The Rise of The Counterfeit Faculty

The Right has cultivated an image of the American university as a bastion of radicalism in which subversive professors recruit impressionable teenagers to the cause of “Gay Race Communism.” It’s a town crier move that more than proves its culture war cred, but also has the quite unintended consequences of making conservatives look like the clueless Fox News devotees that have inspired many a barb on social media. The regular attendees of county Republican meetings know about “CRT.” They know it's being taught in our schools and is brainwashing America’s youth. However, the problem with acronym spouting is that it makes one feel in the know without obtaining the knowledge necessary to take actual action. 

In my two decades as a professor, I can attest that the concepts of CRT have run rampant through the university (both public and faith-based) for the last ten years. Yet, I have never encountered a more accurate diagnosis of the issue than Dr. Stanley K. Ridgley’s new book, Brutal Minds. A Clinical Full Professor of Management at Drexel University and former military intelligence officer, Ridgley has refused to remain silent during his well-earned post-tenure cush life in the hopes of protecting the marketplace of ideas that has made American universities repositories of knowledge since before the nation’s official founding. The result is an essential back-to-school read for students, parents, professors, college provosts and presidents, and legislators as we find ourselves on the cusp of another election year semester when the fruits of CRT are palpable on both tickets.

Unlike the blanket generalizations about college education from those who haven’t set foot on a campus in years barring an occasional graduation ceremony, Brutal Minds lays out a damning case against the widespread adoption of what Ridgley calls “antiracist pedagogy” and “racialism” throughout the university. But, Ridgley’s universities are not the site of the leftist professoriate tainting young minds–a  dimensionless critique that has allowed the left to rightly claim that conservatives have turned CRT into a “boogeyman.” Rather, they are an institution overwhelmed by “an inbred administration of clerks” and a few faculty bad actors who have peddled antiracist pedagogy into lucrative careers.

While our culture war climate has produced a bounty of CRT indoctrination screeds, most display a willful misunderstanding of the university’s function and an outright refusal to engage (or even name) the texts to which they object. The result is vague bans drafted by those outside the academy such as the  Tennessee Higher Education Freedom of Expression and Transparency Act that prohibits faculty from teaching “divisive concepts.” Conservative lawmakers clearly want to take action, but they consistently demonstrate a lack of curiosity about their intended target that threatens to make CRT’s adherents merely switch tactics rather than ignite their mass exodus from campus.

The university’s primary purpose is to serve as an incubator for debates of all kinds. Any academic institution drifting from a broad inclusion of ideas is a threat both to the quality of knowledge production most tenured and tenure-track professors produce and the intellectual formation of impressionable students.

For most of my own career, I have taught aspects of “CRT,” especially those in the realm of Marxist, deconstructionist, and postcolonial theory. As English professor Gerald Graff would say, it is an academic’s duty to “teach the controversies.” In doing so, the contradictions and intellectual dishonesty of the “Pop CRT” with one foot in the self-help genre that has gripped the worlds of business and online discourse thanks to the likes of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi become readily apparent.

The primary issue with Pop-CRT, unlike its academically rigorous counterpart, is that it uses its poststructuralist roots to craft totalizing, often binary, concepts that it then knowingly inoculates from criticism with the same type of binaries postmodernism challenged in the first place. Thus, the result is an ideological omnipotence built on intentional circularity and academic malfeasance. 

As the unequivocal condemnation of CRT from state legislators indicates, the greatest danger to both higher education’s foundational concepts and our civic discourse is the encroachment of CRT and other forms of critical theory into public life by those who lay claim to unearned expertise. Few Pop CRT evangelicals seem to remember that the pioneer of “intersectionality,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, lamented the devolution of her field four months before the Summer of Floyd in Time by saying “These days, I start with what it’s not, because there has been distortion. It’s not identity politics on steroids. It is not a mechanism to turn white men into the new pariahs. It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.”

What separates Ridgley from CRT’s myriad critics is his understanding of the university’s inner workings and professional standards. Although Brutal Minds does acknowledge the professorate's left leanings, it also points out that, despite a few outliers who conservative media has made poster children, most faculty members are consummate professionals too preoccupied with their own research and debates in their fields to have the time to tout the merits of a Harris/Walz ticket in the classroom. Ridgley has no issue with the presence of such “divisive concepts” on a syllabus, but abhors their elevation into near-religious texts with an uncritical acceptance that is anathema to everything the academy holds dear.

As Brutal Minds argues, the true threat of CRT rests upon the shoulders of what Ridgley calls the higher learning Cerberus–the three-headed Hound of Hades that consists of: 

1. Education schools with anemic research standards and a host of diploma mill programs that historically have attracted the lowest performing graduates.
2. A bloated Student Affairs bureaucracy full of mediocrities who design politicized extracurricular programs and receive graduate degrees from said schools of education, which offer “a ticket through the side door of the university” unencumbered by four-years of PhD training and a rigorous book-length dissertation.
3. The American College Personnel Association and National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, nonprofits with the objective of inspiring uncredentialed bureaucrats to indoctrinate students with “anti-racist” pedagogies and develop student affairs professional resources such as training sessions and pseudo-academic publications. 

The outcome is an onslaught of unqualified bureaucrats who deem themselves college educators but resemble, according to Ridgley, “Fake Louis Vuitton bags, which provide status on the cheap, without the struggle or expense” for whom “the prize is borrowed prestige.”

The greatest strength of Brutal Minds is Ridgley’s dedication to close reading of not only the “cult cargo” academic journals of such professional organizations but also the output of the few ideologue faculty who have carved out tenured positions in soft disciplines, including the University of Kentucky’s Cheryl E. Matias and Emory University’s George Yancy. As members of the “Chivas Regal Aggrieved,” they set the standard for the implementation of primitive fakery, lived-experience “ethnoautobiographies,” and questionable qualitative data culled from their inner circle to pass for academic research. Throughout the book, Ridgley holds their work and the journals that publish it up to actual academic scrutiny that crafts a resounding case for the intervention of upper-level administrators, accreditation agencies, and state legislatures.

As Ridgley notes, such hackneyed work routinely alludes to poet and activist Audre Lorde’s aphorism about using the master’s tools against him. However, as a seasoned academic, Ridgley also knows that the entire point of postmodern thought is that metanarratives and binaries collapse under their own weight. Accordingly, his primary solution to CRT’s grip on the American university is to use its opponents’ self-installed authority against them.

For Ridgley, the type of freshmen orientation “workshops” in the dorm common rooms that are motivated by antiracist pedagogy amount to conducting human subject research without a license. Such is a flagrant violation of the federal laws that forced universities to establish Institutional Review Board standards in the wake of the public outrage caused by research projects like Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Consequently, Ridgley’s strategy not only pits bureaucrat against bureaucrat but also makes the university and individual employees vulnerable to legal action while giving administrators cover to terminate with cause those who hide behind lax fields and gestures to DEI. 

Although Brutal Minds is the rare book that provides genuine insight into the campus climate of American universities, its conclusions are much more relevant to politicians and the general public they represent. The Speakers and Majority Leaders of Congress and state legislatures across the nation should make it essential reading for members of their parties or, at the very least, mandatory for anyone proposing a bill related to higher education. More than any other anchor of our social fabric, the university is a multifaceted institution that represents the very best of the American experiment–one that will not survive if those who claim to protect it do so with a foundation built on half-truths and generalizations not that dissimilar from the tautology that allowed their opponents to usurp the system in the first place.