Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth
Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth is a 2004 nonfiction book by American conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. Google Books lists the book as published by WND Books in 2004, with ISBNs 0785261486 and 9780785261483, and a length of 222 pages.[1] The book advanced Shapiro's argument that American universities were dominated by liberal faculty and campus cultures.[2]
Background and publication
Shapiro wrote the book while he was a UCLA undergraduate and nationally syndicated columnist. Contemporary Associated Press coverage, published by CBS News, described him as a 20-year-old UCLA student whose book assembled his campus notes and criticism of what he saw as pervasive liberal bias in higher education.[3] The book appeared early in Shapiro's career, before his later work at Breitbart News, The Daily Wire, and The Ben Shapiro Show.
Publishers Weekly summarized the book as an attack on leftist indoctrination of university students.[4]
Reception and criticism
The book drew attention from conservative media and from critics at UCLA and in higher-education circles. A May 2004 Daily Bruin article reported that the book had appeared in stores and said that several people named or quoted in the book disputed Shapiro's treatment of facts, quotations, and context; the article also included Shapiro's statement that he stood behind the book's facts and central argument about faculty politics.[5]
Academic reviewers were also critical. In a 2005 review in The Review of Higher Education, Evan Baum and Laura Perna argued that the book generalized from Shapiro's UCLA experience and relied on limited or one-sided evidence for broad claims about higher education.[6] Shapiro continued to promote and discuss the book in later appearances, including a 2006 C-SPAN Book TV interview listing for CPAC.[7]