About a week ago I wrote an article discussing the decision by the manager of a conservative leaning NGO in the United States to cease to hire graduates from American Ivy League Universities. This individual came to this difficult decision on the grounds that the products of these Universities have either been brainwashed by the Left to such an extent that they become HR nightmares because of their adherence to identity politics or, if not brainwashed, have learned to be silent and not speak up when speaking up about a problem is what is required.

When I wrote that article I found myself becoming profoundly disturbed at what is happening at American Universities and how the sort of problems that are being created there are now being exported to UK higher educational establishments. The old saying that when America sneezes Britain catches a cold is most certainly true of education and especially how the way that American left wing racial politics has been imported to the UK and is now present in UK Universities.

The article by the manager of the NGO was bad enough as it illustrated just how much higher level US Universities had declined, but a recent article on Fox News featuring a defector from North Korea named Yeonmi Park may indicate that the situation in US Universities is far worse than many may have imagined.

I’m familiar with Ms Park’s work because of her You Tube Channel ‘The Voice of North Korea’ in which she tells the world just how bad North Korea is and how heavily brainwashed the average North Korean citizen is. The story of Ms Park’s escape from the Communist hell hole of North Korea is both amazing and inspiring and one well worth reading. However this article, that I was alerted to by being featured on Tim Worstall’s site, which relates to Leftism in US Universities, is quite simply horrifying.

According to Fox News Ms Park said:

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park said in an interview with Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

When a dissident refugee from a country as controlled and as brutal as North Korea says something like that about an American University, in this case Columbia University, then it is a massive indication that something is badly wrong with these institutions.

Ms Park added that she found anti-American and anti-Western attitudes prevalent at Columbia University during her time there. She added that there was also a culture of ‘collective guilt’ and ‘stifling’ political correctness.

For me one of the most horrifying parts of this article that dealt with Ms Park’s experience of an Ivy League University, was the reaction that she got from University staff about Ms Park’s love for classic literature. She was admonished by a member of the teaching staff at Columbia for admitting that she loved reading Jane Austen. The member of staff told Ms Park that she should not be reading books by the likes of Austen on the grounds that they were ‘colonial’ and that the author and the characters in her books were ‘racists’, ‘bigots’ and were ‘subconsciously brainwashing’ her.

Universities were once places, both here in the UK and in the United States, where open minds were created. They were environments where critical thinking skills were both taught and encouraged because critical thinking is a vital component of creating, discovering and exploring both the physical and intellectual worlds.

It’s a terrible thing for the Universities of the Anglosphere to become places that Ms Park described as being reminiscent of North Korea because of the levels of brainwashing that go on within them. This state of affairs is not just dangerous towards the students who attend these institutions and who leave either brainwashed or fearful of expressing a point of view, but also to wider society in the West. The institutions of higher learning are creating individuals who can only think in prescribed ways and with the backing of prescribed ideologies.

Such a situation where people leave University not knowing how to think critically and cleaving to failed and destructive ideologies would merely be a personal individual tragedy for the graduate concerned, if after college they found they could only get jobs flipping burgers in a takeaway. Unfortunately all too often they do not. They migrate to the public sector, the cultural institutions and to politics where they bring their lack of ability to think critically and their Leftist where they set about unmaking politics, their workplaces and the culture and replacing it with the mono-thought religion of Leftism. What’s going on in US and British Universities is not just a danger to these institutions or those who attend them, but also to the wider society as a whole, which is why the leftist takeover of institutions of higher education needs to be tackled and for them to have honesty, critical thinking and political plurality returned to them.