What Goes On in Those College Classrooms

“We all know what goes on in those college classrooms,” said Ontario Premier Doug Ford once, on the basis of having attended college for two months. He was referring to the popular stereotype that our colleges are hotbeds of leftist professors surreptitiously indoctrinating innocent students with our ideology. Okay, look. I was a leftist college professor for 31 years. Here’s how this works. First of all, it’s the world’s greatest job, and I’m not complaining, but nobody ever said it was not difficult and time-consuming. I earned my salary, spending thousands of hours on the job, inside and outside the classroom, teaching playwriting and related theatre topics. I can’t imagine taking on that whole other, unpaid job of brainwashing them with my leftist politics, on top of all the official, paid-for stuff. It would be a massive task to perform on a volunteer basis. And the main reason it would be a massive task is because I have no idea how one might go about doing it. My students were not children. They were savvy, curious, skeptical young adults, with efficient built-in ideology detectors, which it was our job to help them refine further. I cannot fathom how I could