The University of Conformity

by Larry McCloskey (October 2025)

In recent years, public education has adopted activist and ideological tendencies outside of curriculum, even as educational outcomes precipitously drop. Why sweat the rigours of reading, writing and math, when passive conformity is so easy? Students should have the opportunity to see issues from different perspectives as pre-requisite for learning critical thinking. There is a marked difference between an informed opinion and a borrowed ideological response.

The efficacy of this mind-numbing indoctrination is most evident in the finishing school we call the university.

The university experience used to be a time for trekking into the deep weeks of discovery—both of oneself and the infinite possibilities of learning—an exploratory reprieve from the coarseness of the world. With rigorous application over a challenging period of trial and error, one’s study of objective truth led to an informed, evolving, and dynamic point of view and sense of self.

But the intellectual safe space of past generations has been subverted by a metaphoric safe space obsession over perceived threats and correct thinking in a world too dangerous for individual exploration. Danger requires direction, which the modern university is only too willing to give, and often insist upon.

Meaningful exploration requires freedom of expression, which universities claim is fundamental to their values, in direct contravention of their working reality. Three recent Canadian surveys paint a disturbingly consistent picture. On September 3rd, 2025, Aristotle Foundation published, “Freedom of Expression on Campus: A Survey of Student Perception of Free Speech at Canadian Universities.” When students were asked about their level of comfort speaking up about controversial issues such as politics, religion and race, 85% of conservatives fear a lower grade, versus 25% for liberal students. Religious students were also twice as likely to feel discomfort compared to non-religious students.

The Fraser Institute’s September, 2025 study, “Canadian Students are Getting a One-sided University Education,” found that among the lowly 15% of right leaning students, 74% feared the professor might lower grades.

The MacDonald-Laurier Institute’s July 16^th, 2025 paper, “Crisis in Conformity: The Urgent Need to Restore Open Inquiry and Free Expression in Canada’s Universities,” provides needed insight. Written and researched by Lindsay Shepherd (whose personal experience qualifies as having skin in the game), the study contends, “The rise of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) orthodoxy has transformed Canadian campuses into echo chambers.”

In 2017, as a graduate teaching assistant for Communications Studies 101, Lindsay decided to show a short video clip from TVO’s The Agenda (so not particularly controversial even by Canadian standards) in order to inspire discussion about the emerging phenomenon of gender sensitive pronouns, and their effect on communication. The most contentious segment featured a debate between Jordan Peterson and Professor of Transgender Studies, Nicholas Matte. Professor Matte characterized misusing students’ pronouns as violence and hate speech. Jordan Peterson countered that the draconian nature of forced language has unforeseen consequences that, “despite its surface nature, strike at the very heart of civilization.”

In the classroom, Lindsay facilitated discussion but did not take not a position in favour of either duelling professor. She was then called for a meeting with two professors and a member of Diversity and Equity, where she was roundly chastised for exposing students to diversity of opinion, especially of that most despised Professor Jordon Peterson. What the unholy DEI trinity did not know was that the full meeting was captured on Lindsay’s computer. The verbatim assault must be read in its entirely to fully comprehend the inner workings of universities. The transcript is equal parts jawing-dropping censorship and negation of basic rights from those who claim to be exemplars of human rights. What results is a rare opportunity for the public to see the ubiquitous nature of university censorship from a student unwilling to play the game, but with the presence of mind to protect herself. Her experience is chronicled in a book called Diversity & Inclusion (Inclusion is stroked out with the word Exclusion substituted in bold).

The title captures the hypocrisy between what university progressives say, and what they actually do. University hypocrisy on the subject of diversity and freedom of speech is best characterized with a single word: projection.

Proponents of DEI love to talk about systemic—and therefore impossible to eliminate—bias in response to any claim that practical progress has been made on any equity issue. And yet systemic bias by the purveyors of systemic bias, is demonstrably embedded into university culture. How else to explain that 73% of social science and humanities faculty identify as left-wing, with just 4% right-wing? Overall, 88% of Canadian professors vote for left-wing parties.

The evidence of left-wing systemic bias in combination with fear for expressing views among the minority of conservative students, eliminates discovery—once the hall mark of the university experience—and is replaced by rigid conformity. Conformity is antithetical to discovery, making the university experience increasingly detrimental to personal development.

The repercussions of trading discovery for conformity cannot be underestimated. Recent events provide a depressingly dramatic illustration. A thirty-one year old Christian conservative is assassinated for his passion and commitment to encouraging free speech where it is needed most—American campuses. He is particularly encouraging of discussion with his strongest critics, debating in an open forum, in a hostile environment. Though he has no credentials, he takes on all comers— university newbies, graduate students, Ph.D. candidates, and professors—and never loses an argument. He is accused of attacking the person, but is actually logical in challenging identity-obsessed students to be more than their gender, skin colour, or any single individual attribute. His challenge gets a mixed reception, many people reacting with anger. Others seem curiously taken with his message, perhaps considering for the first time, that their sense of self could be reconsidered. An important minority of students perceive his challenge as liberating, even if in our identity obsessed world the thought of being fully human is threatening to the core.

The centre cannot hold. Thirty-one year Charlie Kirk, husband, father to two children, ages one and three, and founder of Turning Point USA, is assassinated. His death, and the brutal cowardly cause of his death are both shocking and unsurprising. Nobody extended himself with greater abandon, pursued a cause with more courage and determination than Charlie Kirk. Quite simply he regarded his life of service more important than his own life, which can only happen for those who believe in something beyond this life.

Charlie was an outlier who walked the walk, which runs counter to our modern, increasingly self-centred world. We have become so far removed from what existed a mere decade ago, that his traditional family views are considered radical by the ignorant clamouring mob. Radicalism has supplanted conventional views about God, country and family so quickly and thoroughly, that extreme progressive views are hardly noticed. And with nothing substantial to believe in outside of self, we are left with belief in me, myself and I. That nihilistic trinity never ends with progressive fulfillment, even as the pretence to sustain it continues. W.B.Yeats anticipated the ubiquitous radicalism of modernity. “All empty souls tend towards extreme opinions.”

Almost as disturbing as Charlie Kirk’s assassination has been public reaction. In the face of tragedy, it used to be that people of opposing sides would not comment, but that unspoken understanding of restraint no longer exists.  Emotional regulation and respect for the dead and their families, has lost its currency.  Most disturbing, some people in casual conversation drop the unoriginal thought that Charlie Kirk deserved what he got. Those who make such comments are universally ignorant about Charlie Kirk’s actual message, often basing their base comments on a single video clip they don’t agree with. Ignorance is not bliss; disregard for context does not enlighten. (I write this on the day of Charlie Kirk’s memorial where public reaction provides inspiring contrast to condemnation of the mob).

The content of Charlie Kirk’s many messages—courageous, persuasive, erudite even if one does not agree with him—is irrelevant to what Charlie Kirk deserved. No one deserves—though there is no one who worked harder for the recognition he received—to be murdered for their views. There is no arguing the finer points of someone’s message and arriving at a justification for murder. (Though with 58 Democrats refusing to honour Charlie Kirk and condemn his assassination, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by the great unwashed public).

The words of glee about Charlie Kirk’s murder that flow so easily in casual conversation is beyond schadenfreude indulgence (to delight in another’s misfortune). To passively judge Charlie Kirk as deserving assassination is to be complicit in murder. Those who did not pull the trigger but delight from afar, forgo the archetypal morality that once bound us together.

Free speech is not just foundational to democracy, it is important to individual development. Students whose years of university exploration are replaced by ideological conformity will suffer from that experience. Lack of expression based on fear will negatively shape one’s development as much as personal exploration used to contribute to one’s character.

Carl Jung warned about the dangers of repression. Issues, experiences, viewpoints that are repressed form the “shadow”, an archetypal representation of hidden and denied aspects of self. The more the shadow is ignored, the more it negatively impacts on personality. Failure to integrate the shadow into consciousness will compromise or stunt one’s ability to achieve psychological wholeness.

Jung’s assessment of repression is not overstated. And if our students are repressing their actual views or even the questions that would like to ask during their years of feigned exploration, what does institutionalized repression of political and cultural views do to this emerging population? The irony, of course, is that the students are expected to self-censor, while passively taking up politically correct causes in the name of free speech. This process of indoctrination and self-censorship is formula for mass societal repression. If there is not a cultural reckoning for those without the means for expression on this grand scale, we will have birthed the cataclysm of a lost generation.

I spent almost forty years in the university sector watching the experience of deep weed discovery diminish into the shallow swamp of woke conformity. During that time I saw much evidence of George Bernard Shaw’s facetious observation, “Youth is wasted on the young.” For most young people of an earlier age, this wasting period was freedom to make mistakes before maturing into adulthood, with the distant possibility of acquiring wisdom in great old age.

But maybe Shaw’s quote is misplaced in the modern world. Today it might be more accurate to say, youth is wasted by the old. Those who can’t do teach, and sadly, we are teaching the young progressive ways that will never do.

In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt documents three troubling phenomena that have impacted mental health among young people, beginning around 2005: introduction of the smart phone, the explosion of social media, and the hyper vigilance of risk-adverse parents. Children pulled from the dangers of the playground went into the deep weeds of technology for which the illusion of discovery hid disturbing and addictive qualities. This dependency on technology at the expense of active participation in the physical world, coupled with emerging woke education, has robbed young people of their youth.

I’ve heard people suggest that the pendulum may be swinging back from left to centre. And just as often I’ve responded that, to 18 year olds who have been educated to know nothing other than the woke left, to whom can the pendulum swing back?

Growing up in a Catholic Irish family of nine, we had scores of people and few possessions. Though we never thought about it as such, our world was characterized by boredom and scarcity—that is, unless we did something about it. We were driven, overly competitive and desperate to distinguish ourselves beyond being one among the McCloskey brood. The grit required to forge our own path fuelled curiosity and drive, even if with discomfort and inevitable setbacks. Still, we were not disadvantaged by risk aversion, all consuming technology, or institutional censorship.

If there is hope for young people, if there is a silver lining to Charlie Kirk’s death, it is this: young people educated to passively believe in correct causes and the primacy of self, are showing signs of disillusionment and rebellion. Necessity was our motivation growing up, and maybe necessity will again motivate young people to exit repressive constraints and become cultural counter-revolutionaries. Ideology and self-obsession are no substitute for developing personal values upon which to authentically participate in the world outside of self.

We need to return to young people the autonomy to explore, make mistakes, take risks, and in 1960’s parlance, “find themselves.” We, of middle and old age, need to step back and allow the young to be young or else they will always remain so. Young people who never grow up become the sad remnants of regret and unrealized potential.