DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Reeducation Campus. In City Journal, I report on an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone: attending the annual convention for the college bureaucrats in charge of indoctrinating freshmen. More than 1,700 of them from around the world convened to discuss the First Year Experience, an umbrella of orientation programs that have spread to 90 percent of American campuses and are rapidly expanding overseas.

These programs often start with a “common read,” a book sent to everyone the summer before school starts, and proceed with lectures, discussion groups, seminars, courses, exercises, field trips, art projects, local activism, and whatever else the schools will fund. The programs are typically run not by professors but by “co-curricular professionals”—administrators lacking scholarly credentials who operate outside the regular curriculum.

These professionals seem to lean even further left than the faculty, to judge from the wild applause they gave to authors promoting common-read books with no literary merit but plenty of identity politics. And in some ways these bureaucrats have more influence than the faculty.

By choosing your courses carefully, you can avoid the progressive sermonizing that passes for scholarship in some departments, but everyone has to undergo the orientation and first-year programs. You may have come to study computer science or literature or biochemistry, but first you’ll have to learn about social justice, environmental sustainability, gender pronouns, and micro-aggressions. You may have been planning to succeed by hard work, but first you’ll have to acknowledge your privilege or discover your victimhood. If you arrived at college hoping to broaden your intellectual horizons, you’ll quickly be instructed which ideas are off-limits.

While the tenured professoriate stagnates, these administrators are expanding their domains, just as predicted by Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.