beliefs and presuppositions, resulting in either a transformed way of pattern recognition, or, at the deepest level, a totally transformed framework. _ Learning to Think Strategically

Emancipation? Yes, and much more. Release from constraints plus the motive power to go beyond previous limitations.

Many animals can be trained to remain within a limited perimeter of physical or behavioural space. Then, when the real constraints are surreptitiously removed without the animal's awareness, the animal continues to limit itself as if the constraints remained. Monkey men are just like those animals. Transformative learning wakes them up.

For learners to change their "meaning schemes (specific beliefs, attitudes, and emotional reactions)," they must engage in critical reflection on their experiences, which in turn leads to a perspective transformation (Mezirow 1991, p. 167). "Perspective transformation is the process of becoming critically aware of how and why our assumptions have come to constrain the way we perceive, understand, and feel about our world; changing these structures of habitual expectation to make possible a more inclusive, discriminating, and integrating perspective; and, finally, making choices or otherwise acting upon these new understandings" (ibid.).

...Transformative learning has two layers that at times seem to be in conflict: the cognitive, rational, and objective and the intuitive, imaginative, and subjective (Grabov 1997). Both the rational and the affective play a role in transformative learning. Although the emphasis has been on transformative learning as a rational process, teachers need to consider how they can help students connect the rational and the affective by using feelings and emotions both in critical reflection and as a means of reflection (Taylor 1998). _ericdigests

Very few theorists have come to understand the centrality of grief to the process of learning and growing. Manfred Clynes is one such researcher. Robert Boyd is another. To understand why meaningful learning and transformation should involve grief, is to begin to appreciate how profoundly important being a human (as opposed to being a monkey) truly is.

There is an innate drive in all humans to understand and make meaning of their experiences. It is through established belief systems that adults construct meaning of what happens in their lives...Developing more reliable beliefs about the world, exploring and validating their dependability, and making decisions based upon an informed basis, is central to the adult learning process. _PraegerHandbookVol2

Most pseudo-intellectuals in academia, media, law, politics, and environmentalism are perfectly content to forego the exhausting work of transformation. Their time is filled with a daily routine of monkey games, which is as satisfying as they seem to require.

But those who wish to step beyond the ordinary shite fight and mudslinging of monkey play, into the larger universe of human, trans-human, and "posthuman" possibilities, it's going to take a lot of work, pain, and grief. Over and over, as long as you continue wanting to go farther.

Good little self-satisfied monkeys would never tolerate anything like that.

This is important: The crucially important and helpful techniques of transformative learning can be twisted -- are being twisted every day -- by professors, workshop leaders, propagandists, politicians, and others who shape the minds of others for their own benefit, rather than helping the person shape his own mind for purposes of personal and professional growth. This perversion of the transformative process is called brainwashing, or sometimes "consciousness raising." The goal of brainwashing is to confine the mind -- the opposite of liberation or emancipation.

Anyone who has experienced genuinely liberating and empowering transformation will detect the attempt at false and perverted "transformation" fairly easily. And it will make him very, very angry to see it.

More on this topic later.

Madrasas for Leftists: PC Universities at the Brink

There once was a time when the university environments of North America were not ones of indoctrination and brainwashing, as they often are now. Professor Alan Kors remembers those days:

I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term "the '60s" began. Most of my professors were probably men of the left—that's what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil's advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question.

...In grad school at Harvard, while a few dates left in the midst of dinner on discovering my free-market and hawkish politics, and while I did get thrown out of a party for opposing, when asked, Eugene McCarthy's view of Vietnam (this should have been a warning), the classroom remained open and, by design, intellectually pluralistic....When I went off on job interviews, I was not once asked a question, ever, about my worldview, but only about my historical research and notions of teaching. Politics were simply not in the category of appropriate inquiry.

...What has changed? In terms of the university in loco parentis, which has been restored and expanded with a vengeance, the revolution has been breathtaking....From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case—the professoriate and the curriculum—it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become.

There also has been, compounding academic problems, a dumbing down of the professoriate that quite numbs the mind—best seen not in the monographs that earn people their degrees, but in the egregious nonsense, crude meta-theorizing, self-indulgence and tendentious special pleading that are not merely tolerated without criticism, but rewarded at the highest levels.

...Academia also has become a place where professors can achieve the highest rewards, except in the protected fields, for acting out their pathologies. In higher education, to paraphrase the Woody Allen stand-up line, we increasingly send our students to schools for learning-disabled and emotionally disturbed teachers....

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten "minorities," including women (the majority of students), about the "internalization" of their oppression (today's equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them? __WSJ__via_BelmontClub

In fact, Kors is understating the case--pulling his punches. The reality of the modern university is worse than he describes.

Richard Fernandez thinks that the age of academic indoctrination may be nearing its end. He draws that reassurance from J. Richard Gott's "doomsday argument. It is an interesting argument, related to the "anthropic principle" argument in nature. Thought-provoking, but not conclusive.

I sincerely hope that Fernandez (aka "Wretchard") is right. Universities of indoctrination are spewing out minds that are increasingly incapable of standard reasoning and logic. Too often a graduate of a liberal arts or social science program has never been exposed to divergent points of view--never learned to confront intelligent and reasonable people whose deeply held and closely reasoned ideas differ substantially from their own. Naturally he goes out into the world believing that all right-minded persons will believe as he does, and that all others are either dishonest, corrupt, or stupid.

All of that, before his pre-frontal lobes have even completely myelinated--before his powers of judgment have even come close to maturing. How could he possibly know better, unless someone at some point was willing to force him to delve deeply into diverse disciplines of thought and reason?

As Kors explains in his piece above, those halcyon days of intellectual diversity in the university are as good as gone. But is Fernandez right in supposing that this monolithic thought structure, this incompetence, this intolerance, is soon to meet its doom?

Society--in the form of the news and entertainment media, popular culture--has bonded itself to the PC worldview monoculture of the universities. Government bureaucracy increasingly adopts the same forms, and the bureaucracies of corporations and non-profit foundations have been increasingly moulding themselves according to PC intolerance.

There is no doubt that civilisation is attempting to transition from a religion-dominant culture to a secular-dominant culture. But it is not that easy. Society abhors the moral vacuum of the "middle ground." Secular morality has not truly stepped into the gap to provide a firm foundation for sound child-raising or a decent society. Leftist ideology has attempted to fill the void via many universities and much of the media, but for some reason, it has only done half the job. It has torn down most of the traditional moral icons of the civilisation, but its own moral forms have not been widely taken up by the society at large.

So instead of a culture confidently stepping out into the wide-open future, you see a fearful and insecure society full of self-doubt, questioning its own right to exist in the face of widespread poverty and misery elsewhere in the world. Entire nations are shrinking into the moral void, choosing anti-natalist ideas or going after comfort and security instead of taking risks on a wider future.

The human extinction movements are merely the extreme end point toward which a large part of the university educated are shuffling. Choosing to avoid children, or avoiding marriage altogether are other points along the same scale.

The quasi-suicidal carbon hysteria movement is a mere symptom of the basic intellectual nihilism that has followed university graduates into the culture at large. The true problem underlying the symptom is an inability to test hypotheses and theorems. If the hypothesis meets the long-term requirements of your ideology, put your emotions behind the idea, avoid the rational testing stage altogether, and use all the tools of human persuasion in your bag to put the idea over.

There are many other symptoms of the underlying problem, and it would be nice if we could deal with them all, one by one. Unfortunately, the madrasas for leftists are a fait accompli. But fortunately, there are others who are working on the problem.

The dumbing down of society is a serious problem. Solving that problem may require more than just a bit of indirection and lateral thinking. More on that later.

[slight editing for style may occur after original posting AF]

Brainwashing, Consciousness-Raising, and Cult Indoctrination

"Brainwashing" came to be recognized as a term around 1950, in Mao's attempts to transform revolutionary China. The term came into use in the western world in the USA during the Korean War of the 1950s, when it became known that the Chinese communists were using brainwashing techniques on western prisoners of war.

What is brainwashing?

In the late 1950s, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton studied former prisoners of Korean and Chinese war camps. He determined that they'd undergone a multistep process that began with attacks on the prisoner's sense of self and ended with what appeared to be a change in beliefs. Lifton ultimately defined a set of steps involved in the brainwashing cases he studied:

1. Assault on identity
2. Guilt
3. Self-betrayal
4. Breaking point
5. Leniency
6. Compulsion to confess
7. Channeling of guilt
8. Releasing of guilt
9. Progress and harmony
10. Final confession and rebirth

Each of these stages takes place in an environment of isolation, meaning all "normal" social reference points are unavailable, and mind-clouding techniques like sleep deprivation and malnutrition are typically part of the process. There is often the presence or constant threat of physical harm, which adds to the target's difficulty in thinking critically and independently.

Source.

These methods should be familiar to anyone who has experienced indoctrination into a cult, or the political indoctrination known as "consciousness raising." Consciousness raising is a method of "programming" a person into an extremist philosophy--and is common practise in many leftist and nazi-type organisations. In fact the original method of programming for radical feminists was consciousness raising. It is important to separate the individual from her previous "program", in order to program her into the new ideology.

Our study groups were radicalizing our own consciousness and it suddenly became apparent that women could be doing on a mass scale what we were doing in our own group, that the next logical radical action would be to get the word out about what we were doing. This kind of study would be part of what was necessary to achieve the liberation of women on a mass scale. Source.

Cult indoctrination and indoctrination in muslim extremism follows much the same form as the other types of brainwashing.

* Breaking sessions: that pressure a person until they crack.
* Changing values: to change what is right and wrong.
* Confession: to leave behind the undesirable past.
* Entrancement: open the mind and limit rational reflection.
* Engagement: that draws a person in.
* Exhaustion: so they are less able to resist persuasion.
* Guilt: about the past that they can leave behind.
* Higher purpose: associate desirability with a higher purpose.
* Identity destruction: to make space for the new identity.
* Information control: that blocks out dissuading thoughts.
* Incremental conversion: shifting the person one step at a time.
* Isolation: separating people from dissuasive messages.
* Love Bomb: to hook in the lonely and vulnerable.
* Persistence: never giving up, wearing you down.
* Special language: that offers the allure of power and new meaning.
* Thought-stopping: block out distracting or dissuading thoughts.

Source.
Anyone reading the above list of characteristics of "conversion techniques" will notice similarities between cult techniques, political ideological techniques, and techniques used against prisoners of war in the Korean and Vietnamese wars.
The sad truth is, in leftist dominated universities in the western world, as in muslim and extreme fundamentalist religious schools, such "consciousness raising" types of brainwashing are routinely used in many classes given by women's studies, ethnic studies, political science, and many other departments where political and religious indoctrination is considered more important than preparing the students to be fit to meet the future.