A new report is claiming over a third of an Ivy League institution’s students identify as LGBT, revealing the power of universities to brainwash and pressure students into conformity. According to the Brown Daily Herald, 38% of students at Brown University identify as LGBT, up from 14% in 2010.

Not only does this mean that the number of self-identified LGBT students at Brown has almost tripled in less than 15 years, but it now also stands at five times the national rate of American adults identifying as LGBT — even amongst the general populace aged 18-25, less than 20% identify as LGBT. Since the rest of the nation isn’t following the same sexual orientation trend as Brown’s students, it stands to reason the demographic explosion isn’t occurring naturally. So what’s brought it about?

Indoctrination is the first explanation that comes to mind, and with good reason. Higher education in the U.S. has, by and large, fallen from being an intellectual training ground for critical thinking and a place for fine-tuning unique or technical skills to being a bastion of leftist thought, brainwashing students into embracing the latest far-left ideological fads. Brown doesn’t stand alone in this instance: according to a report published last year by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, nearly 40% of students at liberal arts colleges identify as LGBT, and back in 2018, both Yale and Harvard reported increasing rates of students identifying as LGBT. This rainbow ideology has been a hallmark of the leftist intellectual onslaught, one that universities have pushed rabidly.

First, there’s the prevalence of LGBT ideology in the classroom. Some of the more glaring examples include a Penn State sociology professor instructing students to watch gay and lesbian pornography, the University of Miami outright encouraging students to undergo gender transition procedures, the Penn State student government voting to fund transgender name changes, a San Francisco State University professor lecturing on “queer history,” Oxford introducing an LGBT history course, and the once-Catholic University of Notre Dame offering lectures on “Queer Holiness.”

Brown has notably offered numerous LGBT courses over the years.

Nor are religiously-affiliated schools entirely safe: Texas Christian University is offering a “Queer Art of Drag” course, and medical students at Catholic Jesuit-run Loyola University Chicago are being taught gender transition procedures for children, despite the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops explicitly condemning the practice for both children and adults. These are just some of the more glaring examples leading to claims of LGBT indoctrination.

Second, the LGBT dogma isn’t simply instilled in students but enforced amongst university faculty, and those who dare to dissent are rooted out and penalized. University of Alberta professor Kathleen Lowrey was demoted for insisting men can’t pregnant. Northwestern University professor Michael Bailey’s recent paper on gender dysphoria in adolescents was retracted after LGBT activists protested his claim that social contagion and peer pressure play a role in teens identifying as LGBT. St. Phillips College in Texas has been accused of firing biology professor Johnson Varkey for clarifying chromosomes determine biological sex. Madera Community College professor David Richardson was suspended after bringing chocolates to campus labeled “she/her” for plain and “he/him” for chocolate with nuts. Southern Utah University allegedly fired professor Richard Bugg for refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns. Shawnee State University threatened professor Nicholas Meriwether for the same, costing the school over $400,000 after Meriwether sued. Over a third of college and university faculty reported they self-censor their thoughts and opinions in interviews and lectures, fearing for their jobs. Even students are policed — for example, a University of Cincinnati professor reportedly failed a student for using the term “biological woman” in a project.

This indoctrination isn’t relegated to colleges and universities — academia is simply the breeding ground. Once higher education does its dirty work, the newly-commissioned LGBT devotees go forth to preach their gospel to others, especially in the public education system. Call it trickle-down indoctrination. A report published by the Washington Examiner this week reveals most colleges have replaced reading, writing, and arithmetic requirements for future teachers with woke “diversity, equity, and inclusion” requirements. University students are trained to teach “children as young as 3 to consider being gay, attacking whites, ripping rich people, promoting Black Lives Matter, and combating climate change.” This trickle-down indoctrination has also had its effect, with almost a quarter of high school students identifying as LGBT according to the CDC, up from just over 10% in 2015.

But it’s important to note that all this indoctrination results predominantly in students identifying as LGBT, not necessarily living as LGBT. Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education Studies, told The Washington Stand, “[I]t’s one thing to say you’re pansexual and another thing altogether to have sex with a transsexual. It’s easy to say and not so easy to actually do, I would think. Especially if you spend all your free time on Discord servers and game comment sections.” Research backs this up.

Social science researcher Eric Kaufmann noted last month that the number of young people identifying as LGBT doesn’t match the rate of LGBT sexual activity — the latter is significantly lower. He told The College Fix:

“LGBT behavior is up 4 points among young people since 2008, but LGBT identity is up 11 points. … If this was about people feeling able to come out, then we should have seen these two trends rise together. What we find instead is that identity is rising much faster than behavior, indicating that people with occasional rather than sustained feelings of attraction to the opposite sex are increasingly identifying as LGBT.”

Kilgannon noted that LGBT ideology is only part of the broader issue — sexual immorality. She noted that colleges “are promoting an atmosphere of debauchery that knows no limit in modern life. It’s nothing new, remember the Playboy list of Top Ten party schools?” but added, “Pornography has done this work on youth long before they get to college. Our whole culture is brainwashing kids to be LGBT and to blame colleges gives them more credit than they might deserve.”

Colleges and universities may be the elite training centers for LGBT indoctrination, but the practice pervades the entire culture, from Hollywood to corporate America to the federal government.