by 
How was it that universities transitioned from opening minds to closing minds? As a new generation sign up for their degree courses, big brother is watching as well as teaching.
Cancelling and policing thought has taking precedence. Politicians and public figures have been cancelled from giving their lectures by just a few objectors. It took just one complainant who had only come across a pamphlet and whilst not attended even attending the event, for an Oxford College to apologise for hosting a Christian human rights conference. University administrators have been warning lecturers what they can and cannot do or say; never be seen raising an eyebrow when talking to a ‘person of colour’; never in any circumstances ‘mis-gender’ a person and never ever, ask someone ‘where they are from.’
The latest tightening of the tourniquet comes in the form of the compulsory modules or training that students have to take when they first turn up to university. A number of newspapers have begun to comment on this change of climate at our universities. We are watching a dramatic and unashamed move from education to indoctrination.
St Andrews’ and Kent are the two that have made their way into the news recently. Both have ingested critical race theory and elevated equality and diversity training not just as core values, but as tests of ‘right-thinking’. This is not right thinking in the usual sense of avoiding illogicalities, contradictions or false conclusion. This is right-thinking in terms usually associated with the police state.
But speaking of the police state. It has spread to the police themselves.
For example, in 2019 Harry Miller, an ex-policeman was visited by a policeman after he was denounced for hate speech when he asked on Twitter how the police dealt with recording a rape committed by a trans offender.
The policeman who interviewed him agreed that he had committed no crime, but that the police had come to his door to check his ‘thinking’. The legislation confusingly catalogues hate crime as technically a non-crime, but nevertheless reports it as a ‘hate incident’ which illogically then becomes part of a crime report. No one calls this madness out.
“It makes you the thought-police” Harry replied; “literally.”
Harry Miller did at least try. He rightly challenged the policeman who came to check his thinking saying:
“You know what this makes you ?”
“No said the constable, “What does it make me.”
“It makes you the thought-police” Harry replied; “literally.”
So not only has thought-crime leaked into what used to be real crime, but the universities are getting more ambitious, or perhaps audacious. They are imposing a test for right thinking as a condition of matriculating. They too are turning into ‘thought-police’.
It was originally the role of universities to train the young mind to manage the pursuit and recognition of truth, good arguments, the discovery of the artefacts of the imagination both in the Arts and the Sciences. But the new culture we have accepted without protest does the opposite. It smothers and distorts the truth; it replaces arguments with blackmail; it binds the imagination with dead hand of politically correct dogma. It bends science out of shape and makes it deny itself in order to comply with the thought police.
“Bodies with vaginas”.
Catching them young, the universities have renewed their assault on the original culture that formed them, and switching sides in the culture wars, are starting a new process of policing instead of expanding the thought of the teenage applicants.
Critical Race Theory has taken over the educational establishment
This must be seen as the triumph of a weird sect of academic Marxists called the Frankfurt School. It was they who foresaw that the Marxist revolution might not take off among the proletariat after all, and designed a second strategy that would attack Western society by undermining the core cultural norms that it had built its greatest successes on.
But perhaps the real question ought to be:- why are so many people going along with the introduction of the new thought-police?
They are embedded everywhere now. All the HR departments of big business, peopled by the woke Arts graduates of the last three decades. All the universities, which may not be a surprise, though it has come as a jolt to many of us that you have to be woke to even get in, let alone graduate. Even the police, without any sense of irony or history, perhaps never having read Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World have signed up; the terrible Soviet Gulags where the victims of the first great Marxist experiment in thought control were despatched, appear to have been forgotten. But sometimes to forget history it to be doomed to repeat it.
Bread and circuses
Those old fascist tyrants who ran the Roman Empire cottoned onto this long ago, boasting that they could keep the ordinary people compliant to long as they kept throwing bread and circuses at them from time to time.
It’s no great surprise that there are people and agencies trying to control our freedoms and take them away. But it is a surprise that so few people care enough to fight back.