Imagine a student writing an essay about inequality. She has read Marx carefully, can explain his account of class and thinks it helps explain part of the problem. She also thinks the theory leaves out evidence that points to a different conclusion. She writes that objection into her essay, rereads it, then deletes it. She has a pretty good idea which conclusion will make for an easier conversation when the grades come back.

I wonder how often the most interesting sentence in a university essay is the one the professor never gets to read.

A university can praise free inquiry in its prospectus and teach conformity in its classrooms. Students notice which arguments get a fair hearing, which objections earn an eye-roll and which conclusions come back with the best marks. If agreeing with the lecturer looks like the safest route to a degree, students have a reason to conform long before anyone tells them to.

I want students to read Marx. I want them to read him closely enough to know when his critics are taking shortcuts, too. And I want a student who thinks he was wrong to be able to make that argument in the room where it matters most, in front of a professor who thinks he was right.

The test I didn’t know I’d be taking

When I was a student, I was active in right-wing politics. Some of my teachers took a dislike to me and made life difficult for me. I believed at the time that my politics were costing me marks.

I remember one test I missed because I was ill. I went to the professor to ask when I could sit it. He told me he’d let me know. About an hour later, he came into the classroom and told me, in front of my classmates, that I was taking the test right then.

I can tell you how much notice I got. I can only tell you what I suspected about his reasons. But once you start wondering whether the person marking your work has already made up his mind about your political stance, it changes what you feel free to say in his classroom.

What are we calling cultural Marxism?

I use the term here for a family of Marxist and Marxist-influenced approaches to culture, education and power. Antonio Gramsci, writing his Prison Notebooks between 1929 and 1935, explored how political leadership depends partly on consent and how institutions in civil society help shape what people take for granted. That is an idea worth studying. It also gives us a question worth directing at the university itself. Whose assumptions pass for common sense in the classroom? [1]

We can start with what universities actually publish. The Federal University of Campina Grande in Brazil lists Marx alongside Émile Durkheim and Max Weber in its graduate social theory course. The Federal University of the São Francisco Valley includes historical materialism and class struggle in its social sciences curriculum, alongside contemporary challenges to Marxist thought. Those documents tell us which ideas students are invited to study. To see how dissent is handled, we would need to see the assignments, the grading criteria and the feedback students receive. [2, 3]

When the answer is decided in advance

Suppose a class is asked why workers at a factory went on strike. A Marxist analysis might focus on who owns the factory, who controls the work and who benefits from the profits. Another student might point to a change in shift schedules, a breakdown in bargaining or a manager who ignored repeated safety complaints. Those explanations can overlap. A student might find that the shift change triggered the strike and that the balance of power at the factory helps explain why the workers felt a strike was their only option.

A professor can reasonably ask the class to explain how Marx would interpret the dispute. That shows whether students understand his method. A question about what actually caused the strike calls for a different kind of answer. It asks students to weigh evidence and consider what each explanation leaves out. If the conclusion is settled in advance, students learn to work backwards from it. They can pass the course without ever finding out how well the theory explains what happened.

From the barricades to the institutions

In May 1968, student protests in France helped spark a general strike involving millions of workers. The unrest shook Charles de Gaulle’s government. By the end of June, his supporters had secured a decisive parliamentary majority. Around the same period, the West German student leader Rudi Dutschke was advocating a “long march through the institutions.” The idea was already circulating during the protest years. In 1972, Herbert Marcuse took it up in Counterrevolution and Revolt, discussing how activists could work inside established institutions, including universities and the media, while seeking to change them. [4, 5, 6]

That strategy deserves attention precisely because education has influence beyond any one election. But the history of an idea and the conduct of a lecturer are two different questions. Marcuse’s endorsement shows what he wanted activists to do. What a professor does with a student’s dissent has to be judged on the evidence from that classroom.

Brazil’s universities and the legacy of resistance

In Brazil, the relationship between the academic left and the university was shaped in part by military rule. After the 1964 coup, the headquarters of the National Union of Students was attacked and burned. The student movement became an important centre of resistance, and left-wing groups were active in it. The wider opposition also included trade unions, Catholic groups and other civic organisations. At the University of São Paulo, professors were removed from their posts for political reasons. Some were reinstated after the 1979 Amnesty Law, while the military was still in power. [7, 8, 9]

Some of the students of that era later taught the next generation. José Álvaro Moisés, for example, was studying social sciences at USP in 1968 and went on to become a professor of political science there. It’s easy to see why ideas associated with resistance carried moral weight. People had taken real risks for the right to organise, speak and teach. That history helps explain the standing of parts of Brazil’s academic left. It leaves open how individual departments taught those ideas and how much room they gave their students to challenge them. [10]

I’ve met Brazilians whose politics seem to turn the usual class stereotypes upside down. The national figures give a more complicated picture. In DataSenado’s 2024 survey, 21 per cent of people with some higher education or more described themselves as left-wing, compared with 12 per cent of those whose highest level was completed fundamental education. In the higher-education group, 31 per cent identified as right-wing. In Datafolha’s 22 October 2026 runoff poll, Lula led Flávio Bolsonaro by 58 to 42 among voters in households earning up to two minimum wages, while Flávio led by 54 to 46 among voters with higher education. One survey asked people how they described their politics. The other asked whom they intended to vote for. To find out how much universities shape those views, we’d need evidence of what students believed before they arrived and how their views changed while they were there. [11, 12]

I respect the courage it took to oppose a military dictatorship. I also think the best way to honour that courage is to protect the right of today’s students to question the people who came before them. A professor can explain why Marxism appealed to some who lived under military rule. A student should be able to ask where that tradition got things wrong and get a serious answer. If a university is proud of its history of dissent, it should make room for dissent in its own classrooms.

When agreement earns the better grade

Grades go back centuries. Yale was classifying students by performance in the 1780s. What the 1960s give us is a clear statement of the principle at stake. In 1967, American faculty, student and higher education organisations said students should be free to raise reasoned objections to views presented in class and should have a procedure to protect them from biased or arbitrary assessment. They also made clear that students still had to learn the course material. [13, 14]

There is some experimental evidence that agreement can affect marks. One study found that educators gave higher grades to essays that matched their political views, even when using a grading rubric. In a separate experiment, teaching assistants at several institutions graded anonymous undergraduate political science essays, and the researchers found no evidence of partisan bias in that setting. Both results matter. The first shows how agreement can influence a mark. The second gives us reason to be careful about how widely we assume it happens. [15, 16]

When I talk about brainwashing in education, I am thinking of a habit a student can learn one assignment at a time. Figure out which premises are safe to question. Find out which objections get taken seriously and which ones get you labelled. Write something the person holding the red pen will recognise as a good answer. The student may privately disagree with every word. On paper, the professor sees a room full of converts.

A syllabus can tell us which theories a course teaches. Campus incidents can show how intimidation makes speaking up costly. To establish that a student lost marks for disagreeing with a Marxist interpretation, I’d want to see the assignment, the marking criteria, the student’s work and the feedback together.

When students enforce the rules

In 1967, California history teacher Ron Jones tried to show students how people could come to accept authoritarian rule. At Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, he introduced strict classroom routines, a salute and membership cards for a group he called the Third Wave. He assigned a few students to report rule-breakers. In his later account, Jones recalled that other students volunteered information about their classmates. He also admitted how much he enjoyed the unity he had created. Dennis Gansel’s 2008 film The Wave drew on the episode and moved it to a German high school. [17, 18, 19]

In Mao’s China, the consequences of denunciation could be deadly. In 1966, Mao encouraged students to organise as Red Guards and confront people branded enemies of the revolution. In an investigation covering 96 schools, researcher Youqin Wang documented the killing of 27 educators. At Peking University in 1968, she found that students were assigned to search teachers’ homes or denounce teachers who had never taught them. Accusing someone could become a public way of demonstrating one’s loyalty to the revolution. [20, 21, 22]

The university question is about what happens in ordinary settings, where the pressures are usually quieter. Who gets interrupted? Whose argument is answered on its merits? How much does a student have to trust the person grading an essay before putting a serious objection in writing?

When staying quiet feels risky

There’s a moment in Ron Jones’s account that makes me think about what can happen in a classroom long before anyone is threatened. Some students volunteered to report their classmates. Think of a student today who disagrees with a left-wing consensus in a seminar. At first she keeps quiet. Then she notices that keeping quiet can draw attention too. The next time someone objects, she laughs along. She might even be the first to pile on. Everyone in the room gets the message she wants them to get. “Look at me. I’m a good lefty.”

The economist Timur Kuran calls it preference falsification when people publicly express a preference that differs from what they privately believe because of social pressure. The person sitting next to that student may have the same doubts she does. All he sees is her laughing, and all she sees is him saying nothing. Each leaves thinking the other agrees with the room. [23]

I’d expect the same pressure in a room where everyone is expected to sound conservative. In either room, think about what changes when one student says, “I’m still thinking about this, but here’s where I disagree,” and the teacher takes the objection seriously. The next student now has some reason to believe they’ll be heard too.

Who gets to be one of the good people?

There’s a familiar picture of politics in which the left stands for the environment, human rights, democracy and animal welfare. In that picture, the right is where people put everything they distrust. Conservatives and Christians get lumped in with fascists and neo-Nazis, as if those labels tell you the same thing about a person. Once you accept that picture, choosing a political camp can feel like choosing what kind of person you want to be.

I understand the appeal of being on the side you think is doing good. People can care deeply about a cause and also enjoy what supporting it says about them. The trouble starts when that feeling becomes a reason to stop listening. If someone questions my preferred environmental policy, do I ask how they’d protect the river, or do I assume they don’t care whether it’s polluted? Two people can want the same river cleaned up and disagree fiercely about how to do it, who should pay and whether the plan will work.

Bring that into a classroom and the reward for joining in becomes clearer. The student who piles on can earn a laugh and reassure herself that everyone knows where she stands. The student who asks an awkward question risks being judged before she gets to finish it. A teacher can change the conversation by asking the class to identify what the student actually argued and deal with that argument. If we care about democracy, surely we can let someone finish a sentence before deciding what kind of person they are.

When disagreement turns into intimidation

At the Federal University of Ceará in 2016, a man wearing a T-shirt with Jair Bolsonaro’s image was filmed being heckled by students. Years later, the footage circulated as though the encounter had just happened. The fact-checking project Comprova confirmed that the video was genuine and traced it back to 2016. I think about the students who saw that encounter and had to decide for themselves whether it was worth letting their classmates know what they believed. [24]

During Brazil’s 2022 election, Júlia de Castro, a history student at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, told Gazeta do Povo that she received threats after an anonymous post on a student site singled her out for supporting Bolsonaro. The paper reported that she filed a police report. She said she returned to class with relatives and a security guard because she feared being assaulted. Imagine having to make that arrangement just to go back to class. [25]

At the University of São Paulo in September 2025, a visit by the right-wing group União Conservadora turned physical. UOL reported that footage showed a teenage activist pulling a vuvuzela from a student’s hand, causing her to fall, before another student pushed him. A USP student reported being bitten by the group’s leader, and the group said its own members had been assaulted. The accounts differ over who provoked the confrontation. That distinction matters when assigning blame, just as the distinction between a visiting activist and an enrolled student matters when describing what happened. [26]

The Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson faced a different version of that hostility. In 2017, protesters chanted through a McMaster University event where Peterson, then a University of Toronto professor, had been invited to discuss political correctness and free speech. At Queen’s University in 2018, the student newspaper reported that most people protesting his lecture demonstrated peacefully. Some blocked exits, and a protester whom campus security identified as someone from outside the student body broke a window. Protest organisers said they were objecting to Peterson being given a platform, citing his remarks and their concerns about trans rights. Those objections could have been put to him directly and pressed in front of the audience. [27, 28]

There’s an irony in watching a professor get shouted down when one of the rules in his best-known book asks readers to consider that the person they’re listening to might know something they don’t. I’d apply that rule to Peterson as readily as to his critics. Give the speaker a chance to answer. Give the critic a chance to ask the hardest question in the room. Give everyone else a chance to hear both and decide for themselves. [29]

Talk to people you disagree with

I want schools and universities to teach students how to have a conversation with someone whose views they find wrong, even offensive. Ask how that person came to believe what they believe. Find out what evidence they’re relying on. Try putting their argument into your own words and see if they recognise it. You may come away just as convinced as you were before. You might also discover a fact you had missed, an objection you hadn’t considered, or a weakness in your own argument.

What troubles me is how readily we can substitute a label for that conversation. “Don’t talk to him. He’s a Nazi.” “Don’t listen to her. She’s a communist.” If either label is accurate, it tells you something about the person’s politics. The next question is still worth asking. What exactly are they arguing, and where does their argument hold up or fall apart? A teacher can help students work through those questions by asking them to describe an opposing view fairly before they criticise it, then giving them room to reach different conclusions.

This matters long after students leave the classroom. If people only hear their opponents described by those who already despise them, each side can spend years arguing with a caricature. They may never find out that they agree on a practical problem, or that the real disagreement lies somewhere other than where they assumed. They still have to live in the same neighbourhoods, work together and make decisions that affect one another. The less practice they have talking across those differences, the easier it becomes to treat every disagreement as a choice of sides.

Around 2008, when I was living in Australia, I went to a Socialist Alliance meeting. I sat down with a man there and we talked for about an hour. He told me what he thought of Welf Herfurth, whom he regarded as a Nazi and a fascist. Then we got onto the environment, human rights, healthcare and what was happening in Australian politics at the time. We found ourselves agreeing on a surprising amount. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say we agreed on about 80 per cent of what we discussed.

As I got up to leave, I shook his hand. “By the way,” I said, “I’m Welf Herfurth.” He went white and couldn’t find a word to say.

I’ve wondered how much of that conversation we would have had if I’d introduced myself at the start. By the time he knew my name, he’d already spent an hour talking with someone he’d expected to despise. That’s the kind of encounter I want students to have. You can learn more about what someone thinks in an hour across a table than you can from years of hearing other people tell you what they’re supposed to believe.

The mark that matters

Brazil’s Constitution names freedom to learn, teach and research, along with pluralism of ideas, among the principles of education. In practice, those principles are tested in ordinary decisions. A student should be able to see why she lost marks. A professor should be able to point to an error, a gap in the evidence or a conclusion the argument fails to support. I would expect the same from a conservative professor grading an essay that makes a strong case for Marx. [30]

Put the marking criteria in writing. Apply them equally to opposing arguments. Give students a way to ask for a second reading when the feedback seems to judge the conclusion more than the work that went into it.

The test of a university’s commitment to free inquiry comes when a student stops conforming and puts an unpopular argument on the page. I keep coming back to the student who deleted her best objection. I want her to put that sentence back in. I want her professor to read it carefully enough to tell her where she’s wrong, and honestly enough to recognise when she’s right.

Can a student understand the professor’s argument, make a better one against it and still earn the highest mark in the room?

References

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Gramsci
2. Campina Grande course syllabus
3. São Francisco Valley curriculum
4. Larousse on the June elections
5. Columbia Law School discussion of Marcuse
6. Research on Dutschke’s strategy
7. National Union of Students history
8. Jornal da USP on the removal and reinstatement of professors
9. Freedom House on Brazil’s democratic transition
10. Jornal da USP on José Álvaro Moisés and the student movement
11. DataSenado’s 2024 ideological profile
12. Folha’s breakdown of the October 2026 Datafolha poll
13. History of university grading
14. Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students
15. Study on political agreement in essay grading
16. Study of anonymous political science essays
17. Ron Jones’s account
18. European Film Academy
19. Filmportal on the historical inspiration
20. Wang’s study of attacks on educators
21. Wang’s account of the 1968 campaign
22. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute on education under Mao
23. Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies
24. Projeto Comprova’s verification
25. Gazeta do Povo’s reporting
26. UOL’s reporting on the USP confrontation
27. The Varsity on McMaster
28. The Queen’s Journal on the Grant Hall protest
29. Peterson’s ninth rule in 12 Rules for Life
30. Brazil’s Constitution, Article 206