The Instagram account Basic Optimism, which posts against the erosion of Western common sense, said American colleges are no longer training young women to think. The November 3 post argued that campuses now deliver a finished political script, and that the loneliness that follows is part of the same design.
“We used to send kids to college to learn how to think. Now they come home knowing what to think, and lonelier than when they left,” the account wrote.
The caption opened with a harder line: “College is making young women go crazy.” It then blamed “the communists who took over our institutions.” That charge is the account’s own. What the post is pointing at is a documented shift: elite universities selling ideology as coursework, and students learning which answers are safe.
Course catalogs as political product
Fox News reported on Young America’s Foundation’s 2026–27 “Comedy & Tragedy Report,” which sampled catalogs from Ivy League schools, major athletic conferences, and top liberal-arts colleges. The titles are not hidden. Columbia offers “Religion and Nasty Women” and “Marxism and Cultural Theory,” the latter stating it “will not offer an intensive study of the writings of Karl Marx” and will instead treat Marxism as a theory of culture and “discourses of social justice.” Princeton and Yale list courses built around the performer Bad Bunny and “colonial context.” Swarthmore lists “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology.”
YAF president Scott Walker, quoted by Fox News, said the pattern is the point: “Higher education has been hijacked by progressive ideology, transforming too many of our colleges and universities from places of learning into institutions of indoctrination.” The organization told Fox News it reproduced titles and descriptions unedited from university websites.
What the West is paying for
The Basic Optimism post treats that capture as an attack on Western formation, not a taste dispute about syllabi. Young women are the audience the account names because they are the cohort campuses have most thoroughly recruited into identity coursework, grievance language, and social punishment for dissent. The loneliness the caption describes is the social cost of that orthodoxy: if the safe opinion is already assigned, friendship becomes enforcement.
Walker’s line and the catalog sample do not prove a communist plot. They do show that expensive American universities now sell race, gender, empire, and Marxist cultural theory as the core of a liberal education. Basic Optimism’s claim is that this is how a civilization stops teaching its daughters to think. The course lists Fox News published are the evidence that the teaching has already been replaced.