Like many social conservatives, Rick Santorum is frustrated with indoctrination of college students by their leftist college professors. But how indoctrinated with leftist ideology do you feel? How much pressure do you experience from your professors to adopt and act on their liberal political ideas?

Speaking to a church crowd a week ago, Santorum said, according to CBS, “that ‘the left’ uses universities to indoctrinate young people for the purpose of ‘holding and maintaining power.'” He objected to prohibitions on government support of teaching Judeo-Christian values in universities, which are also apparently responsible for the defection of 62 percent of all faith-holding students who enter college.

While some colleges may be more blatantly biased in favor of liberalism than others, there is no vast left-wing conspiracy that controls universities whose mission is to deceive young people into voting for Democrats. Court rulings that keep public schools from funding religious teaching have been part of American legal precedent for decades. Young people leaving their churches of course is not due to the fact that so many Christians, as Ghandi mentioned, are so unlike their Christ.

Santorum’s frustration is most likely directed at liberal indoctrination, rather than against indoctrination itself. In painting a dichotomy between left and right, Santorum shows disagreement merely with the principles being indoctrinated, not indoctrination itself. He said, “We’ve lost our higher education,” as if it should be the province of conservatives.

Supporting one political party or wing of political thought is not universities’ goal. The purpose of higher, liberal education is training students in critical thinking so they can go out into the world and constructively critique it. By way of our critical approach, we will develop real solutions to our problems.

That means that sometimes we have to question our basic assumptions about how the world works. Higher education is about thinking outside the box, an activity that does in fact have value: Without doubting the evidence for Ptolemy’s theory that the earth is the center of the universe, Copernicus would not have investigated the issue or discovered that ours is a heliocentric solar system.

Higher education is about motivating people to make a difference in the world — to change it for the better. Santorum, however, in urging members of his audience to stop donating money to universities, demonstrates a lack of understanding that changing what is wrong — including what is wrong with higher education — takes participation. Abandonment and desertion will not fix the problem.

He and other social conservatives ought to listen to the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”