“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 possibly slip my socialistic agenda into their well-oiled brains without their being immediately aware of it.

But let’s say I did figure out some fiendish strategy. What would be the payoff? Let’s say that out of a couple of hundred students per three-month term, I managed to convert – well, 20 seems like wishful thinking. But if I turned 20 conservatives into leftists, then the Liberals, N.D.P. or Greens would benefit to the tune of 20 more votes in the next federal election. Again: an awful lot of work for precious little benefit.

So for this plan to have any appreciable effect, I couldn’t do it alone. I would have to work in concert with an extended secret network of leftist professors around the globe. And, in fact, that is the stereotype: all us professors working on this project in tandem, and in unanimous agreement about both goals and tactics. Yeah, right. Unanimous agreement. Gentle reader, have you ever attended a meeting of professors?

And finally, the stereotype of college professors being universally small-l liberal is, frankly, absurd – and even for us, a great many of the students are to the left of us to begin with.

There is another argument against the stereotype of the Propagandizing Progressive Profs, which makes me slightly uneasy. It has been popping up in the form of memes on social media lately. It is that, far from brainwashing our students, we give them the tools of critical thinking and objective analysis, with which the students independently conclude that it’s just plain better over here on the left.

Though I share that view, I find the argument suspiciously ideological in its assumption. However, it does seem persuasive, as leftists appear to be forever questioning and re-examining our own principles, while the right-wing crowd seems quite content to fall in line unquestioningly behind their leaders. Ironically, this may contribute to their strength: the right wing can form prompt phalanxes undistracted by doubts, while the left bickers and reevaluates and organizes circular firing squads. I’ve often been struck by the way Trump’s audiences cheer enthusiastically – or, of course, jeer us libtards – whenever he announces a blatant lie that would be instantly exposed if they would just take a second to fact-check him on their phones. But, of course, they don’t. So it’s hard not to infer that they’re perfectly happy to let him do all the thinking for them. No wonder he shouted, at a rally in Nevada in February, 2016, “I love the poorly educated!” (And, once again, they cheered.)

However, in fairness, let’s explore the opposite argument. (Notice what I just did there? Hey, I’m a professor.) I admit that I have encountered some profs who do assume that their students agree with their own politics: who make, for example, snarky jokes about those dumb rednecks, or dumb commies, and expect their students to laugh along. And many of the students do laugh – either because they sincerely share the prof’s politics and find the joke funny, or because they want to curry favour and get good grades – while others sit in silence, wondering if this is the right classroom for them. Though this hardly amounts to a massive program to indoctrinate the students, it’s definitely unprofessional behavior.

So I’ll tell you what I would do, when partisan politics found its way into our discussions of playwriting or theatre. Usually I would proclaim my political bias to the students. I would say that I am not one of those professors who expect their students to agree with their politics. And I would announce that conservative students were welcome in my classroom: that the course was not called (for example) Introduction to Playwriting for Leftists, but Introduction to Playwriting.

By now there would usually be a suspicious silence in the room, so I would then add, “I draw the line at fascism.” And that would usually get a relieved laugh. And, dear reader, if you think that my drawing the line at fascism constitutes stuffing the students’ heads with my socialistic beliefs, well, you go write your own blog, and maybe Doug Ford will give you a speechwriting job, because now you know what goes on in those college classrooms.

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P.S.: In February, I posted a blog, which you can find on this website, disputing the letters of protest that had contributed to the cancellation of productions of Christopher Morris’ play The Runner in Victoria and Vancouver. I noted that the letters ask us to imagine Canadian or South African plays depicting the experiences of indigenous people through the eyes of white settlers, and suggest that such a play would inevitably be racist. I wrote, “Some such plays do exist – Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose, an acclaimed Canadian play about a white nurse living among First Nations people, comes to mind” – and argued that in fact it’s an anti-racist play which, like The Runner, shows a white character getting a hard education in rethinking old assumptions. Well, whaddaya know: yet another play has been cancelled in Victoria because it commits the crime of “centring” characters who belong to the dominant culture – it’s called Sisters, and is about white nuns regretting their treatment of First Nations children in a residential school – and hey, it was written by Wendy Lill, the same playwright I cited in my blog! Of course I don’t for a moment believe that my mention of Heather Rose set the self-appointed watchdogs on the prowl for other suspicious material by the same writer; but it’s a disturbing coincidence, within what seems to be a disturbing, and continuing, trend.