☆ If local Woke colleges are 1984, I was Julia: A young conservative's perspective

An Opp Now contributor (anonymized by request) recently participated in a graduate program at a Bay Area public university. Rampant social justice conditioning and closed-minded conversations? Check and check. But here, they reflect on an overlooked consequence of systematic Leftist indoctrination: It can render young free thinkers numb to shock, outrage, and action. An Opp Now exclusive.

When I finally bit the bullet and picked up 1984 several years ago, I remember my mother being surprised that I wasn't more disgusted at the book's events. I wasn't shocked by the idea of 24/7 surveillance, even into one's most intimate thoughts. I wasn't alarmed at how Oceania methodically, intentionally, unreservedly rewrites history to reflect ever-morphing power shifts. And I certainly didn't react much to the underlying thrust of Orwell's dystopian society, that it wields entertainment, war, relationships, and language itself to force submission to Oceania's “pure power”-driven state. None of this astonished me because I've seen all of this play out in my own life, particularly in my graduate college experience.

Truly, it wasn't until the final third of the novel with protagonist Winston's brutal torture scenes that I felt anything about Oceania besides pure academic interest. Reading about Winston hitting rock bottom, being dehumanized and brainwashed to the point of severe physical, emotional, and mental degradation, made me sick to my stomach. But I had to get to that section of the book first. I had to reach the point beyond return in Orwell's novel—“the place where there is no darkness” but only sickeningly ever-burning, artificial, controlled light. The place where Winston must, and does, finally cave.

I'm not the first to make a connection between 1984—or any other dystopian novel (the now-stock names of Huxley, Bradbury, and Atwood, too, are conjured frequently for similar purposes)—and the world we live in. But as I remember my experience at a local public university (hereafter abbreviated as LPU), I can't help but consider how I, like Orwell's character Julia, was inculcated to the point of apathy.

1984's side character Julia, Winston's love interest, is young like me. Unlike Winston, she has grown up immersed in Oceania's brainwashing and can only remember being completely dominated by the government. When Winston suggests rebellion to her, he's disheartened by her lackluster responses. He observes about Julia: “Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.”

Winston wants to return society to its just and upright past, but Julia only wants to survive. To make the best of what she views as an unchangeable situation. Julia plays society's “games” so she can behave the way she wants in private, though this cannot ultimately succeed (she eventually gets tortured and lobotomized, at last overpowered in both her public and private lives).

At LPU, I was a graduate student and Graduate Teaching Associate several years ago. I scored well and received positive references from students and supervisors. While I will proudly claim my experience at LPU as beneficial and worthwhile (and have nothing but affection for the kind, intelligent, and hardworking professors and peers I encountered there), I can't ignore the obvious: My university, like many public colleges these days, is not primarily focused on cultivating critical thinking skills. It's not focused on empathizing with and understanding the other side, so we can discover truth together. On the contrary, it's churning out students to repeat Woke talking points.

In attempting to summarize some of the wackiest things I experienced at LPU, I realize I run the risk of stirring up nothing but ambivalence in Opp Now's readers. I am not the only Julia out there. Nevertheless, here's a few highlights:

As an Instructor of Record in Public Speaking, I taught from a social justice-based book that asserted among other things that color-blindness (sorry: “color evasion”) promotes hegemonic whiteness and that guns and police are bad.

My Communication Studies Department sent the university an impassioned letter on February 19th, 2021 demanding our GE learning objectives remove the supposedly racist/colonialist phrase “social science methodologies.” These methodologies, by the way, were regularly taught as part of the established curriculum. While all Communication Studies faculty I met at LPU were well meaning in their social justice efforts, I can in good conscience only label this move—contradictory and outrageous as it is—as Woke performativity. My department had, and I assume has, no desire to eliminate social science methodologies from students' learning experiences. The letter remains amusing to me in a surreal, unsettling way (think: Willy Wonka tunnel scene); yet, the department's willingness to sacrifice obvious truths in favor of Leftist posturing is anything but funny.

I couldn't believe how much LPU blurred the lines between discipline-specific facts/findings and political ideology. It was routinely affirmed in my Communication classes and instructors' meetings that anyone with a conscience was upset about XYZ election-related development, that it was not possible for a decent person to think differently about politics, about worldview. Teachers regularly asserted ideas like these (both from assigned readings): Minority under-representation in publishing necessarily indicates “Academia's pervasive White masculinity,” and validating knowledge via established experts cancels out the Black woman's contribution (as narratives and feelings are the only way they can “legitimate their claims”). One particularly disturbing ethnographic paper we had to read seeks to “challenge the moral certainty with which people designate underage sexual experiences [in which an older man “corners” an eleven-year-old in a public restroom] as 'abuse.'” Rather than just providing us skills and knowledge within the Communication discipline, the university weaved in its own political ideas as if they, too, were foundational realities.

Along that same vein, as part of my required training to teach at LPU, I completed several modules on designing an inclusive syllabus. I remember being shocked at an example syllabus for a math course, which was highlighted as being not quite inclusive enough. Why? It didn't address the stereotype that women or minorities can't do math. I wish I was joking. I don't remember any professor outlining in their syllabus that “by the way, contrary to popular belief, women can succeed in this course!” What an insulting thing that would have been to say.

And not to mention the accepted presupposition that truth and morality themselves are socially constructed—which, in a stoke of irony, should negate the need for public education and rigorous Communication scholarship. In a seminar course, I remember challenging my professor's assertion that everything is communicatively constructed. I suggested that surely there are material conditions (e.g., the body you're born with, the physical space you occupy) about which we communicate: raw elements in the universe to which we assign value and labels. That social reality isn't completely socially designed. But this concession was dismissed by my professor, as “material conditions” didn't have a spot on their instructional diagram. Later, I recall this professor claiming that (to quote my handwritten notes from a class meeting) the “human will = social, knowledge = socially created, ∅ objective reality, intersubjectivity... makes morality.” If there is no basis for truth besides mob rule, should we be surprised if brute power dictates our country's future?

My silence at LPU wasn't limited to explicitly political conversations: I admit I held my tongue during most class discussions on controversial issues. I expected less-than-kind responses from peers and instructors, based on how they referred to non-Leftists when they assumed none were present. Essentially, anyone with different beliefs from LPU's had committed the sin of the “-ism” and were referenced only as a nescient (or worse, malevolent) perpetrator of oppression. This was also circa “Silence is Violence,” so regardless of if you voiced a unique opinion or kept quiet, you weren't doing enough unless you strongly articulated support for LPU-approved viewpoints. A kind of Two Semesters Hate. I still remember how at the end of the year, a peer joked about how bothersome it would be for me to encounter conservatives if I had attended a different school. My simple response of “Oh, well, I'm a conservative” shocked them into silence. (But I give them credit for treating me with the same friendliness afterwards. Contrary to the Woke paradigm, individuals with different political leanings can actually, genuinely, enjoy each other. What a concept.)

So at LPU, rather than taking any public stands for my beliefs, I took a nod from the turtle: I retracted my head. I spoke the truth but held some truths back.

And with time, I found myself more and more numb to my truly radical educational environment. That year, I fulfilled my responsibilities at the university while carefully preserving my reputation as a scholar and instructor. I completed my stint; and then I left.

This brings me back to Orwell. I wonder how many other young free thinkers, in and beyond Silicon Valley public colleges, are finding themselves in similar situations as mine—and Julia's. Who are shutting up and keeping their heads down, plowing through as seamlessly and rapidly as they can. Who may not even fathom the full extent of the indoctrination and ridiculousness to which they're subjected; they've as a whole accepted it. I assume it won't take seeing society hit rock bottom (all liberties rescinded, a Winston rats-on-the-face moment) for us Julias to feel something besides passive detachment. Nonetheless, our mentality needs to change.

Last year, I learned from a health practitioner that an unexpected element of overcoming an eating disorder is newfound hunger. Your body is made to feel hunger; everyone gets hungry; but when you constantly deny and cover up and punish that natural desire, your body grows numb to it. You are hungry but rarely feel it. Then, when you start taking care of your body again through healthy eating, you'll likely find that you're tremendously hungry, all the time—to an extent you haven't ever previously experienced.

Julias like me have long suppressed their natural distrust, surprise, and outrage at what Woke institutions tell them. We, like Orwell's character herself, may not be fully conscious of how we've neutered our valuable instinctive responses. I believe we can reverse this, but it'll take intentional work. It'll take exposure to the “good” in the realm of politics, as many of us assume a dichotomy between the profane/political and sacred/personal. It'll take community; I often felt isolated and alone in my beliefs at LPU, but it doesn't have to be this way if free-thinking individuals are bolder with their convictions. And ultimately, it'll take cultivating, accepting, and acting upon hunger—hunger for a world built on truth and liberty.

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