Rep. Elise Stefanik recently issued a fairly typical conservative criticism of the university, telling Fox News that “We need to focus on engineering, math, science, the classics. And instead they are training not the next generation of leaders, but the next generation of Marxists.” This kind of rhetoric is common on the right. “Many professors are Marxists or other varieties of radicals who hate America,” warned Phyllis Schlafly in 2005. “We have ceded education to the radical Left,” laments Sebastian Gorka. JD Vance, of course, tells us that “the professors are the enemy,” quoting an older statement by Richard Nixon. The pro-Palestine protests today, writes Craig DeLuz in the Sacramento Observer, are part of “a long-standing trend towards Marxist indoctrination within our universities.”

I’ve always found it difficult not to laugh when I hear university professors described as “Marxist.” How out of touch with the reality of academia can you be? The percentage of professors who subscribe to the doctrines of Karl Marx is, as far as we can tell, vanishingly small. We don’t have great numbers on this. There was a 2006 survey of American professors that found that only 3 percent of them are self-described Marxists. When I was in college from 2007 to 2011 at a very liberal university (Brandeis, which was known for graduating the legendary leftist radicals Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis), I studied political theory for four years and never had a single professor who showed any hint of being a Marxist. They were a bunch of liberals without any revolutionary instincts. I don’t know if I was assigned a page of Marx during four years in the politics department. (I did take a course in the history department on the history of conflict between Marxists and anarchists. The professor did not seem to be a Marxist or an anarchist. If I had to peg him, I’d describe him as a cynic about ideologies.) 

What does it actually mean for a professor to be a Marxist? Do they have to accept a certain number of Marx’s teachings? Which parts? Marxism has a number of core propositions, including:

1. Historical materialism – the theory that material economic conditions and modes of production are the primary drivers of historical and social development
2. Dialectics – a method of understanding change and development through the interaction of opposing forces, where contradictions within a system lead to conflict, transformation, and the emergence of a new order
3. Class struggle – the ongoing conflict between social classes, especially between the working class and the owning class, over control of resources and power.
4. Exploitation and alienation – exploitation refers to the extraction of surplus value from workers by capitalists; alienation describes the worker’s loss of control over their labor, its products, and their own human potential
5. Instability of capitalism – the view that capitalism is prone to recurring crises due to its internal contradictions, such as overproduction, falling profits, and inequality

Reading this list, it should be obvious that you can be a “Marxist” in a descriptive sense without being a Marxist in a normative sense, and I think this is probably the case for a lot of professors. That is to say, Marx felt he was doing social science and prediction, not merely practicing an ideology, and the above tenets can be held regardless of your view on whether any of it is good. You might believe capitalism is unstable regardless of whether or not you like capitalism, and you might think historical materialism is sound regardless of whether you think communism is a desirable end state. You can even believe in the existence of a class struggle without opposing it, or believing in the overthrow of capitalism. “There’s class warfare, all right,” Warren Buffett has said. “But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” We often note here at Current Affairs that the Wall Street Journal has a certain Marxist flavor to it because it understands the existence of an ongoing power struggle between bosses and workers. So even some of the small number of professors who are “Marxist” are likely adopting Marx’s analysis without actually adopting his communist politics. Marx was such a towering economist and sociologist that even conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter paid glowing tribute to his abilities as an analyst while staunchly disagreeing with his political conclusions. 

I mentioned that when I was in college, Marx was hardly assigned, at least in the politics program. But of course, that was before the 2008 financial crisis and the publication of books with titles like Why Marx Was Right. Is Marxism more prevalent now, after that world-shaking economic event put some of his theories back on the map and led more of the American public to adopt a critical view of capitalism? Well, I can’t find a recent survey of professors like the 2006 one. But we can see if Marx is in the curriculum. If you look at the most recent course catalogs at Harvard and Yale (the hotbeds of radicalism!), we can see that there are a few courses, out of the thousands offered, that mention Marx. At Harvard, across 2,600 pages of course offerings, we find a number of courses that mention Marx. Take this one, for example: 

Well, okay, here’s a class where Marx will be taught! But is it radical indoctrination? It seems more to me like Marx is being included here as one of many thinkers who have had ideas about how technology is used in society. Excluding him from a “philosophy of technology” course wouldn’t make much sense. The fact is that Karl Marx was one of the most influential intellectuals in history, so if you’re going to teach anything about the history of ideas, you’re going to bump into him. But so many of the courses are striking in how they do not attempt “indoctrination” but rather present Marx as one of many influential thinkers whose work should be grappled with. See, for instance: 

Note that in all three of these listings, Marx appears alongside Adam Smith, patron saint of laissez-faire capitalism (a distortion of his actual ideas, but let’s leave that aside). The professors in these courses appear to be getting students to think about big questions like, “What makes a government legitimate?” In other words, getting them to turn on their brains and critically examine the nature of society, economics, and government.

Are there some courses on the dreaded “critical theory” and feminism and Black history? Yes, there are. Harvard has one course I would never take, because I don’t like pompous jargon, which promises to examine the critical theorists who “identify and rectify the pathologies of bourgeois modernity by examining systemic problems of capitalist society such as reification, commodification, repression, and instrumental reason,” promising engagement with the works of “Lukács, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Jaeggi, and Forst.” No, thank you! But you know, not everything at the university is for me. And like I say, Harvard has 2,600 pages in its course catalog! You can take a class with Steven Pinker instead, if you like, although personally I wouldn’t do that, either. 

But even if we zero in on the classes in critical theory or gender studies, and say, “aha! Leftism in the university!” we’ve got a pretty distorted view of what the university tends to be like. The fact is that, by far, the most common undergraduate major in this country is business. Degrees in business, engineering, computer science, and biomedical sciences are becoming more popular while liberal arts degrees are becoming less so. The story of the university in our time is the story of the gutting of programs in history, sociology, philosophy, and other so-called “useless” subjects. The “neoliberalization” of the university means students are less likely to take those Big Questions courses that might require you to read a few pages from Marx and Smith and think about how capitalism works and whether it’s entirely a fantastic system. I doubt many business majors take classes where they’ll be forced to ask deep questions about the system they aspire to succeed in. 

It’s true that there aren’t too many conservatives among professors, either, which many on the right take as a sign that they’re being deliberately excluded. One of the requirements the Trump administration has tried to impose on Harvard is a mandate for “viewpoint diversity,” essentially affirmative action for conservative Republicans. But the absence of conservatives does not mean the presence of Marxists. Of course, many Republicans think anyone to the left of Mitt Romney is a communist/socialist/Marxist. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton: all have had these words flung at them as epithets, even though actual leftists spend much of their time harshly criticizing these figures precisely because they do not accept the basic principles of socialism. You can make a case that the academy leans Marxist if you redefine “Marxist” to mean “center-left liberal.” 

But I think there is a reason that there are more center-left liberals than conservatives in the academy, and I’m afraid the answer is going to make me sound like one of those snooty big city elites. Facts are facts, though: The right does not actually like learning, curiosity, empathy, and intellectual adventure! Do you think Donald Trump reads books for pleasure? Do you think Elon Musk,  Even the right-wing “intellectuals” tend to be frauds who push lazy propaganda. Who are the great conservative intellectuals? Charles Murray? Douglas Murray? Ben Shapiro? Jordan Peterson? These men are fools. If they are shunned by the academy, it is not because their ideology is disfavored but because their statements collapse when scrutinized. In fact, possibly the most respected right-wing political theory professor of recent decades, Harvey Mansfield, was brutally torn apart for his logical errors and prejudices when his work was given a serious look by a genuinely deep and well-read thinker, Martha Nussbaum. As Matt McManus has noted, there is a long tradition of right-wingers explicitly prioritizing instinct over reason, being hostile not just to our existing intellectuals but to the intellectual enterprise writ large. Oh, they’ll go on about the Western canon and the Great Books, but it often turns out they don’t know anything about them. (And when they find out, they rush to ban Shakespeare plays from high schools for being too sexual.)

Some critics of the “Marxist” academy essentially admit that they are not talking about anything Karl Marx would recognize as Marxism. Mike Gonzalez, the author of a book called NextGen Marxism, says that he’s not talking a belief in historical materialism and alienation and so forth, but in a set of ideas that have gone through what he calls a “cultural distillation”: “the original economic orthodoxy has gone first through a cultural distillation in Europe, and then yet another here in America, with other features, such as race, sex, and climate, being added.” DeLuz says the same, saying that “other elements such as race, sex and climate” have been “added” to Marxism, but the “‘oppressor vs oppressed’ paradigm is the essence of Marxism.” This is interesting. It suggests that any talk of oppression is inherently Marxist. If you talk about, for instance, the oppression of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, you have adopted an essential paradigm in which the world is divided into oppressed and oppressor groups. Therefore, you are doing Marxism. 

Here we finally have it: when the critics accuse the university of being some kind of Marxist indoctrination factory, they do not mean that the university is breeding actual Marxists. They believe that too many people come out of college believing that oppression is real and that it is wrong. That’s how DeLuz can call the Palestine protests the product of Marxist indoctrination. But the truth is that people join these protests because they see something happening that horrifies them: the killing of tens of thousands of people by a heavily-armed military backed by the world’s most powerful country. It’s true that this bears a resemblance to Marxism in the sense that Marx, too, looked out at his time and saw a horror: people toiling themselves to death in the “dark Satanic mills” of the British industrial system, people who did almost nothing in their lives but work and whose bodies and minds were being destroyed to produce profit. He saw oppression, just as people look at Palestine today and see oppression. But one needs no “indoctrination” in order to perceive that reality. All it takes is an open mind and a bit of learning, which can be a very dangerous thing to those who would prefer we swallow whatever dogmas we grew up with.