How Third Worldism Corrupts American Higher Education

Tal Fortgang
‘17

There is a particular kind of bad idea that thrives under the protection of academic freedom. Such a toxic philosophy does not contribute to the marketplace of ideas. Rather, it gains prominence within the academy precisely because it systematically poisons that marketplace from within. When it comes under attack from outside university gates, campus administrators invoke free inquiry and end up defending it as precisely the kind of controversial matter academics must be free to explore; professors assign it as cutting-edge gospel; students come to think of it as precisely what they’re attending college to absorb.

Third Worldism is such an idea. Though it is not campus-grown like critical theory, it has found the American university to be an almost perfect habitat. It manifests in open celebrations of violence, if the bloodshed is directed against Westerners. A perfect example was the recent demonstration at Swarthmore College, where students chanted to express their love for Iran and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah to kill soldiers. Iran and Hezbollah have killed hundreds of American troops in the past and are actively engaged in a war against the very country that protects these students’ right to speak.

Traditionally, the analysis of these dime-a-dozen student actions revolves around their right to project such horrific messages on campus. Under the laws of civil rights, freedom of speech, immigration, material support for terrorism, and more, it’s arguable. It’s also not the only analytical mode available.

The better question is this: Is this the kind of movement universities should incubate? Speech that flows freely on campus can nevertheless erode the basic epistemic trust that makes serious inquiry possible. Third Worldism provides a perfect example of a set of ideas that ought to have been marginalized — not banned, but treated as something akin to pseudoscience — though it is tolerable under free-speech or academic-freedom principles. It is shouldn’t thrive within the university, because it is beneath the university; it is unserious and corrosive.

What is Third-Worldism?

As scholars like Zineb Riboua and Martin Kramer have documented in their analyses, Third Worldism is not a set of policy preferences. It is an epistemological framework—a way of sorting all human experience into categories that reinforce the theory that the West exploits the rest of the world. In its most coherent form, it holds that the global South has been systematically victimized by Western capitalism, imperialism, and cultural hegemony, and that this victimization is the master key to understanding history, politics, economics, and even science.

This worldview is distinct from both Islamism and classical Marxism. Instead, it stems from “Third-Worldist” intellectual traditions developed in the mid-20th century, particularly through thinkers influenced by anti-colonial struggles such as Algeria’s war of independence. Over time, scholars like Maxime Rodinson and Edward Said recast Zionism and Israel through a colonial lens, and these ideas were institutionalized in Western academia. The result is a conceptual system in which Western nations are defined as illegitimate from the outset, while anything untoward done by the “Third World” is interpreted as resistance through the same inductive process.

Within this system, historical complexities—such as, for example, the fact that nearly all nations began with one ethnic group conquering another—are minimized or reinterpreted to fit the model. Riboua has astutely pointed out how this creates intellectual “fog,” where accumulating terminology gives the appearance of depth while simplifying reality into moral binaries.

The intellectual lineage runs through Frantz Fanon and the Tricontinental movements of the 1960s, through Said’s postcolonial turn, and into the contemporary diversity-equity-inclusion apparatus that now shapes hiring, curriculum, and institutional culture at nearly every research university in the country. Riboua’s work tracing the ideological foundations of states like Iran and Algeria—where, as analysts at the Washington Institute have noted, the ruling ideology “blends anti-imperialist Marxism, Shia Islamism, and reactionary Third Worldism”— illuminates where these ideas end up when taken to their logical conclusion outside the seminar room.

What makes Third Worldism especially durable is its self-sealing quality. Because it frames Western institutions—including liberal epistemology, empirical social science, and the peer-reviewed journal—as instruments of domination, it renders itself immune to standard academic falsification. To critique it from within the Western tradition is, by the logic of the framework, to reproduce the oppressor’s perspective. Kramer, in his forensic dissection of Middle East Studies programs, identified “militant third worldism” as the dominant influence in a field that had largely abandoned scholarly rigor for advocacy—one that made it nearly impossible to produce honest analysis of the Arab world, Islam, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because the ideological conclusion was baked into the methodological premise.

Not Scholarship but Catechism

If this were scholarship that allowed for free and open inquiry, and critiques running in both directions, it would make an interesting sub-field of academic study. Certainly, Americans ought to understand the ruling ideology of states like Iran, just as we understand Chinese Communism and North Korean Juche. The problem is that there is no scholarship at play here. It is catechism with footnotes. And its spread through the humanities and social sciences has been less like a debate won than like an infection left unchecked—not because the arguments are compelling, but because the institutional incentives for resisting them have nearly disappeared.

Third Worldism is a peculiarly campus-driven phenomenon, and this helps explain why those who view Western civilization as an obstacle to their ambitions—whether Islamist movements, authoritarian states, or the network of foreign-funded advocacy organizations that now operate openly on American campuses—have long identified the university as the single most important entry point for ideological influence. You can see its fingerprints everywhere in the texture of campus life. Introductory sociology courses teach students that the United States was built on genocide and slavery before they have learned the basics of social-science literacy. Anthropology syllabi begin with the caveat that “Western science” is one knowledge system among many, epistemically equivalent to indigenous oral traditions. Philosophy departments assign Fanon and Gayatri Spivak while dropping the analytic tradition as suspect. “Decolonize the curriculum” is not a fringe slogan; it is an active administrative initiative at institutions from Columbia to Berkeley to the University of Michigan. The language of ordinary campus exchange has been colonized—if one may use the term—by assumptions that treat American power as presumptively evil, Western history as an uninterrupted crime, and any defense of liberal institutions as bad-faith apologetics. When Iranian state media praises student encampments, or when Chinese influence operations fund campus organizations promoting anti-Western grievance narratives, they are not introducing foreign ideas into a neutral space. They are watering seeds that have already been planted.

Critiquing Third Worldism and its prevalence in the academy should be seen as a mirror image of concerns over reflexively jingoistic curricula—except Third Worldism is worse. Uncritical celebration of American power, the insistence that the United States can do no wrong, the dismissal of foreign perspectives as irrelevant or hostile would be an intellectual failure.

But Third Worldism is guilty of precisely the same failure: it replaces one set of unexamined assumptions with another, substitutes one form of motivated reasoning about the political ends of our academic enterprise for another, and demands that students organize their understanding of the world around a predetermined moral conclusion.

The crucial difference is that unthinking patriotism, whatever its faults, does not typically turn its adherents against the civilization that sustains their freedom, their institutions, or their capacity to dissent. Third Worldism does. A student indoctrinated in reflexive nationalism is intellectually limited. A student indoctrinated in Third Worldism is intellectually misled and systematically oriented toward the belief that the country whose libraries she uses, whose courts protect her speech, and whose taxpayers fund her education is a force for evil in the world. That is not a symmetrical problem.

None of this is an argument for political uniformity in the classroom, for replacing one ideology with its opposite, or for universities to pivot hard towards nationalism. It is an argument for honest reckoning with the prevalence of anti-intellectual activism in higher education—and why it has flourished when it is anti-Western. Education reformers who want to improve American universities need to be able to name what has gone wrong, specifically and without euphemism. So do (for different reasons) those who, against mounting evidence, still insist that the academy remains a site of genuine, values-neutral inquiry worthy of public trust and public dollars.

Third Worldism is not diversity of thought. It is not critical thinking. Wherever it has taken hold, has made universities less honest, less rigorous, and less worthy of the remarkable privilege their existence represents. Its omnipresence in higher education is an obstacle to restoring American higher education to its full potential. Not, as its reeling defenders would have it, an expression of academic freedom at its finest.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.