Introduce or "Introdoc?"

Don't encourage unwarranted attacks on the University by indoctrinations masquerading as "orientations."

There is a difference between indoctrination and teaching.  Indoctrination is a statement that X is wrong, bad, dangerous.  As a warning sign it can have value.  Take the left path, not the right.  Invest in this stock, not in this bond.  It is the voice of authority. The function of the university is teaching. 

I recall two instructors at the school where I received my PhD. One told his classes that the War in Vietnam was wrong.  The other taught general theories, with firsthand examples, about colonialism in peasant-based societies.  One of these changed the minds of many students, changed them from strong support for the war that had been based upon their opposition to the expansion of communism to serious reservations about the war based upon the possibility that it was an anti-colonial civil war.   

Today, as in the past, the university supports both indoctrination and teaching.  Professors are human and passionate about their beliefs.  We probably should encourage that passion, as, disciplined by a life of service and experience, it underlies progress. 

We might, however, still question the university’s courtship of indoctrination.  Factions in our society that are opposed to particular sets of beliefs will “rightly?”  attack universities if schools are sponsoring indoctrinations against these beliefs.   Leave aside, for the moment, the content of these beliefs.  Tomorrow we may find ourselves on the other side of such conflicts. 

Those, however, that would pull out every strand of indoctrination within the cloth of universities, may be wise to hesitate and consider that teaching may lead to what indoctrination tried and failed to achieve. Free thought can travel in many directions and awaken many insights.  This is not indoctrination; this is the development of mental clarity and evidence-based thinking.  Those who rail against the modern university, one of our greatest achievements, advocate the disposal of a lot of babies as the price of dumping a little bathwater.

On the other hand, university administrations may want to take a second look at how they prepare newly enrolled students for their university experience.  First year student orientation has always cautioned students about class attendance and hopefully inspired students about the great challenges and opportunities awaiting them.  To me, this has always been an innocuous form of indoctrination.   It has been part of the ritual of college life, like the old tradition in some schools of wearing a beany. 

If it were up to me, I would leave teaching to the faculty and let learning be its own advocate. 

Let administrations congratulate their students for their good judgement in attending college, particularly this college. 

At the same time, however, may I suggest that all forms of orientation easily resolve into crude forms of indoctrination.  Say this, do this, think this ----OR!   And then we open the gates to a fevered attack by groups on the political and social “Right” that would prefer to substitute their own indoctrination both for the “forward” to the book (the orientations) that we are writing and to the content of its chapters.