This will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the leftist tilt of higher education over the past few decades, but secular academics are no longer bothering to hide their ideological hegemony. Propaganda is today’s scholarship.

This latest story from Inside Higher Education is just another documented example of Secular Academics Gone Wild. According to the report, “Some prominent liberal academics are soliciting short essays from faculty members and graduate students to document a pattern in American history of major social advances being opposed by conservatives who ‘cry wolf’ about the impact of proposed reforms.” The “Cry Wolf” project is noteworthy for its bald attempt to cast conservatives as the evil empire and the left as the world’s savior. This overtly ideological-religious propaganda campaign is not just your garden variety left-right academic folly. It rejects the very idea of colleges and universities as places of scholarship and crassly admits that they have become institutions for ideological indoctrination. This latest project steps over the line from critical scholarship to outright propaganda masquerading as scholarship.

As Erin O’Connor recently pointed out on her blog Critical Mass:

“On the one hand, there are no surprises — there has been a decades-long academic tradition, at this point, of discounting the notion that disinterested research is even possible, and of selling the idea that the proper response to this is to shape one’s scholarship self-consciously, as a means of ensuring that it assists and justifies the kinds of social justice one would like to see in the world. On the other hand, this activist line of thought has historically had only one line of defense — and that is that it is conducted with impeccable scholarly integrity, is entirely above-board vis a vis research ethics, and is unimpeachable from within the standards of professional conduct. In other words, the ethical standards that accompany interested scholarship are, in theory, terrifically strict.

“That’s how such scholarship can continue to call itself scholarship, and escape being dismissed as propaganda. It’s a shaky edifice, but it’s an edifice all the same, and it has succeeded. Arguably, though, the Cry Wolf project undermines that entire edifice, as it explicitly supports the arguments of those who would say that large swathes of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view.”

Thanks to the increasingly statist control of higher education and the abuse of academic tenure,  we are now left, indeed, with “little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view.”