The College Fix

‘Young people are being taught a crazy fringe theory, and it’s wrong’

Post-Marxist ideology has infiltrated higher education, and there’s risks in teaching it to students, said political scientist Wilfred Reilly, a professor at Kentucky State University.

Reilly defines post-Marxism as “the idea that society is set up to oppress you and that all gaps in performance reflect that oppression.”

In an interview with The College Fix, he said post-Marxism and critical theory have become central themes in textbooks and coursework at many highly regarded universities.

“The problem is young people are being taught a crazy fringe theory, and it’s wrong,” Reilly said. “There’s an extreme opportunity cost to teaching people a theory that’s wrong. And also, the theory makes people hostile to our society.”

While researching his new book, “Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula,” Reilly reviewed modern high school and college textbooks to see how frequently Marxist ideas were being taught as fact. He found that many textbooks portrayed Western society as fundamentally evil.

Reilly said his book debunks 10 common claims liberal academics have promoted for decades, such as “Native Americans were peaceful people” and that “slavery was unique to America.”

“When you look at modern critical theory, all of it is just Marxism with ‘the rich man’ taken out and replaced by something else,” Reilly said.

For example, in critical race theory, Reilly said, “the ‘rich man’ is replaced by the ‘white man.’ With fourth-wave feminism, the ‘rich man’ is just replaced with ‘the man.’”

Reilly traced the infiltration of Marxist teaching in academia back to the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1980s. During these decades, he said, many political radicals entered the academic world and higher education.

Fast-forward a bit, and a 2006 survey found that 18 percent of college professors identified as communists. Reilly speculated that this number has likely increased since then.

“In day-to-day life, you don’t meet any communists,” Reilly said. “If you were to ask people about their philosophies, they’d say, ‘Well, I’m a Baptist,’ or ‘I’m a stoic.’ There would be no one in the room that would say they’re a Marxist—and that’s typical everywhere.”

“But in universities, particularly on the faculty side, it’s very different,” he added. “Universities have moved really far to the left.”

Radical theory prevalent in American higher education teaches students that society is set up to oppress the individual, any gaps in performance indicate the oppression, and that the solution is equity, which Reilly defined as “proportional representation without regard to performance.”

Reilly said he emphasizes the importance of exposing these false liberal narratives in order to encourage critical thinking among students.

Undoing the damage of critical theory being taught in higher education, he added, will be “a task for generations.”

MORE: Professor from Soviet Union warns anti-racism agenda in U.S. is ‘rehashing of Marxism’

IMAGE: William Reilly

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