People often assume professors are indoctrinating students when those professors are only teaching students to critically reexamine their own assumptions based on evidence and methodologies that might be new for those students. That’s not indoctrination. It’s education.
I’m in a discipline (history) that has been at the center of these accusations of “indoctrination.” Yes, many of my colleagues (certainly not all) hold personal views to the left of center. No, they don’t “indoctrinate.” Rather, we hope to challenge students to complicate their own preconceptions by looking at new evidence. But isn’t that what’s supposed to happen in college? Aren’t students supposed to broaden their intellectual horizons beyond what they learned in high school? Why do we assume evidence and inquiry are always politicized?
For many conservatives, “indoctrination” has become a coded accusation of what they imagine leftist professors hope to accomplish. As we often say, if we actually had the power to indoctrinate, we’d start by persuading students to do the reading and finish their assignments! For what it’s worth: in many, many years of my own schooling (primary, secondary, college, and two rounds of grad school), the only professor I ever had who came close to attempting “indoctrination” was a conservative economist who deducted points from any assignment that did not support his specific interpretation. Shockingly (not), I survived that class un-indoctrinated (though I did not earn as high a grade as I would have had I just parroted back his views).