#358 How Universities Quietly Changed America | Dr. Corey Miller
The Alisa Childers Podcast
Alisa Childers
4.9 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2026
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you're going to send your kids or grandkids to university, you need to understand what’s happening there. Because if you don’t, you may be paying for the apostasy of your own children.
That’s not hyperbole. That’s the sobering reality we’re discussing in today’s episode.
Our culture hasn’t just “shifted” over the last five to ten years. According to my guest, it has undergone a soft revolution; one that didn’t begin with riots or political slogans, but in classrooms, lecture halls, and faculty lounges decades ago. The real battleground wasn’t first Washington, it was the university.
Today I’m joined by Dr. Corey Miller, president of Ratio Christi and author of The Progressive Miseducation of America. Drawing from years of teaching philosophy and comparative religion at Indiana University and leading a campus apologetics ministry active on over 100 universities, Dr. Miller explains how higher education became the epicenter of an ideological transformation reshaping the West.
In this conversation, we explore:
What a “soft revolution” actually is—and why it’s more powerful than most people realize
How universities shifted from truth-seeking institutions to engines of worldview formation
Why politics is downstream from culture—and culture is downstream from education
How even Christian colleges are not immune to ideological capture
The rise of what some are calling the “woke right”—and why Dr. Miller argues that label is misleading
Why terms like “dissident right” may better capture the philosophical roots of certain emerging movements
Dr. Miller also shares his personal story—from seventh-generation Mormon (with ancestors connected to Joseph Smith) to skeptic to Christian philosopher—and how that journey shaped his passion to help students not just survive university, but thrive intellectually and spiritually.
Perhaps most importantly, we discuss what parents, pastors, and students can actually do. If revolutions can happen slowly through institutions, then rebuilding must be intentional and long-term. Dr. Miller even talks about a 40–50 year strategy for reclaiming the university.
This episode is sobering, clarifying, and surprisingly hopeful.
If you care about the next generation, about truth, and about the future of Christian witness in the academy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If I'm going to go to university, I need to understand what's going on there. |
| 0:03.2 | If I'm going to send my kids or grandkids there, I'm literally paying for the apostasy of my own children if I don't first understand what they're getting themselves into. |
| 0:29.2 | Our colleagues. Our culture has changed so radically, especially in the past five to ten years. |
| 0:37.2 | But what a lot of people don't realize is that it goes back to long before that with what my guest today calls a soft revolution. And it began in the classrooms. |
| 0:38.9 | It began in the universities and the colleges with a very intentional infiltration of ideas |
| 0:45.3 | that subvert the Christian worldview. Today's conversation is jam-packed, so fascinating and |
| 0:51.4 | informative. Before we get to it, though, I want to let you know that today's |
| 0:54.9 | episode is brought to you by Brave Books, Christian Children's Entertainment Company. You can go to |
| 0:59.8 | bravebooks.com slash Childers for 20% off your order. So I have so many highlights from my discussion |
| 1:07.1 | today with Dr. Corey Miller, who's written a book called The Progressive Miseducation |
| 1:11.9 | of America, confronting the cultural revolution from the classroom to your community. |
| 1:18.2 | And as I mentioned, he gave such a succinct and fascinating history of how we got here. |
| 1:23.3 | And in particular, what I found really fascinating about this conversation is a lot of people |
| 1:27.8 | are starting to talk about this term called the woke right. |
| 1:31.9 | And we talked about that, but Dr. Miller is actually pushing back on the term itself and |
| 1:37.1 | is arguing it really isn't the same kind of thing as the woke left in reverse or like |
| 1:42.1 | the mirror image, as some have argued. So it really gave me a |
| 1:45.2 | lot to think about. And actually, Dr. Miller has persuaded me, not that this group of people doesn't |
| 1:50.1 | exist because they do, but that it should be called something different like the dissident right. |
| 1:55.7 | So I'm actually going to be trying to switch from calling it woke right to dissident right. And why |
| 1:59.8 | that really matters, it's actually kind of important to understand the philosophies that undergird those types of |
| 2:06.0 | ideologies. You are not going to want to miss out on this conversation. So excited to bring it to you. |
... |
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