As usual, Rick Santorum got a lot
wrong in his remarks on higher education. But he's right that attempts are made to imbue students with certain values.
Rick Santorum earned a bachelors degree in 1980, a masters degree in 1981, and a law degree in 1986. When he last ran for office, his campaign site declared that he is "committed to ensuring the every Pennsylvanian has access to higher education." And extolling college is a decades old bipartisan trope in American politics. So it's unfair for the former Pennsylvania senator to attack President Obama as a "snob" for saying that he wants all kids to go to college, and even more unfair to assert that he wants to send them there so that they can be indoctrinated.
But can we please admit that many four year colleges do in fact attempt to indoctrinate students? And that a lot of Americans, including President Obama, regard that as a good thing?
Start with the sort of indoctrination that is least controversial. An ideology of anti-racism prevails at most American colleges. Show me a kid who writes a racial epithet on the dry erase board on his dorm room door, or drapes a big Confederate flag out his window, and I'll show you a kid who is about to have a conversation with the Office of Residential Life. I'd wager that if Rick Santorum himself were made a Dean of Campus Life he'd intervene to address outright racism.