If some in the right-wing media are to be believed, my story is proof that Western universities are nothing but “toxic cesspits of communist and anti-Western indoctrination… indoctrination factories.”
When I enrolled in my first university class, I was a proud, hard-working conservative. I believed in small government, low taxes, and the sanctity of the backyard BBQ. But according to the feral right-wing media, what happened next was inevitable: within weeks, I had been fully indoctrinated into the radical loony left.
It started innocently enough. Week one, I was still me – listening to talkback radio on the drive to campus, rolling my eyes at climate change protestors. By week two, though, things were already shifting. I found myself drinking oat milk “just to try it.”
By week four, I could no longer bring myself to shop at a supermarket chain because of “late-stage capitalism.” I began referring to my parents as “boomers” and told them they needed to decolonise their thinking.
By mid-semester, the transformation was complete. I had knitted my own rainbow flag, attended three climate marches, and begun describing everything I didn’t like as “problematic.” I could no longer clap at family events, preferring instead to wave my hands silently in the air, as taught by the student union to avoid triggering anyone.
By the time exams rolled around, I had signed three online petitions, boycotted two companies I had never shopped at, knew 450 words in Mandarin, bought my first Che Guevara t-shirt and started every conversation with the phrase, “Well, actually, it’s more complicated than that.” My social media feeds were suddenly filled with articles about wealth inequality, Indigenous sovereignty, and the dangers of billionaire space programs.
Even my vocabulary changed. Words like “neoliberalism,” “intersectionality,” and “late capitalism” began appearing in everyday conversation. The right-wing media would have you believe this is compulsory – and they might be right. I didn’t even notice when my bookshelf filled up with Marx, Foucault, and a suspicious number of books with the word manifesto in the title.
Ironically, many of the same commentators who warn parents about this so-called indoctrination send their own children to expensive overseas universities – apparently confident that the left-wing brainwashing won’t stick to their offspring. Maybe it’s the money.
Now, as a fully radicalised leftie lunatic, I spend my days advocating for wealth redistribution, dismantling power structures, and making sure all my friends recycle properly. Occasionally I glance at my old self – the one who believed university was just about getting a degree – and I can barely recognise him.
Parents, consider this a warning. Your child could go to university to learn accounting and come home trying to nationalise the Reserve Bank. If it happened to me, it could happen to anyone. Sky News was right!
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I became a leftie woke when my mother – who was born in England – said
“Tim, the royal family are nothing special – they eat, sleep and go to the toilet like everyone else”.
I was further redicalised by the anti Vietnam war protests in the 70’s, and of course my left leaning Botany, Physics and Maths lecturers.
Getting on at University
Respecting your fellow students
“When someone uses they/them as their pronouns, it means that you should refer to them with those pronouns. Even if you think the person looks like a “she” or a “he,” the appropriate thing to do is to use the pronouns that a person informs you are the right ones for them.
Because they/them pronouns are not gendered, you may safely assume that a person who uses them doesn’t want to be referred to by gendered pronouns.
You can’t really assume anything else about the person’s gender, though. That’s because there are many reasons why a person might be best suited with non-gendered pronouns.
For instance, they might be nonbinary, gender expansive, transgender, bigender, or gender non-conforming. They also may identify in a way that doesn’t fit any of those descriptions.”
You could do a PhD on that!
Geez Roswell, it took you a long time to catch on to the oppressive domination of capitalism and the necessary implementation of the welfare state so that working class people could (perhaps) get a fairer share of the common wealth that the Boss Class had wrapped up for themselves in tax concessions for investments, rebates for business expenses and easy government financial handouts.
In ”the glorious Menzies years” following WWII my hard working solo parent often worked three jobs simultaneously to keep food on the table, thought a 16 hour day was a public holiday and travel to the next door suburb was an international flight. That was before the Whitlam government introduced child care & family reforms that the LIARBRAL$ had conveniently ignored.
So why was the family so ”LIARBRAL$ MINDED?? Family history?? Naiveite?? Certainly NOT work experience ….
So entering university exposed me to ”community equity”, ”from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”, fighting American imperialist wars in SE Asia did nothing for the Australian economy except waste natural resources and the lives of too many fine young Australians for American based armaments manufacturers well out of the firing line.
Now 50 years on, little has changed ….. the BOSSES still rule, workers are still exploited and politicians continue to go without accountability for any and every self-serving scam or deliberately failed policy ….. like Robodebt and the ”no funds return” COVID-19 corporate money handout.
I blame my left leaning on facts. Solution? Remove them and replace them with alternative facts. Problem solved! We can all be right wing and happy again 😊
I blame life: definitely for the loony part and probably for the lefty bit. Not being a soulless ignoramus also contributed, of course.
I practiced a sort of hard-right leftyism, opting for Bundy instead of Chardonnay. After half a lifetime of obeisance, upon manumission it paid well. Albeit my well crafted obsessions seemed to be leading me to an auto-lobotomy. So, fried, I chucked it all in and became softer around the edges. But still, somewhere from deep within the chakras, as an original poached egg cracked, I struggle with doing by not doing.
I rather think (hope) I am more leftie than looney ! My entire family is hard-core right wing. I am in my 80’s and a while back my older cousin ordered me to “leave that rotten Labor mob and return to where I belong “. ?? I ignored it and changed the subject. The trigger for that tirade was my remark about mostly being a swinging voter !
My sister and her husband are rusted on Victorian LNP and have roles in that party to perform for the benefit of the party and it certainly exacts its pound of flesh. We do not speak of politics for obvious reasons. She has said some pretty bluddy awful very anti-compassionate things to me, and it is upsetting to see just how much she embraces far right stuff. She was never like that back in the day.
I changed course from the LNP propaganda I got from family, when I had time to do a little clear thinking ( post babies and teen kids ) and it became a no-brainer.
A certain person contends that many folk at uni are delberately(?) infected
with the notorious “Woke Mind Virus”
Not such a pandemic since Covid?